Cactus’ Tuning wins $2,500 Nuovo Award at IGF
“Noted independent developer Cactus [Jonatan Söderström] received the inaugural Nuovo Award for his abstract visual puzzle game, Tuning. The Nuovo Award honors “abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.”
The Nuovo Award was judged by a separate, smaller juried panel of notable game and art world figures, including previous IGF Innovation/Nuovo Award winner Jason Rohrer (Passage), Area/Code’s Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more.”
“I’m not gonna take up time with ranting,” Cactus said. “I’m just gonna start the party tonight.” Soderstrom played a somewhat surreal music video, and left the stage without another word.
Once a healthy section of the audience started clapping to the beat, session organizer Phil Fish stepped up to the mic and said, “Hey, to everyone sleeping out there — dance party.”
Nobody started dancing, sadly.
I don’t think this sums up what he did when receiving the award on-stage. I hope someone had a video of it – it was hilarious.
I had a quick look around but couldn’t find any posted online. Perhaps something will emerge over the next couple of days.
Just found it. Cactus is pretty far into it, but the whole thing is entertaining enough to watch anyway.
http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/6253471/
The award is at the 30:00 mark.
Cactus is epic. Really.
His plan was to stand there for as long as possible before he was taken off the mic. But in the end he chickened out and said what he did. In all i found the speech rather funny and i think was the only real big laugh of the awards.