Motorola promotes mobile gaming innovation

Motorola has announced the winners of its two-day mobile game coding competition, held during the Game Developers Conference and designed to promote and reward innovation in mobile game design.

The competition was open to any non-commercial individual or team in attendance at the GDC, and judged by a panel of mobile industry experts including Jason Rubinstein from Motorola, Jim Eisenstein of Hasbro, EA Mobile's Minard Hamilton and Andrew Stein of MediaNET Gaming and Cingular.

Submissions were judged on gameplay, game design, innovation in visual art and audio, and innovation in the use of unique features (such as SMS, phonebook etc) and prizes included Motorola handsets such as the RAZR, PEBL and SLVR. Winners of the grand prize could commercially release their game, with the aid of business and promotional opportunities via the judging panel and the MOTOCODER website.

This year's grand prize competition winner was Andreja Djokovic of Barbaroga, with the puzzle game 'Konstruxis', with the runner up prize going to Jennifer Hruska and Shayne Guiliano of Sonic Network for their rhythm game, 'Pyrosonix'.

However, the decision was so close, the judging panel elected to award both entrants with the full grand prize set, meaning both titles could soon be appearing on the Motorola platform.

Christy Wyatt, VP of ecosystem and market development for Motorola commented: "Mobile devices have to perform as good as they look. That means creating software as compelling as our designs - and working with the best talent to do it."

"Andreja from Barbaroga and Jennifer and Shayne from Sonic Network are that kind of talent. We're looking forward to our continued work with them and the entire mobile developer community to deliver even more big things in the future," Wyatt added.