Game designers from all corners of the video game industry gathered Friday evening (December 11th) in Santa Monica at Red Bulls North American Headquarters for the First Annual Inside Gaming Awards, where the industrys leading video game publishers and developers walked away with awards in-hand. Hosted the night before the Spike TV Video Game Awards, the Inside Gaming Awards was created to specifically appeal to the vast community of global gamers and was established to provide an alternative look at the recent year in gaming. The nights big winner was Infinity Ward / Activision for video game title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 snagging six awards in total for Game of the Year, Best Multiplayer, Best Control, Best Replayability, Best Weapon and Best Original Score. Winners were formally announced today on Machinima.coms flagship show, Inside Gaming. (For a complete list of winners, please refer to the attached Appendix.)

Highlights of the night included a Red Bull versus HALO All Stars Tournament with Red Bull branded MLG pro gamer, Dave Walshy Walsh and a speech from YouTubes Director of Strategic Partnerships, Kevin Yen, congratulating the Machinima team for generating over 768 million views to date on the Machinima Channel on YouTube, making it one of the most viewed channels of all time. Over the course of the last year, the Machinima.com network has grown at a phenomenal rate and the 65 million average monthly video views confirms that the breadth of the network among the global gaming community far surpasses other competing gaming outlets and traditional networks.

Machinima has done a fantastic job at understanding, engaging and growing its audience on YouTube, said Kevin Yen, Director of Strategic Partnerships for YouTube. One of YouTubes core goals is to make our partners successful. Machinima is a great example of how a content creator can use our platform to succeed in a competitive market.

Nominees were eligible for two separate awards the official industry Inside Gaming Award and a Gamers Choice Award. Utilizing YouTubes Video Annotations feature, a new way for users to add interactive commentary to videos, the Gamers Choice Awards voting system allowed viewers to navigate into categories to watch nomination videos and submit votes over a two-week period.

Weve found that the gaming audience lives predominantly online so partnering with YouTube has allowed us to distribute content to the biggest global audience possible on the gamers platform of choice and to deliver a unique and alternative perspective on video game awards shows, said Machinima.com CEO and Chairman, Allen Debevoise. With the New Year approaching, we look forward to other symbiotic projects with YouTube and Machinimas franchise shows including Inside Gaming.

Inside Gaming has delivered comprehensive coverage of the most important industry and consumer events including E3, PAX, GamesCom, and Comic Con. Inside Gamings coverage of each of the major events of 2009 has delivered an average of 15 million video views on the Machinima.com Network during the week of the respective events and has delivered unmatched marketing opportunities for advertisers associating with the Machinima.com Network during such events. Inside Gaming will cover approximately 20 events of interest to gamers in 2010.

Since the companys inception, Machinima.com has rapidly expanded to provide comprehensive and compelling entertainment content focused on gaming within the core 18 34 demographic and generates more than 65 million video views per month across its network, making it the number one entertainment destination for gamers, developers, publishers and fans. The word Machinima is a loose hybrid of the words machine and cinema and is used to describe the process of creating real-time animation by manipulating a videogames real]time engine and assets.