UNCHARTED 2 wins GOTY at the SPIKE VGA 2009 - nabs 2 more VGA awards and 2 Inside Gaming Awards

Last week was a busy week for the Dogs as we had two awards shows to attend, but it definitely had its rewards! Without a doubt, the most prominent video game awards show currently is the SPIKE Video Game Awards – partly because it’s the only show to be televised live and it’s been gaining in exposure year after year. Therefore it meant a lot for us to be nominated for a leading eight awards when the nominees and categories were announced in late November. December 12 couldn’t get here fast enough. On Saturday night, Amy, Bruce, Christophe and Evan all headed over to L.A. Live to attend the SPIKE VGA 2009 while a bunch of Dogs went to the PlayStation.Blog community event and viewing party to mingle with fans and watch the show. I know that we all had our fingers crossed that we would walk away with some awards to cap off a crazy year which included finishing UNCHARTED 2, getting awesome review scores and stellar sales. You can read Evan’s behind the scenes look at attending the VGA 2009 on the PlayStation.Blog to get an idea of what it’s like to go to these events – it’s not always stress-free, especially when you’re a nominee! Just in case you haven’t heard by now, UNCHARTED 2 won Game of the Year, Best PS3 Game and Best Graphics – more awards than any other game at the show and only the second time in Naughty Dog history we’ve won any industry awards. We’re especially grateful for all this recognition, not just because we put in a lot of hard work over the past two years, but because there really was a slate of stellar, quality games that came out in 2009 and every one of the nominees easily could have won an award. Just a day earlier, Jacob and I, headed over to the Red Bull headquarters in Santa Monica to attend the inaugural 2009 Inside Gaming Awards, held by Machinima.com. The Red Bull offices are pretty amazing and they did a great job to accommodate the private industry event Machinima wanted to put together for their awards show. After some mingling with the other folks who were invited, we were all taken to the screening room in the office to find out who won. The winners were announced through a compilation of videos hosted by Dead Pixel. We were stoked to find out that UNCHARTED 2 won two awards – Best Game Cinematography and Best Sound Design. Congrats are in order to our friends at Infinity Ward who won a bunch of awards for Modern Warfare 2, including the Inside Gaming award for Game of the Year. To echo what Evan said at the closing of his blog post, I know we’re all extremely proud to have been involved with such an amazing project and that we appreciate every single one of our fans. Thanks to all of you out there who have supported us!