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iPhone Dominates 2009 Mobile Game Developers Conference

Monday March 30, 2009 4:20 am PDT by Arnold Kim
Last week, game developers descended on San Francisco to take part in the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC was broken up into different segments with the first two days dedicated to Mobile gaming. The mobile keynote speech was given by Ngmoco's CEO Neil Young and was appropriately titled Why the iPhone just changed everything. Young's keynote described the dramatic change the iPhone brought to the mobile gaming industry which was previously focused on carrier negotiations and porting to all the different handheld variants.

Perhaps most telling was the fact that the iPhone dominated the Independent Games Festival awards in Mobile at GDC winning 6 out of 7 categories, including Best Mobile Game. iPhone winners included (app names link directly to app store):

- Mobile Audio Achievement Award: Zen Bound (Secret Exit)
- Technical Achievement: Real Racing (Firemint) - Preview
- Art: Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios)
- Design: Galcon (Hassey Enterprises)
- Best iPhone Game: Zen Bound (Secret Exit)
- IGF Mobile Best Game: Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios)

All iPhone finalists have also been listed by Apple on a special page in the iTunes App Store.

GDC also served to be the launching/demo ground for a number of notable future iPhone gaming titles including 14 new titles from EA, Paramount's Top Gun, Showtime's Dexter, and Ngmoco's Star Defense, Touch Pet Dogs, and LiveFire. Id software even recently released their classic Wolfenstein 3D to the App Store, with plans to port Doom in the near future.

Most notable is the fact that the App Store is less than a year old, so the iPhone had no presence at GDC last year.

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