Havok picks up Game Developer Front Line Award for middleware

18 Jan 2013

David Coghlan, managing director, Havok

For the fifth consecutive year, Dublin-headquartered games physics technology company Havok has won the award for Best Middleware from Game Developer Magazine’s Front Line Awards.

The awards have been honouring the video-game industry’s best developer tools for more than 15 years now.

A panel of game developer professionals from throughout the industry selected Intel-owned Havok for the award. Intel acquired Havok in 2007 for US$110m.

Emmy Award-winning Havok was founded at Trinity College Dublin in 1998 and its physics technology appears in top-selling game titles, as well as a variety of Hollywood movies.

The original founding team behind Havok – Hugh Reynolds and Steve Collins – recently started a new company called Swrve, which is creating 100 new jobs after raising US$6.25m in a funding round led by Atlantic Bridge Partners and Intel Capital.

“We are truly honoured to receive recognition from our peers in the games industry with our fifth consecutive Front Line Awards win,” Havok managing director David Coghlan said.

“We are continually pushing to ensure that Havok tech is at the very forefront of game development across all platforms. This evolution is the result of the enormous talents and hard work of our engineers and this peer-recognition is a great validation of their achievements.

“We would like to thank all the great teams who we have worked with for their support and their projects that push games technology to the very edge,” Coghlan said.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com