Telefilm Canada has launched The Great Canadian Video Game Competition. This competition will see selected small development teams (10 in round one) supported and shepherded through the process of bringing a video game from concept to retail, seeing them mentored by some heavyweights of the Canadian game development market, along with some very substantial "prizes" (e.g. up to $250,000 to create a "playable prototype", and then up to $500,000 in matching funds, apparently matching private investors, to bring it to market).

As a taxpayer, I have mixed feelings about this. Not only is the Canadian game development industry already relatively strong, this seems like a very precarious contest for a government agency to be involved with: Telefilm would be eviscerated by the party of the day if they brought a game like Going Postal or Grand Theft Auto.

It's not my industry, so I haven't read the guidelines, but perhaps they have a "family friendly" disclaimer in the requirements (explicitly or selectively).

Speaking of video games, in the earlier days of software development, every clever developer generally dreamed of riches in the realm of video games. The hacker itch was generally scratched by making a cool new technology demos (I recently reminisced with the Steem Atari ST emulator, and some of the demos -- then running against an 8Mhz processor with limited external supporting chips, unlike PCs today which have tremendous parallel processing with hugely powered I/O, graphics, audio, networking, and support chipsets themselves vastly eclipsing the original power of the ST -- are impressive even today), though few developers had the follow-through to build a complete game. Still, there was a seeming endless onslaught of hundreds or thousands of games every month. People like John Carmack naturally released their hacker urges by buildings games like Commander Keen.

Now the amateur/beginner game market is mostly dead (yeah it still exists, but it is nothing compared to what it was in the 80s or 90s). If you're a clever programmer now, your dreams of riches are that you'll create the next Reddit or Slashdot or Fark, and most of the hacker focus is on "AJAX" or PHP or Python or .NET.

Quite a remarkable shift, and in many ways it's a tragedy.