Technical Excellence Game of the Year Award

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Minions of Mirth is a single player and massively multiplayer RPG which also supports player hosted worlds and modding. It was written by a single programmer over 11 months using the Torque Game Engine from GarageGames. When considering what Prairie Games has done to solve the technical challenges presented by Minions of Mirth, you can't be anything but impressed.

When we started considering our award for Technical Excellence, Minions of Mirth was at the top of the page, but we wondered if the award shouldn't be called the Technical Feat award as that title does a better job of summing up what Minions of Mirth has accomplished.

For starters, the game is a MMORPG. While it seems most game developers dream of their own MMORPG, few ever succeed in finishing one. Even fewer succeed in making enough money to survive. Minions of Mirth has succeeded on both accounts. Although they scraped by financially to make it happen, they didn't let that get in the way of their dream of excellence for the game.

Minions of Mirth was simultaneously launched on both Windows XP and Mac OSX. This meant that the game was written to be cross-platform making it all the more technically challenging. The simple solution, of course, would be to just choose Windows and be done with it, but Prairie Games wasn't about to sacrifice the vision they had for a cross-platform launch.

The most daunting task for any MMO is having enough servers to run the game. Prairie Games didn't have hundreds of thousands or even thousands of dollars for servers. Using an evolving approach to maintain their own server farm, Prairie Games has managed to meet the ever increasing size of their community (with over 30,000 registered players currently) while staying financially solvent.

Prairie Games has created a game that features offline single player, multiplayer with modded community servers, and MMORPG play on their own hosted servers with no monthly fee. To make it all work, they moved to a tiny North Dakota town (the equivalent of a really big garage), putting their lives and financial fortunes into making their dream game a reality. It is a technical feat of no small significance and we were proud to present Minions of Mirth with our Game of the Year Award for Technical Excellence.

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