The co-founder and managing director of Valve Corporation, Gabe Newell, will be honoured with the BAFTA Fellowship at the British Academy Games Awards ceremony on March 5th 2013.
A statement from the Academy reads: Newell’s belief in “working with the community” has been evidenced since Valve launched its support for Half-Life community developers, dubbed ‘Modders’, who have created their own variants of Half-Life using tools released by the company. As a result, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat and many other titles were born from the ‘Mod’ scene. Steam, with the recently launched Steam Workshop, represent the leading marketplace for those making today’s independent games as well as individuals creating in-game items.
The yearly award is the highest the academy can bestow and has only been used to honour games industry luminaries in the past few years, in 2010 and 2011 the fellowship was awarded to Shigeru Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux respectively.
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