Manifesto Games congratulates PeaceMaker and the development team at Impact Games on their recent distribution relationship with the Peres Center for Peace.

PeaceMaker is the award-winning game that allows the player to “play the news, live the conflict” by attempting to bring peace to the Mid-East as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President. The Peres Center has distributed 75,000 copies through the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz and 10,000 copies through the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds. They will distribute an additional 15,000 copies of PeaceMaker to Palestinian and Israeli high school classrooms in the coming months.

“It has been our hope to put this game in the hands of people who live with the real conflict every day, so they can play as the other side.” Explained Asi Burak, co-founder of ImpactGames. This holiday season, his wish as come true. Those of us in the rest of the world can still download PeaceMaker here at Manifesto Games and have a try at creating a more peaceful world for the coming New Year.

Greg Costikyan, CEO and co-founder of Manifesto Games, is this year's recipient of the International Game Developer's Association Maverick Award, which will be given to Costikyan at the Game Developers Conference. This year, the conference will be in San Francisco and the awards ceremony will take place on Wednesday, March 7 at the Moscone Convention Center.

The Maverick Award recognizes those who make significant contributions to the game field by taking risks and experimenting with unconventional methods. A juried award voted on by a panel of IGDA members and established in 2004, the Maverick Award is now in its fourth year. Previous recipients of the award have been the founders of Harmonix Music Systems, creators of Guitar Hero; the founders of Pop Cap Games, casual games innovators whose successes have included Bejeweled; and the founders of Blast Theory, a group of UK interactive media artists. This is the first time that the Maverick Award has been bestowed upon an individual and Costikyan is being honored for his tireless efforts to create a path to market for independently developed games.