Vancouver-based Next Level Games wins national award

Vancouver-based Next Level Games has won the 2008 Canadian New Media Award for Excellence in Gaming.

The video-game developer was honoured for its work on last year’s popular Nintendo Wii game Mario Strikers Charged.

The Canadian New Media Awards are held every year to celebrate the achievements of the country’s new media industry.

“It’s really nice to be recognized by our peer group for the work that we’ve done,” said Justin Dowdeswell, a developer at Next Level. “You have a team that’s worked together for so long, and it’s always nice when the game either sells well, or becomes critically acclaimed.”

Dowdeswell said the game took about a year and half to produce, and noted that working with Nintendo has been one of the company’s highlights.

“Working with Nintendo has been extremely rewarding,” he said. “When making a game with Mario, there’s such a rich history that goes with it, and Nintendo was really good in communicating with us. It was really give and take.”

The company was also nominated in the Excellence for Children’s category for Spider-Man: Friend or Foe but lost out to Toon Boom Animation Inc. from Montreal.

Apart from the two aforementioned games, Next Level also worked on the previous Mario soccer game, Super Mario Strikers for the Nintendo GameCube, and NHL Hitz Pro for the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox.

When asked about future titles from the company, one of many game developers based in Vancouver, Dowdeswell said that a few are in development, but that he couldn’t speak about them at this time.

Apart from Next Level, several other Vancouver area industry members were nominated for Canadian New Media Awards, including Gerri Sinclair of Great Northern Way Campus for Educator of the Year, Vision Critical for Company of the Year, and Protagonize from Taunt Media for Excellence in Social Media Websites.