Think Services Game Group’s 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in game development acknowledging excellence in game creation, will honor Hideo Kojima with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s ceremony taking place at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Kojima is Corporate Officer, Executive Producer and Director of Kojima Productions and creator of the seminal Metal Gear series. The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of developers who have made an indelible impact on the craft of game development, as Kojima has with over twenty years of work on Metal Gear and other notable franchises.

Renowned as one of the world’s most influential contemporary game developers, Hideo Kojima first decided to get involved in the game development business while studying economics. Driven by the hardware limitations of the MSX personal computer, he pursued a fresh approach to the action game genre – and thus the stealth genre was born with 1987’s Metal Gear for Konami.

After creating the cult Snatcher and Policenauts franchises, the global breakthrough for Kojima’s career took place in 1998 when Konami’s Metal Gear Solid was released on Sony’s PlayStation platform. This seminal title has been followed by a host of important sequels and franchise additions, including the critically acclaimed Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and 2008’s multi-million selling Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Kojima also produced the well-received mech action Zone of the Enders series, and also created Boktai: The Sun in your Hand, a Game Boy Advance game which contained a photometric sunlight sensor in the cartridge that charged a vampire’s solar weapon, another example of the designer’s signature disruption of traditional gaming mechanics.

Presented by GDC and Webby-award winning Gamasutra.com, the awards ceremony is held in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival and will be hosted on March 25, in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. For complete details, please visit www.gamechoiceawards.com.

The editors of Gamasutra.com, who are in charge of award management, worked in association with the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notables such as Doug Lombardi (Valve), John Vechey (PopCap), Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), and Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), to pick the Special Award winners following audience nominations.

Hideo Kojima will also be making his Game Developers Conference speaking debut at GDC09 when he gives the keynote lecture, “Solid Game Design: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible,” the morning after the Choice Awards Ceremony, on Thursday, March 26, 2009 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PST in the Esplanade Room of the Moscone Center’s South Hall.