Winner of Toyota Yaris Game Development Announced

Remember that announcement a couple of weeks back from the Toyota Motor Sales, USA? If you do, it was all about that competition made especially for game developers. And even if that announcement seemed like it was just done yesterday, the winner of the mentioned competition was already announced. Meaning, the game is already over and the winner takes home the prize.

The competition was named the Toyota Yaris Mobile Game Development Competition and it was part of another huge event which was the Evolution (or EVO) World Finals for 2006. The 2006 World Finals was actually a video game tournament and it was held in Las Vegas in Nevada.

And who won this competition? It was Ryan Dudley who brought home the $20,000 grand prize. Dudley is a student from the DigiPen Institute of Technology and he was working with two other team members so as to create the winning entry to the competition. Their mobile game was called the ‘Yaris Express’. The $20,000 grand prize would be split up by Dudley with Johnney Nguyen and Andrion Becker. Dudley and Nguyen worked as programmers for the game and Becker served as the artist.

Of course, just like any other competition, there were certain criteria that the game developers had to follow. And the Yaris Express seemed to be topnotch entrant that held most of the criteria given plus additional characteristics and attributes that the judges of the whole competition were looking for.

The game has been designed so much so that players can navigate Toyota Yaris through city streets. But of course, the catch would be that they would be racing against time and there would be added challenges like picking up passengers and dropping them off at designated drop off points. And just like any other game, there are also power ups in the form of Yaris characters. These would help the player receive additional scores or would assist them in dropping off the passengers.

Perhaps Toyota would next time sponsor a game development competition which would be having a main theme of creating a new Toyota design. Players of the game would have to create a new design for a Toyota vehicle by using parts like Toyota parts RAV4 and the like.

Anyhow, if you are interested in playing the game, you can download the ‘Yaris Express’ come this fall through Toyota’s main website.

Mark Clarkson is a 35 year old marketing consultant for a leading auto parts store. This native of Denver is also an offroad enthusiast.