We're proud to be an Hachette UK company
Everyone likes winning awards. And we’re lucky little so-and-so’s because we’ve won 15 awards in the last two years. No teary speeches though.
Well we might as well start with the big one. Yes, we won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation (to give it the full wordy title).
This is probably the most prestigious award you can win, if for nothing else that you get to meet Her Majesty the Queen, rather than the usual minor D-list comedian from “8 out of 10 Cats “who present most awards bashes.
If you make mobile games for a living, then Pocket Gamer is the site that you want to be recognised by. And we have been very fortunate to be featured in their top 50 in our first two years of making games.
The much-respected magazine Develop has compiled a list of the top 100 games studios in the UK. And guess what, we’re on it, which makes us very happy. We’re up there with some big console studios, so we’re in very good company and they said some very nice things about us, so we like them alot.
For the last two years, we’ve been on Mobile Entertainment’s list of the UK’s top 50 mobile innovators. We like to joke that there probably aren’t more than 50 innovators anywhere, but that’s just being silly.
We were still in nappies when we won this Nectar Award for being the very best startup in the whole of the United Kingdom. High praise indeed, plus we won £2,000 which we splashed out on all sorts of lovely things we can’t remember. We also got a bunch of Nectar Points, but we’re not sure where they are?
Here we are in our old office above a shop.
A bit like losing your virginity, it’s often the first time that’s the hardest (so to speak). And our very first award was won in our lovely home town of Cirencester. Since then we’ve gone on to win six Ciren Biz Awards, which is verging on greedy. You can almost hear the groans when they announce “...and the winner is...Neon Play”. But we’re very chuffed.
We absolutely love being in Gloucestershire and are incredibly proud to be based here. And we’ve been lucky enough to have been nominated in six Glos Biz Awards, which is pretty good really. And we were very happy to win Best Young Business in our first year. We’d like to win more though (not that we’re greedy).
As we had won the South West region award for Entrepreneur of the Year, we went forward to the National final (a bit like in Glee?). And unbelievably, our CEO Oli Christie only went and snapped up the award for the Best Entrepreneur in the World (ever)...within the Chamber Awards. It was quite a boozy night.
We’ve all heard of chambermaids and chamber music, but had you heard of the Chamber Awards? No, well nor hard we to be honest. But we were tickled pink when we found out we were the recipients of not one, not two, but three Chamber Awards (in the South-West). We won Most Promising New Business, Most Innovative Business and Entrepreneur of the Year. What a hatrick!
If you haven’t heard of Smarta.com, you should be ashamed of yourself. It’s a mighty-fine website that caters for people looking to start their own company and gives great advice to entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey. And we had a great night at the O2 in London as were announced as one of the winners. Here are Mark and Oli with Dragon's Den Deborah Meaden.
We got a letter from Lord Young and Sir Terry Leahy (ex-Tesco boss) saying we were one of the top 250 young and exciting companies in the UK, who are doing our best to push this country from recession to a hopeful forthcoming boom. We went to Liverpool for a great day of networking and presentations from global big hitters.
Our proverbial mantlepiece is jam-packed with glass awards and we’re very proud of that. But nearly all awards (that we get anyway) are glass with almost invisible writing on. So could we ask that that words are done in black or something so we can read them? Cheers.