Their project, called Fract, was a first-person game about exploring a mysterious, empty neon world. That world was, in reality, a music synthesizer. Players were tasked with putting the device together, interacting with buttons and levers to coax some sense out of audio puzzles. Even with the game's incomplete state, players were hooked.

Richard Flanagan was 28 when he walked onstage to accept the award. He moved slowly and carefully up the stairs to the podium. He had never been around so many game developers in his life.

"Thank you to everyone here," he said, his voice cracking with nervous energy. He didn't mention that the presenter got his name wrong. "I took a bit of a chance. I decided that I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to learn about game design."

"I need to thank my family and friends that supported me — at this age, at this level of my career. This is just incredible. Thank you so much!"

In the audience that night were the teams behind Minecraft and Octodad, behind Nidhogg and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This was Flanagan's moment of validation. These were his peers now, and their applause was for him.

And yet at that very moment there was someone in the audience whom he had just let down. Someone he inadvertently slighted. Someone who loved him and supported him more than anyone — his fiancée, Quynh Nguyen. He never thanked her in that speech.

"There was probably yelling," Flanagan remembers. "I think she — rightly — felt left out."

Later that night offstage, he told Nguyen that he would rather have never started working on the game than to have hurt her with his speech.

"I was willing to say, 'OK, let's go home. Let's do something else. ... This isn't about me. This is about us.'" Tears well up as he recalls that evening, that long plane ride back home. It's not something he's comfortable talking about in detail, even today.

But in the end he couldn't bring himself to cancel the project. That day in San Francisco he realized that the game was as much Nguyen's as it was his. The reason the game existed in the first place was because their relationship existed. And in building one, they had helped build the other.