Brenda Romero will receive the Bizkaia Award at the 8th edition of the Fun & Serious Game Festival

The Fun & Serious Game Festival, the videogame festival that will stage its 8th edition from December 7 to 10, has announced the first of its 2018 Honorary Awards: The Bizkaia Award. Brenda Romero is one of the essential voices in the development of the industry over the past 35 years and she has just received one of the Legend Awards at Develop Brighton. She received an Honorary BAFTA from the British Academy in 2017. She started in this industry at just 15 years of age, as a tester, and she boasts an extraordinary curriculum vitae, since she has developed more than 47 titles over a period of almost four decades. Today she is the co-owner – with her husband, John Romero – of Romero Games and Program Director at the University of Limerick, Ireland, on the Video Game Design and Development Program.

The awards ceremony, which, as is customary, will be held at the Guggenheim Museum, recognizes the current work of Brenda Romero (née Garno and also known throughout her career as Brenda Brathwaite), her contribution as an entrepreneur, and also the creation of titles such as ‘Wizardry,’ a game that, to a large extent, laid the foundations of role playing and in which the creator tackled the design of the game’s mechanics and levels. The American developer has also created the ‘Jagged Alliance’ and ‘Realms of Arkania’ sagas and has worked on licenses such as ‘Def Jam: Icon,’ ‘Playboy: The Mansion’ and ‘Dungeon & Dragons: Heroes’.

Her series of six analog games, ‘The Mechanic is the Message,’ attracted a great deal of international attention, particularly ‘Train and Síochán Leat’ (known as ‘The Irish Game’) which is exhibited at the National Videogame Museum (USA).

Gamasutra magazine considered her in 2013 to be one of the 10 key developers in the industry and, the same year, Develop Magazine included her among the 25 names that have changed the videogame industry. Furthermore, in 2013 Romero became the first resident developer on the Games and Playable Media Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2014 she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the state of the industry in Ireland.

The Fun & Serious Game Festival seeks to recognize her current commitment to the new generations of creators, including her support, patronage and promotional endeavors. The award also recognizes her creative career.

Alfonso Gómez, the Director of the Fun & Serious Festival, has declared: “Brenda Romero has not only been one of the key women in the videogame industry for almost 40 years, she is one of the voices that, at creative, management and promotional levels, has contributed the most to the international videogame sector. For us it is an honor that she has accepted this award.”

Brenda Romero has confirmed that, in addition to collecting her Honorary Award on December 10, she will participate in the VIT Talks, the veteran series of talks offered by experts within the framework of the Festival on videogames, innovation and trends.

Over its eight-year existence, Fun & Serious has become a must-attend event for the industry: it was founded with the aim of elevating videogames to the category of an art form, like cinema or music, thus recognizing the importance of an industry that is expected to generate 125.4 billion dollars in profits in 2018 (approximately three times the figure generated by film industry) Videogames have become so popular that, by 2017, hey had attracted some 665 million users (White Paper on the Spanish Development Video Games, 2017, DEV-ICEX).

About Fun & Serious Festival

The Fun & Serious Game Festival, held every December in Bilbao, is the largest video-game festival in Europe and a key meeting-point for the industry as a whole.

The event’s mission is to recognize and promote the work of video-game producers, directors, artists and developers, based on a comprehensive program of conferences, roundtables, networking and activities, aimed at both companies and the general public. As is customary each year, the Festival will conclude with an exclusive Grand Prize-Winning Gala for the best video-games of the year.

The Fun & Serious Game Festival enjoys the support of the Basque Regional Government – SPRI, Bilbao City Hall and the Provincial Council of Biscay. The event’s strategic partners include Microsoft, PlayStation and Ubisoft. The Festival features the collaboration of the Spanish Video-Games Association (AEVI), UTAD, Virtualware and Digipen.