The Trailblazer Award is an honorary prize given to a working creator who has made both great contributions to the field of games and captures the independent and pioneering spirit.
Sara Thacher has filled her career on creating playful interactive experiences that often cross and combine physical and digital. She is an executive creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering, where she is responsible for the development of new attractions and experiences at Disney parks around the world. As creative director, she’s applied her passion for bringing the adventures of the screen to the real world for both Star Wars and Marvel franchises. She started her Imagineering career as a project leader in Research and Development where she has received multiple patents and developed the TEA Award-winning Haunted Mansion: Ghost Post.
Prior to Imagineering, Sara served as executive producer and experience designer at the immersive entertainment company Nonchalance, where she co-created the groundbreaking and Indiecade-award winning experience, The Jejune Institute. She serves on the board for the Immersive Experience Institute and the Peabody Awards where she helped expand the fields of eligible work to “interactive stories that matter.”
The Vanguard Award is presented to an independent studio that has been working in the space since the beginning, before indie games became a major part of the game industry.
Based in Copenhagen, Triband is an attention-seeking orchestra of people who want to make the world laugh with silly and surprising comedy games. Their game WHAT THE GOLF? was a bona fide indie hit that won numerous awards, including ‘Best Mobile Game’ at the 2020 Game Developers Choice Awards and the Grand Prize at IndieCade Europe. The follow-up WHAT THE CAR? won the 2024 DICE Award for Mobile Game of the Year, and they recently released WHAT THE CLASH? – a PvP game where every card you play is a new game mechanic.
The Game Changer Award celebrates an individual who has impacted the gaming landscape in a significant way, a positive disruptor who has brought a paradigm shift to our community.
After a 10 year public relations career in the consumer and tech industry, Sue Bohle entered the game industry as Atari’s first PR agency. Over the next three decades, she launched products for Atari developers, iD, Activision, Crystal Dynamics, Dreamworks, 3DO, Warner Bros, Infogrames and dozens of indie game companies from the U.S., Europe and Asia.
She also worked for industry conferences. In the tech world, she was a consultant to CES. In the game world, her firm also built attendance for the Game Developer Conference (GDC) from 2000 to more than 25,000, making it the dominant industry event, and grew Penny Arcade from a single fan event to multiple expos.
Becoming interested in why games were so addictive, she helped promote some of the earliest learning game companies and then founded Serious Play Conference to help grow the industry for games that could be used in training or education. Today, SPC is the dominant industry even for serious games, worldwide, serving the market for military, corporate, healthcare, education and nonprofit training and educational products.
The Bernie DeKoven Big Fun Award recognizes creators significantly furthering the field and impact of new, big, and physical games.
Based in Bristol, UK, Alistair Aitcheson makes playable stage shows, interactive livestreams and alternative controllers. His shows allow everyone in the audience to join in – whether they be taking part in games that get them running all over the auditorium, or sending secret messages from their phones to direct the action on stage.
Alistair believes that everybody is an artist. He is committed to using games and technology to create safe spaces where audiences can take creative risks. Having trained as a clown with Bristol legends Holly Stoppit and Igne Barkauskaite, he is inspired to find joy in failure, and to acknowledge his players as equal partners in the creative process.
He believes everyone should leave his shows saying “it would have been different if I wasn’t there.”
Beginning his professional games career in 2010, he made his first trip to IndieCade in 2015, where his codebreaking installation Codex Bash won the Media Choice Award. He returned in 2017 with his debut stage show The Incredible Playable Show, which was given the Jury Choice Award. He won the Performance Award in 2022 for his livestream art-making game Artholomew Video’s Stream Challenge.
He also hosted IndieCade’s Beyond Screens Alternative Controller livestreams for three seasons, alongside artist and game-developer Tatiana Vilela dos Santos.
Alistair is currently developing interactive clown performances, mixing drag, improv and technology. His latest show, “My Date with Pierce Brosnan” sees him as a clown on a date with a talking dummy of Pierce Brosnan, whose lines are provided by the audience. Every show is different, with the personality of his celebrity beau entirely determined by his audience’s anonymous (and unfiltered) input. It has been performed across the UK and made its international debut at the Queerness in Games Conference 2025 in Montreal.
