Award winning game is a load of crap

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 02 October 2007 09:52

Business IT - Technology

No reflection on the quality of the game. It's the winner of BigPond's competition to find the next big digital game idea and it's all about a dung beetle and his ball of dung.

Dudley's his name. He's the creation of 33 year old Sherele Moody of Victoria, and he's made her the winner of Project Joystick, a competition launched by BigPond in association with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in July to find the next big Australian computer game.

Dudley, who embarks on a quest to navigate his way through the world while protecting his ever-growing ball of dung, beat around 2000 other entries to earn Moody a tailored package including a HP Pavilion Elite PC, BigPond high-speed broadband for 12 months, a Next G mobile handset with a 12 month account, BigPond entertainment vouchers and an ACMI Prize Pack. BigPond, meanwhile, will invest up to $1 million to develop the winning game concept into a commercial product.

BigPond's director of media, Bill Burton, said the flood of entries showed how excited Australians are about digital games. "Project Joystick was the first competition of its kind in the games world and we were thrilled with the hugely enthusiastic response. People really heeded the call to ignite their imaginations and set their ideas free, resulting in a fantastic standard of entries.

"Choosing the winner was no easy task. The judges, who were drawn from a range of industries, were looking for something really inspirational. In the end, they unanimously agreed that Sherele's entry was a standout! Her winning concept really blows up the image of the games industry being dominated by 17-year-old boys wanting to blow things up."