Uncharted co-creator Amy Hennig will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at next year’s Game Developers Choice Awards. She has worked in the video game industry since the late 1980s, and is an acclaimed game writer and director.
The Game Developers Choice Awards takes place during the Game Developers Conference, and is set for Wednesday, March 20. Hennig will join a prestigious group of Lifetime Achievement honorees including Tim Sweeney, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Ken Kutaragi, Warren Spector, John Carmack, Shigeru Miyamoto, and others. She will be the first woman to receive the Lifetime Achievement award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
Hennig’s first credit was as an artist on Atari’s ElectroCop. At the time she was in film school, but realized the potential of video games immediately. She dropped out of film school and continued working on video games. In the mid 1990s, she joined Crystal Dynamics where she worked on Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Hennig wrote and directed its sequel, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. She continued working at Crystal Dynamics into the early 2000s, when she left to join Naughty Dog.
At Naughty Dog, she co-directed Jak 3 with studio founder Jason Rubin. As the team transitioned to the PlayStation 3, Hennig began laying the groundwork for the Uncharted series. The Hennig-directed Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune released in 2007 after a tumultuous development cycle. It was a hit for the developer, and a sequel was on its way.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves released in 2009, which was a major step forward for the series. Again, Hennig directed and wrote the action/adventure game. Her last release at Naughty Dog was 2011’s Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. She also served as a story consultant on Bend Studio’s Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the Vita prequel.
Hennig left Naughty Dog during the development of Uncharted 4, and joined Visceral Games in 2014. She directed “Project Ragtag,” an unnamed Star Wars title, until Visceral was shuttered in October 2017. She left EA to run an independent studio, and is currently exploring virtual reality as an avenue for game development.
