Vancouver-based Hothead Games was named most promising new company of the year Monday night, as the Canadian New Media Awards honored the best digital filmmakers, game developers and interactive designers at a gala ceremony in Toronto.

‘We were shocked to have been nominated in the first place,’ says joint CEO Steve Bocska. ‘For the last 14 months the company has been keeping its head down… We’re thrilled, as you can imagine, to have won.’

Hothead, one of the 14 winners, is currently in development on Swarm, an environmentally themed adventure game and a finalist in the Great Canadian Video Game Competition from Telefilm Canada. The 23-person company has also partnered with Cambrian House, a Calgary-based web company, on Gwabs, a desktop-to-desktop combat game in which players fight in real time over the Internet, and is codeveloping the game Penny Arcade Adventures, based on a web comic.

Producer of the year went to Matthew Hornburg of Toronto-based marblemedia, producer of Shorts in Motion: The Art of Seduction, part of the Bravo!FACT/National Film Board mobile series.

Company of the year went to mobile brand-builder MyThum Interactive, while Xenophile Media won excellence in cross-platform for The ReGenesis Extended Reality Game. The same title — based on The Movie Network/Movie Central series produced by Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films — shared an Interactive Emmy win last month in Cannes with Zinc Roe Design’s site Zimmer Twins.

Toronto’s Breakthrough New Media and the Quebec City studio Sarbakan won the award for excellence in gaming for the online Captain Flamingo: Uh-Oh Flamingo, based on the YTV series. Meanwhile, the NFB Filmmaker-in-Residence website, which has Katerina Cizek documenting healthcare stories from Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, won for excellence in news, information.

With files from Sean Davidson