Winners announced for free software gaming's highest honor, the Liberated Pixel Cup
The cup has been awarded to Lurking Patrol Comrades, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) featuring a vast world with plenty of characters and both a melee and a magic-based battle system.
Chris Webber, co-organizer along with Bart Kelsey of OpenGameArt, said, "Liberated Pixel Cup was a bigger success than our wildest imaginings when initially planning the project. We hoped to create a standard, useful base and style of artwork and get a few submissions of art and games. Instead, we got nearly one hundred entries of games and artwork, most of them excellent. In the process we've proven the interest and potential for free software and free culture in gaming. We've also shown that with careful planning, we can have collaboration in this area that helps everyone. And, of course, we've had a lot of fun! Congratulations to everyone who participated in the contest!"
"The FSF was happy to support the Liberated Pixel Cup, and we are excited about this new model to facilitate the production of free games. Games are one area that make it hard for people to leave proprietary operating systems behind. The Liberated Pixel Cup model is not only an innovative way to address this by encouraging collaborative game development, it's just plain fun," said Libby Reinish, campaigns manager at the FSF.
The LPC was sponsored by the FSF, which collected donations to fund the prizes, Mozilla, Creative Commons and OpenGameArt. The competition attracted significant attention in the free software community, and in fact the number of submissions overwhelmed the judges, causing a delay in the announcement of the winners.
More information about the prize-winning games is at http://lpc.opengameart.org/content/code-judging-is-in. The winners of the earlier art-only phase of the competition are announced at http://lpc.opengameart.org/content/liberated-pixel-cup-art-winners-announced.
Discussions are in the works for a possible follow-up competition. In the meantime, people interested in the area of free software gaming might also want to get involved in the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective.
About the Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
Media Contacts
Libby Reinish
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org
###