Winners Announced in 2004 Make Something Unreal Contest

Officials from developer Epic Games have announced the grand prize winners of the $1 million Nvidia Make Something Unreal mod-making contest. The grand prize for Best Mod was awarded to Red Orchestra – an infantry and armored vehicle simulation set on the Russian front during World War II. The developers behind the winning entry received $50,000 in cash, and a Unreal Engine commercial license worth approximately $350,000, allowing them to publish the title (or another one) as a stand-alone commercial entity. The winner in the Best Non-Interactive Real-Time movie category was The Journey, a short animated film created by Friedrich 'fiezi' Kirschner, who received $25,000 for his work. The multi-round competition was hosted by Epic Games, developers of the Unreal series, and is sponsored by Nvidia, Atari, Digital Extremes, AMD and Alias. It was organized to publicly recognize and encourage amateur developers, with more than one thousand entries using the Unreal Editor from Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004. "The breadth and quality of the mods submitted in this contest utterly amazed us. People came together to create some of the best game modifications ever created. The ultimate beneficiaries were not only the thousands of Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 players who got to experience some of these great mods, but the game industry as a whole which uncovered some incredibly talented people who will continue to make contributions to the industry for many years to come," said Mark Rein, vice president at Epic Games. The winning entries from all five rounds of the contest can be downloaded from the official contest website.