Boing Boing Game Dev Challenge: The Winners!

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the first ever Boing Boing "Games Inspired by Music" Competition, sponsored by Safari Books Online. The polls closed at midnight with Zachary Johnson's Infiltration and Zachary Lewis's Space Junk nearly neck and neck. Space Junk took the grand prize with 249 votes, followed by Infiltration with 233 votes. Coming in third was Sean Monahan's Beat Boost! All three of these are instant old-school classics!

Mr. Lewis receives the grand prize of a year of access to Safari Books Online, a $515 value, and a fat prize pack from GAMA-GO, including a limited-edition art print, GAMA-GO book, Gama-Goon Statue, Sing-A-Long Tongs, and other goodies. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Monahan score three month subscriptions to Safari Books Online, valued at $128 each, and a grip of GAMA-GO goods like a Yeti Qee Keychain, Pocket Journal, and Hip-Hopsicles!

All of the other finalists will receive GAMA-GO prize packages too! (Thanks, GAMA-GO!)

Thank you to everyone who took the time to create an entry! We're blown away by the effort and raw mutant creativity that went into these! And much appreciation to the chiptunes composers who inspired us with the bleeps and bloops. And thanks to all who played and voted!

Finally, much appreciation to our partner Safari Books Online. We've wanted to hold a competition like this for a long time and we're grateful to them for helping us make it happen. For the foreseeable future, they're offering Boing Boing readers a special 15 day trial of Safari Books Online plus 15% discount for 12 months (new subscribers only) on a subscription. Check it out!

And if this is all new to you, please visit the Boing Boing Arcade, featuring all the finalists in our contest. Shall we play a game?

• [zachstronaut]

  Congratulations Zach Lewis (phwew that was quite the voting battle), Sean Monahan, and all the other finalists.

  Huge thanks to everybody who played my game and voted for me! Big huge thanks. This is very encouraging.

  I’m going to add a high score table to my game over the weekend and maybe flesh out the gameplay.

  I had a ton of fun playing all the games and making Infiltration at Dusk. Thanks to Tettix for his inspiring music. Thanks to Rob, Boing Boing, Offworld, et al for coming up with a cool contest idea.

  Thanks for the prizes Safari Books and Gamma-Go! =)

• [McMonahan]

  Awesome! As much as I would have loved to take the grand prize, third’ll do.

  Thanks to the fine folks at Boing Boing for putting together a such a fun contest and offering some great tunes for inspiration. Also, thanks to everyone who voted and commented on the games. I developed Beat Boost all by my lonesome and it’s really great to get feedback about what I’m doing right and what needs work.

• [McMonahan]

  Oh crap — don’t believe I forgot this: extra thanks to Tettix for not only creating some truly excellent music, but also putting it out there for all of us to use in this compeition.

• [Zachary Lewis]

  Great job, everyone. It was quite a battle, wasn’t it, Zachstronaut?

  I want to say that I couldn’t have done it without my sound crew, hyperduck.co.uk, as well as the rest of the guys at thegamestudio.net.

  Thanks for all the votes, everyone, and look forward to more games (and a much-updated Space Junk) in the future! Just keep an eye on thegamestudio.net, or listen to our tweets @TheGameStudio!

• [Doctor Popular]

  Awesome. Thanks for giving us a reason to make a game. And a place to find other peoples games with similar inspiration. I dug a lot of ‘em.

• [Anonymous]

  Although I came last in the competition with my game flatland, I’m glad I was even allowed to compete since I’ve only developed games for a couple of months.
  Over 2000 people have now played my game and the highscore list have been populated with over 5000 scores. Thanks BoingBoing! :)

• [Bill Meltsner]

  It sounds clichéd, but I really was thrilled just to be a finalist, to have the opportunity to play such awesome games, and to listen to some seriously rad tunes in a genre I hadn’t really previously explored. I enjoyed playing every one of the entries, and I think the winner and runners-up are very much deserving of their new swag.

  Special thanks to Boing Boing for running this thing and to all the folks who voted, commented, and gave feedback. Also to GAMA-GO and Safari Books Online for sponsoring the competition, of course. The past month has been a heck of a lot of fun in a pretty dreary summer.

• [Anonymous]

  Thanks to everyone who used Tettix music for their games, to Rob for featuring my music in the original posting and to Boing Boing for hosting the contest. Let’s do this again sometime!