Awards Extravaganza: Astroslugs wins the European Games Award Gamesload Newcomer Award

... yes, thats really the full name of it. =D

Anyways, yesterday was definitely the second biggest (positive) surprise in the short history of the Bit Barons (the first being the day when we got our EXIST grant). Flashback: A few weeks ago, we submitted a beta version of Astroslugs to the Gamesload Newcomer Award, the only category of the European Games Award that is open to indie and student teams.

There were 13 other great games competing with Astroslugs ranging from Night of Joeanne (that already won a Audience Award at the Living Games festival) to Imagine Earth (that was already nominated for the German Computer Game Prize). Long story short: Even though we believed in the fun game that Astroslugs is we felt like big time underdogs.

So it came extremely surprising to all of us when the award ceremony came to the Newcomer Award nominations (huge AAA games like Heavy Rain or Battlefield Bad Company 2 had already won other awards) and Astroslugs was in the final three of the race. A few seconds later both Critical Wave and Sui&Cide got greyed out and the only thing we saw (on a very large screen) was our Astroslugs cover shot. We had won!

After we realized what just happened, time passed pretty quickly. We got a huge cheque with 2.500 EURO in big letters on it and a golden statue (which looks like some kind of female oscar but whose name we still haven't found out). After a few badly stuttered words of thanks it was all time for hugging, cheering, phone calls and gratulations. And that's where we stand now, one day later. We're still amazed and extremely thrilled. Now it's time for us to show that we're worthy of this prize and complete Astroslugs as the great and fun game that it was always planned to be.

Thanks a lot to all who congratulated us after the show. Hats off to our award competitors - we look forward to playing your games on stage of GDCE and gamescom.

Cheers!

Alex Zacherl

PS: We've uploaded a few images on our flickr account. More will follow in the next days.