Posted in: Awards Show, Games, Video Games | Tagged: Fawzi Mesmar, Game Developer's Choice Awards, Yoko Shimomura

Game Developers Choice Awards Reveal Special Recognition Honors

Yoko Shimomura and Fawzi Mesmar will both receive special recocnition awards during the Game Developers Choice Awards in March.

Organizers behind the Game Developers Choice Awards have revealed the recipients of their special awards for the 2024 ceremony. The event will honor composer Yoko Shimomura with this year's Lifetime Achievement Award for her work over the decades making memorable music, while Fawzi Mesmar will receive the Ambassador Award, which is awarded to individuals who "elevate video games and the industry as a whole to a better place." You can read more about the awards and their recipients below as they will both receive their honors on March 20.

Game Developers Choice Awards Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Yoko Shimomura is a respected Japanese composer and pianist who has delighted players across the world thanks to her work on many iconic game soundtracks. Yoko began her career at Capcom in 1988, where she worked on the music for titles including Street Fighter II, Final Fight, and The King of Dragons. In 1993, she joined Square (now Square Enix), where she composed the soundtracks for games such as Live A Live, the Kingdom Hearts series, Final Fantasy XV, Super Mario RPG, and Legends of Man. Yoko later departed from Square Enix and founded her own music production company called Midiplex, where she still works to this day, and she also serves as a member of the music label Brave Wave Productions.

Fawzi Mesmar, recipient of this year's Ambassador Award, is an award-winning creative director, game designer, author, public speaker, and mentor whose career has spanned over two decades in the games industry. Fawzi's career has taken him to the Middle East, New Zealand, Japan, and Europe, where he worked for several notable game companies such as Ubisoft, EA, King (Activision Blizzard), Gameloft, and Atlus, and he has worked on over twenty tiles and had a hand in developing well-known franchises such as the Battlefield, Candy Crush, Mario Rabbids, Star Wars and 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, and has co-authored nine comic books under the Men of Honour series. In recent years, Fawzi won the Game Dev Heroes award in 2020 within the Game Design category and in the same year, was named one of the industry's top 100 game changers.

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