Dressed to impress

There’s nothing more exciting than getting on your posh kit for an awards do (well there is, but go with it). And our CEO Oli Christie and CTO Mark Allen got all togged up into their best evening wear, had polished their shoes and were ready for the National Chamber of Commerce Awards in London town.

The nominees are...

Neon Play were nominated in three categories - Most Promising New Business, Most Innovative Business and Entrepreneur of the Year. We had already been lucky enough to win our regional South West Chamber Awards in these categories, but we were now heading to the Big Smoke to compete in the national awards against all the regional finalists.

BBC One Show’s Anita Rani was our presenter for the evening and she did a fine job of shimmying around and keeping the show on the road.

The tension mounts...

There were 17 categories and 440 people were waiting on bated breath for the winners to be announced. We came agonisingly close when we came second in the Most Promising New Business category and failed to be innovative enough to win the Innovation Award.

So we weren’t too hopeful when the Entrepreneur of the Year award was up for grabs, especially as there were 12 nominees - small odds indeed.

And the winner is...

But amazingly and to our utter surprise, our founder and CEO Oli Christie was announced as the winner of the national Entrepreneur of the Year.

Here is a video of the winners being announced. We apologise as Oli might have been a bit tipsy at this stage!

And here is Oli with Anita Rani herself - what a fine and very nice lady she is.

We now have another piece of glassware and a plastic frame for our studio. And in fact, that is the tenth award we’ve won since we started 19 months ago. Not bad going for a little mobile games studio in the back of beyond - or Cirencester as we call it.

The evening then descended into a flurry of Sambuca and dancing - a fine time was had by all.

Rent a quote

Oli Christie, CEO of Neon Play (and now with the lofty title of Entrepreneur of the Year) commented with a fuzzy head, “It’s a genuine honour to win the award and it’s testament to the great work the whole team has done in helping to build Neon Play. We have an incredibly talented team and we are developing some seriously fun games - long may it last!”