The organizers of the 24th annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) announced that composer Yoko Shimomura will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and Fawzi Mesmar will receive the Ambassador Award.
Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Yoko Shimomura is a respected Japanese composer and pianist that has worked on a number of iconic game soundtracks. She began her career at Capcom in 1988, working on titles like Street Fighter II, Final Fight and The King of Dragons.
In 1993, she joined Square (now Square Enix), composing the soundtracks for titles like Live A Live, the Kingdom Hearts series, Final Fantasy XV, Super Mario RPG and Legends of Mana. She later departed from Square Enix, founding her own music production company Midiplex, also serving as a member of the music label Brave Wave Productions.
The recipient of this year’s Ambassador Award, Fawzi Mesmar is an award-winning creative director, game designer, author, public speaker and mentor. His career in the games industry has spanned more than two decades, taking him to the Middle East, New Zealand, Japan and Europe. He has worked with companies like Ubisoft, EA, King (Activision Blizzard), Gameloft and Atlus, also helping in the development of titles like Battlefield, Candy Crush, Mario Rabbids, Star Wars and the Persona series.
Fawzi is also the author of the first-ever textbook about game design in Arabic: Al-Khallab On The Art of Game Design. He has also co-authored nine comic books under the Men of Honour series. Fawzi has also won the Game Dev Heroes award in 2020 within the Game Design category and in the same year, being named one of the industry’s top 100 game changers.
Stephenie Hawkins, Event Director at Informa Tech, said the following:
“We are so proud to honor Yoko Shimomura and Fawzi Mesmar for their multiple decades worth of contribution to the crafts of art and making games. Not only have they created enduring works in the medium, they’ve also carved a path that allowed others in their fields to thrive and succeed. Their success is measured not just in their singular accomplishments, but in the ways they’ve inspired the works of other aspiring composers and designers around the world.”Stephenie Hawkins
The recipients will be honored at the Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) at the Game Developers Conference at GDC on Wednesday, March 20. The event will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center, held in tandem with the Independent Games Festival Awards (IGF).
