Stony Brook, NY – May 30, 2013

Game On is an interactive event hosted by the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. Since 2004, current and past students come to Game On to play their original video games for an audience, while industry leaders select a winning game.

This year’s event, which is always open to the public, was held on May 17 at the Wang Center. Described by Newsday as “an impressive roster of successful video game developers”, 15 fierce competitors vied for top prize. Entrants included teams from Push Pop Productions, Decrypted Studios, Snazzy Games, and Khaotic Studies and were called by Long Island Business News as “teams of code-crunching students”. Audience members came from all over Long Island and provided feedback throughout the competition.

Bragging rights for this year’s competition belong to Paul Gifford of Push Pop Productions, who won the competition for his game, Opposites Attract. Opposites Attract is described as a “puzzle-platformer” where the main character Magnus Magnetsson III is electro-magnetically charged. He uses this trait to push or pull himself, and charge other objects in the game. You can play the winning game by downloading it here, Opposites Attract.

Game developers, Moshe Ben-Zacharia and Karl Floersch’s game Ear Boy, tied for second place with Andrew Gratta’s game, Leukocyte. Industry judges spanned the gaming and developer community and included representatives from Activision, Arkadium, Zynga, Kuma Games, Cryptic Studies, Microsoft, Citibank, Onslaught Studios, EduWare, Artizens, Applied Visions, and Walmart Labs.

Congratulations to all of the finalists. Check out trailers of all of the games on the Department of Computer Science Game Programming You Tube Channel.