IGF - Mod Competition Primer

Overview

The Eighth Annual Independent Games Festival will take place at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, March 20-24, 2006. This year, for the first time we're including mods in our competition, and we want to get as many innovative and accomplished mods to enter the competition as possible by the deadline of November 1st , 2005.

We held a public vote, and Half-Life 2, Doom 3, NeverWinter Nights, and Unreal Tournament 2004 are the four titles that are being judged in the first year of the IGF Modding Competition. Anyone who wants to can pay an entry fee, enter their mod, and then be eligible to win the $2500 'Best Mod' prize for each of these four titles - a total of $10,000 in prizes.

In addition, each of the five finalists in each category, which will be announced on December 11th 2005, will be given two Classic Passes or one Giga Pass to the Game Developers Conference 2006, to demonstrate their game to leading game developers at the IGF Pavilion in San Jose, attend all the game creation lectures they like, and vie for a chance at that 'Best Mod' prize, which will be awarded at the IGF ceremony as part of the show itself.

We're hoping to get a really good turnout for mods in the first year of competition, and your support as part of the mod community would be very much appreciated. Please contact the IGF Chairman if you have any questions.

Entry Details

Who Is Eligible: Any non-commercial mod teams (see guidelines or detailed rules).
Competing for: $10,000 in cash (see the Awards Page for more details)
Entry Fee: $25.
Submissions Due: November 1st , 2005 at 11.59pm PDT.
Submission Page: You can now submit your mod for the IGF Modding category.

Judges

The judges for the IGF Modding competition will be specific for each mod, and will include notable community members from the Half-Life 2, Doom 3, NeverWinter Nights, and Unreal Tournament 2004 communities, as well as independent developers and game journalists who have knowledge of the modding community. We will announce the judging panels later in October.

Who Organizes The IGF?

The CMP Game Group (producer of Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the Game Developers Conference) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

The IGF, now in its 8th year, has given away hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes and major recognition to innovative, independently created video games from all over the world, from early pioneering titles such as Tread Marks and Shattered Galaxy, through recent stand-outs such as Oasis, Alien Hominid, and Gish. Now we're delighted to be adding mods to our roster.