VGC | John – Video Game Canon

2024 GOTY Scoreboard: In Progress

People who focus on the business side of games predicted that 2024 would see fewer AAA releases than 2023 and more layoffs throughout the industry. Sadly, they were right on both counts. It’s rough out there for people who make games.

But the dour cloud that’s currently hanging over the industry is all the more reason to celebrate the developers that did great work last year.

Astro Bot has currently collected the most “Game of the Year” hardware since the end of the year (including at The Game Awards, the only major statuette to be awarded so far), but a dozen other games have been with at least one “Game of the Year” accolade. That cohort includes LocalThunk’s Balatro, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, MachineGames’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Atlus’s Metaphor: ReFantazio.

We’re still waiting on results from the New York Game Awards (January 21st), the DICE Awards (February 13th), the GDC Awards (March 19th), BAFTA Games Awards (April 8th), and a few others. But you can find all the games fighting for 2024’s “Game of the Year” honors after the break.

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Rolling Stone Picks Zelda: Breath of the Wild as #1 in “The 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time”

Rolling Stone has been in the listmaking game for a very long time, first publishing “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” all the way back in 2003. But as we move into 2025, they’ve finally turned their editors loose on video games and published a new list of “The 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time“.

In creating their list, Rolling Stone decided to shy away from including dozens of sequels from the same franchise, and to ask how well the classics of yesteryear still hold up today:

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The Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 Finds Room for Super Smash Bros., Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and 40 Other Games

The whole world is getting ready to close the book on 2024, which means that it’s also time to meet the newest inductees to the Shacknews Hall of Fame.

A total of 42 new games were added to the Hall of Fame this year, most coming from the great gaming year of 1999. The Shacknews Hall of Fame runs on a 25-year eligibility window and only games released on or before December 31, 1999 can be inducted.

So which games made the cut? The list includes multiple titles from Valve (Counter-Strike, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Team Fortress Classic), Sega (Crazy Taxi, Samba de Amigo, Shining Force, and Sonic Adventure), and Nintendo (Mario Golf, Pokemon Gold and Silver, Pokemon Snap, Pokemon Stadium, and Super Smash Bros.). But Shacknews didn’t stop there, as they also enshrined Sqauresoft’s Final Fantasy VIII, Crystal Dynamics’s Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Black Isle’s Planescape: Torment, Namco’s Soul Calibur, and Neversoft’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

All told, excluding duplicates, alternate editions, and expansion packs, the Shacknews Hall of Fame now includes 233 unique titles. And they haven’t even reached the first year of the new millennium yet!

All of the titles included in the Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 will be added to the Video Game Canon as part of next year’s update.

The Game Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today

The Game Awards have been produced and hosted since 2014 by journalist Geoff Keighley. The annual ceremony is held each December and recognizes games released during the previous 12 months.

The nominees are selected by an international panel made up of more than 95 media outlets and influencers. This same jury, along with the aggregated results of an online fan vote, also determines the winners each year. The final ballot is weighted with 90% of the vote coming from the panel and the remaining 10% coming from the general public. Contrary to popular belief, Geoff Keighley has no say in selecting the nominees or the winners.

The Game Awards are a direct continuation of the Spike Video Game Awards, which Keighley produced for Spike TV from 2003 until 2013. After the cable channel declined to sponsor the show in 2014, he chose to move forward with The Game Awards as an independent production.

All the “Game of the Year” winners from The Game Awards and the Spike Video Game Awards can be found here…

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Astro Bot is “Game of the Year” at the 2024 Game Awards

Is this a new era for The Game Awards? Geoff Keighley, the producer and host, has seemed to take the many complaints about last year’s show to heart.

Many viewers were bothered by the excessive amount of “World Premiere” trailers in 2023, as well as the scant amount of time the winners were given to speak. Leaning into this criticism, the 2024 Game Awards seemed to be packed with more trailers than ever, shifting the balance of the show to operate more like a Winter E3 with the actual awards serving as a secondary segment. And that’s okay. There are lots of awards shows out there. The Game Awards can be the fun one while the GDC Awards, the DICE Awards, and the BAFTAs give out the real “Game of the Year” honors.

Keighley also received criticism from the press and the public about his lack of concern for the huge number of layoffs that ravaged the video game industry in 2023. This year saw even more job losses, and The Game Awards responded by creating the “TGA Game Changer” award, which was given to Amir Satvat for his curation of Amir Satvat’s Games Community, a website that offers support, mentorship, and job postings for game developers.

Keighley’s introduction to this part of the show was particularly good:

“The sad reality is that over the past few years the gaming industry has suffered significant and unprecedented industry-wide layoffs. Those affect the games we get to play and even more importantly, the people who make the games we love. We can debate and certainly disagree with the reasons why, and honestly, as a show, we kind of struggle how to address these topics in a constructive way. But this year, inside of these challenges, we found greatness. I’m proud to share with you the story of a single individual who saw developers in need and did something truly extraordinary.”

Even the awards themselves felt different this year, as Team Asobi’s Astro Bot won the “Game of the Year”. Astro Bot is the first family-friendly game to win the top prize in the ten-year history of The Game Awards, beating out flashier competition such as Black Myth: Wukong, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Metaphor: ReFantazio. All of those games got their chance to shine, but it was Team Asobi’s night, as the developer also won “Best Game Direction”, “Best Action/Adventure Game”, and “Best Family Game” for Astro Bot.

Not only is Astro Bot an extreme outlier among previous Game Awards winners, but so is the next most-honored game of the night. Balatro didn’t win “Game of the Year”, but developer LocalThunk did collect statuettes for “Best Independent Game”, “Best Mobile Game”, and “Best Debut Indie”. Atlus’s Metaphor: ReFantazio also picked up three statuettes last night, winning for “Best Narrative”, “Best Art Direction”, and “Best Role Playing Game”.

Black Myth: Wukong parlayed its strong fan support into wins for “Best Action Game” and the public-voted “Player’s Voice” award. While Final Fantasy VII Rebirth had to settle for the statuette for “Best Score and Music”.

Finally, let’s talk about that lineup of “World Premiere” trailers, because it really was pretty impressive this year. There were blockbuster sequels, which included The Witcher IV, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Borderlands 4, The Outer Worlds 2, Dying Light: The Beast, and Slay the Spire 2. There were the shocking returns of long-forgotten franchises such as Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Turok: Origins, Virtua Fighter 6, and Okami 2. And there was plenty of new stuff including Warren Specter’s Thick As Thieves, the currently untitled next game from Fumito Ueda, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and the absolutely bonkers Shadow Labyrinth (which is being pitched as a Pac-Man spinoff). It was almost overwhelming.

And that’s it for the 2024 Game Awards. A complete list of all the winners and nominees, as well as a full replay of the ceremony, can be found after the break.

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GOTY Flashback: 2014 Game Awards

The Game Awards has seen its share of ups and downs, but the Geoff Keighley-hosted awards show is celebrating its tenth anniversary this Thursday, December 12th. While we wait to see which game will take the coveted “Game of the Year” statuette this year, let’s look back at the first Game Awards.

After the dissolution of the Spike Video Game Awards a year earlier, Keighley rebranded the show and produced it himself as an independent production. With questions about whether the show could continue beyond 2014, he chose to carry over multiple aspects from his previous gig, including a similar slate of categories, a star-studded lineup of special guests, and a heavy focus on “World Premiere” trailers (including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt).

Eschewing a celebrity host, Keighley even took over hosting duties for the 2014 Game Awards, but he found himself in the middle of an awards show attempting to honor a strange year for gaming.

The industry was going through a console transition, as the PS4 and Xbox One had launched the year before. Many of the year’s biggest games were also released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 and many players had yet to make an investment in new hardware. This industry identity crisis was present in the “Game of the Year” nominees, which included two cross-generation games (Dragon Age: Inquisition and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor), From Software’s Dark Souls II (which wasn’t available on the PS4 or Xbox One at the time), and the mobile-focused Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

Meanwhile, Nintendo was floundering, though you wouldn’t know it from the Wii U’s performance at the show. Super Smash Bros. For Wii U (“Best Fighting Game”) and Mario Kart 8 (“Best Family Game” and “Best Sports/Racing Game”) both took home statuettes, though neither was nominated for “Game of the Year”. Instead, the Nintendo-published and Platinum-developed Bayonetta 2 earned the final spot on the “Game of the Year” ballot.

On top of all this, a coordinated harassment campaign against developers and journalists was growing in the worst corners of the Internet. Popularly known as GamerGate, we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of the campaign and probably will be for a long time. But what else can you really say about GamerGate at this point?

Ultimately, BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was named “Game of the Year” at the 2014 Game Awards, sandwiched between the aforementioned Breath of the Wild premiere and a trailer for Eve Online.

Rewatching bits of the show, I’m struck by how little The Game Awards has changed from 2014 to today. Then as now, you’ve got a lot of rapid fire awards montages, short speeches from the winners, musical performances, and “World Premiere” trailers.

The “Game of the Year” contenders can even be said to represent similar slots as subsequent years, in any given year, the “Game of the Year” category will include the flashiest action games (Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor), at least one action RPG (Dark Souls II and Dragon Age: Inquisition), a representative from Nintendo (Bayonetta 2), and a smaller game that captured the zeitgeist (Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft). You could easily map this year’s nominees onto the same template.

But after ten years, you have to wonder if it’s time for the show to freshen things up a little, but this is probably the way that Keighley likes it. And as he’s said in the past, the commercial realities of producing a show like this practically require him to seek outside sponsors and publishers willing to pay for the placement of their “World Premiere” trailers. Though it’s hard to know if any of that is true.

But other big winners during the very first Game Awards were Destiny (“Best Score/Soundtrack” and “Best Online Experience”), Far Cry 4 (“Best Shooter”), Shovel Knight (“Best Independent Game”), and Grand Theft Auto V (in the since-abandoned “Best Remaster” category). It was a strange year for gaming, but as always, we got a lot of great games.

You can find a replay of the full ceremony for the 2014 Game Awards and a complete list of winners and nominees after the break.

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GOG.com Launches GOG Preservation Program to Keep Classic PC Games Available on Modern Systems

The capital letters in GOG.com don’t stand for anything anymore, but when the digital storefront first launched in 2008, the acronym stood for Good Old Games and was meant to shine a spotlight on the company’s retro focus. In the decade-and-a-half since, GOG has positioned themselves as a competitor to Steam, often selling the same AAA titles that appear on Valve’s storefront. But their desire to be a destination for retro gaming never really went away, and earlier this month the company unveiled the GOG Preservation Program.

The GOG Preservation Program is a new initiative that’ll attempt to ensure that “classic games remain playable on modern systems, even after their developers stopped supporting them.” To accomplish this, GOG has pledged to “commit [their] own resources to maintaining compatibility with modern and future systems” for games in the program. These updates can include everything from testing whether or not a game is supported in Windows 10 and 11, all the way to fixing bugs that have existed for decades (just look at these Patch Notes on a classic Resident Evil Bundle).

But why are they doing this? I’ll let GOG’s Arthur Dejardin explain:

Across my desk sits someone who describes his personality as a carbon copy of Squall’s from FF8. Another colleague told me he became a financial controller because he played so much Tropico as a kid. I love rainy days because they gave me the perfect excuse to play The Legend of Dragoon for the entire afternoon back in the day.

Games shaped us. Being able to play them is an essential part of reconnecting with ourselves. They must stay accessible, playable, and alive.

Unfortunately, the classic PC games market is in a sorry state. It’s too tiny for leading platforms to give it any attention. Classic releases often get the sell-it-and-forget-it treatment, and as time goes on and technology evolves, compatibility issues arise and remain unaddressed. Head to one of the massive platforms to buy a classic game and try to play it on your Windows 11 machine: You’ll stand disappointed.

We believe that maintaining these games as compatible and playable will allow you to keep our shared history alive, reconnect with yourself, and pass on your legacy.

It is incredible to see a company dedicate themselves to game preservation like this. As of today, more than 100 games are part of the GOG Preservation Program, but the storefront hopes to add many more to the program in the future. And like all the games on their virtual shelves, the titles in the GOG Preservation Program will be available to download without DRM.

“The Eurogamer 100” is a List of the 100 Best Video Games to Play Right Now

Eurogamer has been doing a lot of interesting stuff this year to celebrate their 25th birthday (I hope you got the chance to try out the Theme Switcher to see what the site looked like through the years). And about six weeks ago they even attempted to capture “the best games to play in this specific moment” with “The Eurogamer 100”:

Welcome to the Eurogamer 100, a list of video games that aims to reflect their ever-changing nature. Rather than ranking games by their influence or significance, the below list is a suggestion of the very best things you can play at this moment, according to us. We’ve aimed to cover the full breadth of what modern video games can be – and in doing so were reminded, suddenly, that 100 games really isn’t very many at all – while everything on the list must be legitimately obtainable at the time of writing on current-generation hardware. And crucially, it has to currently be brilliant.

Our hope is that this list will be as useful as it is conversation-starting, be that through suggesting exceptional games that may not be on everyone’s radar already, reminding you of long-running classics that have remained timeless, or highlighting those that have found themselves with renewed energy and form.

The key element of “The Eurogamer 100” is that the games included have to be “legitimately obtainable” on “current-generation hardware” to be eligible, which helps make the list a fantastic overview of the last decade (more-or-less) of video games. You’ll find Game of the Year heavyweights (Breath of the Wild at #5, Baldur’s Gate 3 at #6, and Elden Ring at #8) sitting alongside indie darlings (Tunic at #12, Hades at #34, and Animal Well at #36), but I think the Top 3 (Tetris Effect at #1, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at #2, and Outer Wilds at #3) really does capture what video games are about right now.

And thanks to an avalanche of re-releases and the rise of forever games, you’ll also find a few titles that debuted outside that ten-year window, including 2011’s Minecraft (#28) 1991’s Super Mario World (#72), and 2009’s League of Legends #73.

But with such a wide timeframe and such an abundance of choices (100 really isn’t a lot), the number of omissions is staggering. That includes big favorites from recent years (neither Red Dead Redemption is present), as well as one of my personal favorites that’s still available even though it’s nearing it’s 20th anniversary (that would be Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2).

But maybe that’s for a future update of “The Eurogamer 100”. Deputy Editor Chris Tapsell said that we should expect the list to be a dynamic list, and that updates will be made yearly:

Unlike most lists out there, the Eurogamer 100 isn’t a list of the greatest games of all time, but of the best games to play in this specific moment.

We’ll then come back to the list and update it once per year, adding particularly brilliant new games that might have launched, old games that have found new life, and replacing those that may have found themselves in something of a dip.

The rest of “The Eurogamer 100” can be found after the break.

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Introducing the Video Game Research Library

Say hello to one of the next big projects from Video Game Canon… the Video Game Research Library… which is a collection of articles, videos, and podcasts that offer a glimpse into gaming’s past, present, and future through historical, retrospective, and contemporary reporting and scholarship.

Within the library, you’ll find links to investigative reports, retrospective histories, biographical sketches, commentary and criticism, editorial opinions, book excerpts, interviews, oral histories, journal articles from academic and medical professionals, development materials, postmortems, and a lot more. My goal is to create a hand-built collection of links inspired by a bit the old web.

Does the library represent the full history of video games? No, of course not. But it is a good start and I want to add new links as often as I can.

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Boss Fight Books Season 7 Announced: “EverQuest”, “Untitled Goose Game”, “Outer Wilds”, “Dance Dance Revolution”

Boss Fight Books celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this year, and now they’re back with a brand new batch of books. A Kickstarter campaign for Boss Fight Books: Season 7 promising four new volumes in the series began on August 20th.

If you’re unfamiliar with Boss Fight Books, the publisher produces “documentary-style books about classic video games” that tackle the “history, meaning, and legacy of a single video game”. Would you like to know which titles will be included in Season 7? Drumroll please…

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