Congratulations to Melbourne games developers, Wicked Witch, for taking out Film Victoria's 2012 Tim Richards awards. Wicked Witch Managing Director, Daniel Visser, was at hand to accept the award in an industry event held recently by Film Victoria who gave this gushing praise on Wicked Witch for achieving some impressive numbers with their beautiful sling-shot game for iOS called Catapult King.
(Film Victoria) This Victorian company established in 2001 and has spread its wings in recent years, making a departure from fee-for-service work. In 2012 their original title CATAPULT KING was a hit in the global charts, reaching Number #1 game in more than 100 countries and receiving over 13 million downloads to date.
They’ve also developed the officially licensed Jonah Lomu Rugby and AFL Live games which have been released on iphones and ipads with enormous success. Both titles were developed alongside rather than for the publishers, allowing them a strong share of revenue which they’ve used to further build their company.
The Tim Richards awards, which recognises digital media practitioners for "outstanding achievement in original IP development", was introduced by Film Victoria in 2008 and it's fantastic to see that Tim's work is continued to be acknowledged and honoured by Film Victoria this way. Tim Richards was a friend of ours who sadly passed away in 2008.
Tim was a huge advocate of the local games development industry and mobile gaming, two fields which certainly needed more exposure during the early 2000's. He organised local industry events through Dissecta while running a games news website and bringing out the Game Developers' Association of Australia (GDAA) newsletter every month. While mobile gaming was still in its infancy at the time - they were very simple java applications made for a highly fractured number of phone handsets - Tim had the forsight to see that something really big was coming in that area, and I'm sure he would have been extremely excited to see his predictions come true.
Wicked Witch are the latest to join the list of fine Victorian developers to receive the Film Victoria Tim Richards Award. The past winners are:
2008 - Puzzle Quest developers, Infinite Interactive
2009 - Flight Control developers, Firemint
2010 - Firelight Technologies (FMOD), The Voxel Agents
2011 - Little Things developer, KlickTock