As part of the 2017 Game Developers Choice Awards, Sweeney will be receiving this year's Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Organizers of the 17th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards announced today that this year's recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award will be Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games. Sweeney will be honored at the Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony on Wednesday, March 1, 2017. The ceremony is a part of Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, taking place at the San Francisco Moscone Center and free to attend for all GDC 2017 pass-holders.

Previous recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award include Todd Howard, Shigeru Miyamoto, Warren Spector, John Carmack, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hideo Kojima, Sid Meier, Ken Kutaragi, Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Peter Molyneux.

Sweeney has a long history of development and contribution to the game development community at large.

"Sweeney founded seminal shareware game publisher Epic MegaGames in 1991, and the release of its first product, ZZT, led to an explosion of user-created worlds. ZZT has become so beloved as a game/application that it recently led to a full-length book dissection – in the Boss Fight Books series - of the games and culture it created. An expanded Epic MegaGames also released titles such as Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball and Tyrian in the '90s as a leader in the PC shareware space," explained the Game Developers Choice Awards organizers in a short biography for Sweeney.

"While serving as the founder and CEO of a renamed Epic, Sweeney was the main architect of the first-generation Unreal Engine. This game engine was originally created for the 1998 PC game Unreal. But it became the underpinning for a slew of acclaimed games, initially in the Unreal franchise and increasingly licensed outside of Epic, including the BioShock series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, and the Batman: Arkham series."

The 17th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards will also be livestreamed on Twitch at www.twitch.tv/gdc.