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Sony, Nintendo, id Lauded With Emmys
Nintendo, Sony, and id Software have all been given Emmy awards for technology-related contributions to gaming and entertainment. Nintendo's Wiimote, obviously, garnered an Emmy for Peripheral Development and Technoogical Impact of Video Game Controllers, while id collectively received two awards. John Carmack was given The Pioneering Development Work in 3D Game Engines award, and id as a whole received an accolade for Quake's rendering technology. As reader NexusTw1n points out, though, there was something odd about Sony's award. "On Monday, Sony claimed their revolutionary SIXAXIS controller had been honoured with an Emmy , leaving many wondering why the Wiimote had been ignored. Yesterday, that press release was clarified, with a statement making it clear the award was actually for the PS2 Dual Shock controller, rather than the new PS3 model."
Sony's PR lately has been the worst PR I've ever seen.
Although some might say that's because I haven't been watching Sony's PR long enough.
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"Sony, we will be honouring your legendary controller technology with an Emmy." "AWESOME we cannot believe we won over Nintendo with our hasty stab at copying their functionality. Release lots of embarrassing press releases patting ourselves on the back and saying how fantastic we are for our revolutionary SIXAXIS controller!!" "Haha, only kidding. It's for the DualShock, suckers" How much of a smack in the face is that? Quality work Emmy dudes.
While it would be rather late to give an award, I do think Quake would be the most deserving of an award for graphics achievment certainly since and maybe before. Fully 3D environments with arbitrary geometry -- fairly complex geometry at that -- on hardware that had no business being able to render such a thing was quite an achievement. Throw on the lightmaps and you've got something even more impressive. Nothing looked like Quake at the time, and everything since is more detailed geometry, higher detailed textures, and better lighting/texture shader effects. Yay Quake! Of course the game itself wasn't that great, setting the precedent for all future iD games. :)
I particularly liked how they got good performance out of the game by requiring hours and hours of pre-processing on the maps to create visibility trees. There were even servers you could submit your maps to that would then run vis on them so hobbyists could save some time.
The enemies of Democracy are
Yep, they got one too, but I guess since it's Slashdot, people failed to mention it.
Microsoft won an Emmy for Xbox Live.