At the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards, what top award did Portal win?
Answer
Game of the Year
At the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards, Portal won Game of the Year.
The ceremony recognized games released during the preceding year, so Portal’s victory honored its 2007 release. Valve’s compact first-person puzzle game competed against major titles including BioShock, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Rock Band, and Super Mario Galaxy.
Portal also won the Innovation Award and Best Game Design at the same ceremony. Those prizes reflected the game’s unusual combination of physics-based puzzles, spatial reasoning, dry humor, and a portal gun that let players connect two surfaces across a level.
The date can be confusing because award listings sometimes label the achievement by the eligibility year rather than the ceremony year. Portal was the 2007 Game of the Year winner in the Game Developers Choice Awards’ historical winner list, while the presentation itself took place in 2008. The answer is still the award’s canonical top category: Game of the Year.