At last week’s Game Developer’s Conference, Epic Games showed off the first tech demo of the upcoming Unreal 3 engine, which we couldn’t show you. That’s changed now that IGN has posted the entire video. It’s incredibly impressive, but you’ve also got to remember that it is still a tech demo. Enjoy!

Tim Schaefer calls his next game ”extremely, extremely manly” — and no, it’s not Once Upon a Monster.

Trenched, Double Fine’s latest downloadable title was unveiled during last night’s Game Developer’s Choice Awards ceremony during GDC in San Francisco.

Giant robots. Giant Guns and Double Fine? I’m in. Check out the official trailer below.

World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online game from Blizzard is a behemoth of a game. But just how huge is it?

During a keynote address at GDC Austin, Blizzard team members unveiled a host of numerical statistics concerning the game and the lengths the studio must go to to keep the game up and running on a day to day basis. Buckle up, because here we go!

• 7,650 quests
• 70,000 spells
• 40,000 NPCs
• 1.5 million game assets
• 5.5 million lines of code
• 180,000 bugs swatted by the QA department
• 4,449,680,399 rewards unlocked
• 20,000 computer systems
• 13,250 server blades
• 75,000 CPU cores
• 1.3 petabytes of storage
• 4,600 staffers
• 27 hours of music
• 360,000 text strings
• 2 million words
• 12,000,000 Battle.net accounts

Anything on the list really jump out at you, besides everything?

An Inside Look at The Universe of Warcraft @ Gamasutra via Kotaku

You know you’ve won a prestigious award when the body of voters are the developers themselves.‚  Sales figures, cultural absorption, and other such factors matter not at the 9^th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, held last night in San Francisco.

Tim Schafer, legendary game designer hosted the event, as major titles Fallout 3, and LittleBigPlanet took home most of the hardware.

Media Molecule’s crazy-popular, user generated content oriented LittleBigPlanet took home four awards for Best Game Design, Best Technology, Best Debut Game and Innovation.

Bethesda Softworks received the Game of the Year and Best Writing awards for their latest post-apocalyptic endeavor, Fallout 3.

Not all the nods went to the games themselves as Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his twenty years of dedication and work on the Metal Gear series and others.

Finally, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, co-developers of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises accepted the Pioneer Award for their undying enthusiasm and dedication to their work.

Full list of winners at the Game Developers Choice Awards below.

Game of the Year
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks)

Best Game Design:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Writing:
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks)

Best Technology:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Visual Arts:
Prince of Persia (Ubisoft Montreal)

Best Debut Game:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Handheld Game:
God Of War: Chains Of Olympus (Ready at Dawn)

Innovation Award:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Audio:
Dead Space (EA Redwood Shores)

Best Downloadable Game:
World Of Goo (2D Boy)

Recipients for the evening’s special awards were:

Lifetime Achievement Award
Hideo Kojima

Pioneer Award
Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy

Ambassador Award
Tommy Tallarico

via GamaSutra.

If you didn’t already know, the 2009 Game Developers Conference takes place this week in San Francisco, CA, and today Nintendo President Satoru Iwata gave a short, statistic filled keynote address complete with what we have been waiting years for.

Iwata, casually dressed without tie, spoke about the rampant success of the Nintendo family of products with the Wii at nearly 50 million units sold worldwide and the DS already surpassing 100 million units.

Iwata also praised legendary video game creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s efforts by saying Miyamoto “sees game opportunities where others don’t” and “In my opinion he is leveraging these development opportunities better than anyone else today” furthermore, “When Miyamoto sees something that a lot of people are enjoying, he’ll study what part of that activity is fun,” and finally, “Even if people don’t realize why they are having fun, Miyamoto does.”

Bill Trinen of Nintendo spoke to the question of a Wii storage solution and if you fire up your Wii today, you’ll find Wii menu update 4.0 which adds the “SD card menu” that allows for additional storage space with 12 channels per screen and up to 20 screens which equals a total of 240 games!

How can a simple SD card hold so much information? The answer lies in SDHC card, capable of up to 32GB of space.‚  You can download from the Wii Shop Channel directly to the SD card, and then launch titles directly from the SD card.

Next, Iwata took back the stage and announced the Virtual Console Arcade, an expansion on the Virtual Console with titles Space Harrier, Gaplus, Star Force, Solvalou, The Tower of Druaga, Mappy and more available today!

In addition, a slew of Final Fantasy titles for WiiWare as well as Virtual Console.‚  “My Life as a Darklord” is a sequel to WiiWare launch title “My Life as a King” as well as “Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and yes, Final Fantasy will come to the Virtual Console in Japan with all six Famicom/SuperFamicom titles released in Japan and “FF 1″ and “FF:IV”‚  debuting stateside.

Finally, after an interesting, dungeon filled trailer, Iwata announced “The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks.”

“This new DS title is tentatively named The Legend of Zelda; Spirit Tracks. It will be available this year.”

Iwata said that while new original development may be difficult during the economic downturn, he noted that the jet engine, television and the chocolate chip cookie were created during The Great Depression.

Stay tuned for updates and more information regarding everything we heard today, but feel free to let share in giddy excitement over a new Zelda title, I know I will.

Via Michael McWhertor at Kotaku.

This years Game Developers Conference, which will be held on March 25^th in San Francisco California, announced an impressive list of nominees this past Monday.‚  The GDC deviates from most game award shows due to the judges, which are the people behind the scenes of the games themselves, which legitimizes the acclaim.‚  Therefore, it’s no surprise games like Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead racked up four nominations each this year.‚  I’m going to keep my fingers crossed for GTA IV winning Best Writing over the other four nominees.‚  Spore and LittleBigPlanet rightfully find themselves up for most innovative.‚  But, I’m sure we’ve all got different opinions on the matter.

Check out the complete list below and check out as many of this year’s nominations as you can before next years list starts moving in.

For more information about the Game Developers Choice Awards, check out www.gamechoiceawards.com.

The complete list of nominees is:

Best Game Design
Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft Montreal)
Braid (Number None)
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios)
Left 4 Dead (Valve Software)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Visual Art
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios)
Metal Gear Solid 4 (Kojima Productions)
Prince Of Persia (Ubisoft Montreal)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Gears Of War 2 (Epic Games)

Best Technology
Spore (Maxis)
Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North)
Left 4 Dead (Valve Software)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Gears Of War 2 (Epic Games)

Best Writing
Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft Montreal)
Braid ‚ (Number None)
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios)
Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North)
Metal Gear Solid 4 (Kojima Productions)

Best Audio
Dead Space (EA Redwood Shores)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Metal Gear Solid 4 (Kojima Productions)
Left 4 Dead (Valve Software)
Gears Of War 2 (Epic Games)

Best Debut
Braid (Number None)
Sins Of A Solar Empire (Ironclad Games)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
World Of Goo (2D Boy)
Soul Bubbles (Mekensleep)

Innovation
Spore (Maxis)
World Of Goo (2D Boy)
Boom Blox (EA Los Angeles)
Braid (Number None)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)

Best Handheld
Patapon (Pyramid/SCE Japan)
Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin (Intelligent Systems)
God Of War: Chains Of Olympus (Ready At Dawn Studios)
Echochrome (SCE Japan)
The World Ends With You (Jupiter/Square Enix)

Best Downloadable Game
Castle Crashers (The Behemoth)
Braid (Number None)
World Of Goo (2D Boy)
N+ (Metanet/Slick Entertainment)
Pixeljunk Eden (Q-Games)

Game of the Year
Fable 2 (Lionhead Studios)
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios)
Left 4 Dead (Valve Software)
Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North)

The game development community has chosen Portal as Game of the Year at the 8th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards.

Valve’s genre-blending first person shooter/puzzler also took home two other awards at GDC. 2K’s Bioshock, Crytek’s Crysis and Nintendo’s latest Zelda chapter were also big winners.

“The Game Developers Choice Awards stand out from other game industry prizes by being open to all games of a calendar year and by recognizing the individual developers behind each celebrated game,” said Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. “We are thrilled gamers at home will be able to meet the people behind their favorite games when our first ever television broadcast special on the awards airs soon on the G4 television network.”

The recipients of the 8th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards are:

2007 Best Game Design
Portal (Valve)
Kim Swift, Realm Lovejoy, Paul Graham

2007 Best Visual Art
BioShock (2K Boston/2K Australia / 2K Games)
Scott Sinclair, Shawn Robertson, Andrew James

2007 Best Technology
Crysis (Crytek/Electronic Arts)
Cevat Yerli, Douglas Binks, Timur Davidenko, Martin Mittring

2007 Best Writing
BioShock (2K Boston/2K Australia / 2K Games)
Ken Levine, Emily Ridgway, Joe McDonagh, Susan O’Connor

2007 Best Audio
BioShock (2K Boston/2K Australia / 2K Games)
Eric Brosius, Pat Balthrop, Emily Ridgway, Justin Mullins

2007 Best Debut
Crackdown (Real Time Worlds / Microsoft Game Studios)
Ramon Gonzalez, Violetta Sanchez, Rafael Diaz, Jose Guerra

2007 Innovation
Portal (Valve)
Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw

2007 Best Handheld Game
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo / Nintendo)
Eiji Aonuma

2007 Best Downloadable Game
Flow (thatgamecompany / Sony Computer Entertainment)
Kellee Santiago, Jenova Chen, Martin Middleton, Hao Cui, John Edwards,
Nick Clark

2007 Game of the Year
Portal (Valve)
Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw

Recipients for the evening’s special awards were:

Lifetime Achievement Award
Sid Meier

Pioneer Award
Ralph Baer

Ambassador Award
Jason Della Rocca

For more information about the awards and all the recipients, visit: http://www.gamechoiceawards.com/