Both Lake and Pope will be honored at the GDC Awards, and both developers have a great track record and are well deserving of their awards.

At the ceremony, which will take place during this year’s Game Developers Conference, Lake will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and Pope will receive the Pioneer Award. Lake has been with Remedy Entertainment for nearly three decades and is best known as the writer of the first two Max Payne games and Alan Wake, the director and producer of Quantum Break, and the writer of Control. Most recently, he was the director and lead writer of the critically acclaimed Alan Wake 2 (in fact, he was the face of our protagonist in the first two episodes of Max Payne).

Lucas Pope is an influential indie game designer credited with creating some of the most unique and thought-provoking games of recent years. He’s also been a game developer for nearly two decades. He worked on the Uncharted franchise at Naughty Dog, among others, but made his name with his own game. He created the indie game Papers, Please, which won multiple GDC awards. He was later behind Return of the Obra Dinn. This was a visually stunning puzzle adventure game that deliberately used a graphical style similar to early Mac games.

“The Game Developers Choice Awards has a proud legacy of spotlighting individuals who make games the most compelling and evocative form of storytelling. We’re thrilled to honor Sam Lake and Lucas Pope for their commitment to pushing the boundaries of the medium through transcendent narrative structures, complex moral questions, and evocative gameplay,” said GDC event director Stephenie Hawkins in a statement.

So both developers are well known, and even though Lucas Pope doesn’t make mainstream AAA games, that doesn’t mean he has a lackluster body of work. On the contrary, he’s been able to do something in the indie direction that Lake has done with AAA titles. And Papers, Please, although a tightly paced border control simulation, has a calming effect because of its Eastern European atmosphere…

Congratulations to both of them!

Source: VGC