Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.

Balatro Draws “Game of the Year” Honors at the 2024-2025 GDC Awards

It was a tale of two games last night in San Francisco at the 2024-2025 Game Developers Choice Awards. As they’ve done throughout awards season, Team Asobi’s Astro Bot was competing head-to-head with Localthunk’s Balatro in most categories, including “Game of the Year”.

Astro Bot was victorious at The Game Awards and the DICE Awards, but the little automaton couldn’t go three-for-three as Balatro won “Game of the Year” at this year’s GDC Awards. The poker roguelike also went all in to collect the “Innovation Award”, “Best Design”, and “Best Debut”.

But don’t worry, Team Asobi didn’t go home empty handed last night. Astro Bot was the only other game to win multiple awards as it took home two statuettes for “Best Technology” and “Best Audio”.

The rest of the ceremony spread a handful of awards among some of 2024’s most acclaimed titles including Black Myth: Wukong (“Best Visual Art”), Metaphor: ReFantazio (“Best Narrative”), Life Is Strange: Double Exposure (“Social Impact Award”), and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (“Audience Award”).

Balatro has reshuffled awards season with the BAFTAs still ahead of us, and it’ll be interesting to see if it and Astro Bot can continue their winning ways in London.

A complete list of all the nominees and winners from the 2024-2025 GDC Awards, as well as a short video montage of the winners, can be found after the break.

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Zelda: Ocarina of Time Takes the Top Spot in Indy100’s “The Best 100 Video Games of All Time”

We’re just three months into 2025 and we have yet another new Best Games list to dissect and debate.

This time it comes from Indy100, a Digg-like viral news portal from British newspaper The Independent. “The Best 100 Video Games of All Time” sounds a little backwards to my American ears, but it’s business as usual at the top of the list as our old friend The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time took the #1 spot.

The list actually feels pretty traditional as you move through the rest of the Top 25. There’s Super Mario World at #3 and Half-Life 2 at #4 and The Last of Us at #9. Mainstays like Mass Effect 2 (#12), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (#15), and Elden Ring (#17) can also be found in this stretch of the list.

But after that, more than 10% of the list is devoted to games that have never appeared on a Best Games list before. 2025’s Monster Hunter Wilds (#73) is the newest game on the list, but Indy100 also made room for 2024’s Astro Bot (#68), and 2023’s Alan Wake II (#77) and Spider-Man 2 (#72).

This batch of never-before-seen games also includes old favorites like 2000’s Spyro: Year of the Dragon (#81) and the incredibly-underrated Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil (#69) from 2001. Other new additions include God of War: Ragnarok (#16), Horizon: Forbidden West (#44), Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (#95), Devil May Cry 5 (#87), and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (#88).

While a lot of new additions and old favorites dot the Indy100 list, the most unique part of “The Best 100 Video Games of All Time” might be the one game that didn’t make the cut… there’s no version of Tetris anywhere on the list. It’s a bit surprising, but it does happen.

The games from Indy100’s “The Best 100 Video Games of All Time” will be added to the Video Game Canon as part of the 2026 update.

World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Finalists for Class of 2025 Include Angry Birds, GoldenEye 007, Quake, and More

I can’t say that I blame them, but it sure looks the World Video Game Hall of Fame would like it to be 2023 again. The finalists for the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025 were announced earlier this week, and six games that failed to make the cut from 2023 are getting another try this year. That crop of titles includes Ensemble’s Age of Empires, Rovio’s Angry Birds, Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Rare’s GoldenEye 007, Visual Concepts’s NBA 2K, and id Software’s Quake.

They’ll be competing against two other returning finalists, Konami’s Frogger (which was last up as a finalist in 2020) and the Mattel Football handheld .

Unorthodox handhelds are something of the theme this year, as Bandai’s Tamagotchi digital pet is a finalist (for the first time) as well. It’s joined by a trio of other first-timers including Midway’s Defender, Incredible Technologies’s Golden Tee Golf, and Natsume’s Harvest Moon.

“This year’s finalists span the decades and range from arcade classics to one of the most popular mobile games of all time,” said Jon-Paul Dyson, the Director of The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games. “All of these games have enormously influenced pop culture or the game industry itself. Frogger was popular in the arcades of the 1980s, but an iconic Seinfeld scene in 1998 made it unforgettable. The brilliant coding of the first-person shooter Quake enabled unforgettable multiplayer matches that have mesmerized players and influenced many games that followed. Then there’s Tamagotchi, which bridges the gap between video games and digital toys, changing the way we think about games.”

The Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee, a body made up of journalists and scholars from around the world, is currently debating which of these games to induct as part of the Class of 2025, and you can help. A Player’s Choice Ballot will be available until March 13th and the three games that receive the most votes will be submitted alongside the other ballots from the committee members.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025 will be announced during a ceremony at The Strong on Thursday, May 8, at 10:30 AM. If you’d like to study up on this classic games, the curators at the Strong Museum have put together a cheat sheet describing each of games. You can find it after the break.

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Aidan Moher Will Write “Suikoden 1 & 2” for Boss Fight Books in 2026

The Suikoden I & II HD Remaster was first announced in 2022, and after three long years of waiting, it is finally available on store shelves. This is the first modern re-release for any of the games in the franchise, and fans are absolutely giddy at the chance to play it again.

Aidan Moher (the author of the RPG-centric Fight, Magic, Items) decided to piggyback on the launch date with an announcement (via Astrolabe) that he’ll be teaming up with Boss Fight Books to publish a history of the creation of Suikoden 1 & 2 in book form:

After doing a deep dive into the history of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the rise of Japanese RPGs in the west with Fight, Magic, Items, I was left with several stories that felt unfulfilled—games and series that had more to say than I was able to fit into that book. Chief among those was Suikoden, which has seen a recent and surprising revival after the success of its creators’s kickstarted spiritual successor Eiyuden Chronicle. […] I couldn’t imagine telling one story without the other, and the end result is a rich, reported and personal look at the first two games, the people who made them, and the impact they’ve had on their genre and beyond.

From the early days when a green Yoshitaka Murayama accidentally agreed to make an RPG (a genre he didn’t play) about The Water Margin, to Miki Higashino’s revolutionary soundtrack and Junko Kawano’s timeless designs, to a lengthy interview with Suikoden II’s localization team, and the road to the 2025 remasters, Suikoden 1 & 2 runs the gamut.

Suikoden 1 & 2 will be published in 2026 as part of Boss Fight’s upcoming (and as yet unannounced) Season 8. More details about the rest of the books in that lineup will be announced at a later date.

Hades Debuts in the Top 10 in the 2025 Update to the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000

It took a little extra time, but the Version 8.0 update to the Video Game Canon is finally here.

With the addition of a handful of new lists since the last update, the Video Game Canon’s critical consensus is now aggregated using data from 80 Best Video Games of All Time lists published across the last four decades. That includes one list published just a few weeks ago (Rolling Stone’s “The 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time“) and one from 2024 Dexerto’s “These Are the 100 Best Games of All Time“).

Data from two older lists (The Sydney Morning Herald’s “Top 50 Video Games of All Time” from 2002 and Gamereactor’s “Best Ever: Games” from 2022) were also added to the dataset, as was the annual update to the “Shacknews Hall of Fame“.

If you’re new to the Video Game Canon, here’s a quick primer on how it all works.

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Ludocene Wants to Fix Game Discovery With a “Dating App” for Video Games

Discovering new video games is harder than ever before as thousands of new titles are added to digital storefronts every month.

I’m sure you’ve read some version of this sentence in dozens of articles over the last few years. But discovery isn’t just an industry buzzword and the “too many games” problem is very real. So how do you sift through more than a thousand games a month to find the best of the best?

Enter Ludoscene, a new website from the Family Gaming Database, that will try to help players find their next favorite game when it launches later this year.

Ludocene, which actually comes from the Latin for “New Games”, is now seeking funding through Kickstarter. The website (and accompanying app) is designed to function like a dating app crossing with a deckbuilder. Users will fill their deck with games they already love, narrow the choices with modifiers like platforms or ESRB rating, and even call on the help of Experts (such as Brian Crecente, Simon Parkin, and more than a dozen others) to meld their favorites with Ludocene’s human-built recommendation engine.

Ludocene is a new way to find your next game. It uses rich human-researched data to build your catalogue of games. It uncovers amazing, unusual and unexpected matches not just the usual suspects or big popular games.

It feels like you’re playing a game, where winning is discovering video games that perfectly match your tastes:

– Build your perfect deck of games you love.
– Pick experts whose taste you trust.
– Discover your best matches in the tailored suggestions.

Each game is represented by a card that you can interact with: click to view a game trailer and flip to view more details and the best prices on storefronts.

You can see Ludocene in action, and hear more about the project from Andy Robertson of Family Gaming Database, in this video:

If it’s funded, Ludocene will be available to Early Access backers in a few weeks. The rest of us will get a chance to find our perfect game sometime over the Summer.

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 and DICE Awards), but a dozen other games have been with at least one “Game of the Year” accolade. That cohort includes LocalThunk’s Balatro (which was “Game of the Year” at the GDC Awards), 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 BAFTA Games Awards (April 8th), but you can find an in-progress overview of all the games fighting for 2024 “Game of the Year” honors after the break.

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DICE Awards: All the Winners from 1997 to Today

The DICE Awards have been awarded by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences as part of the DICE Summit (“Design Innovate Communicate Entertain”) since 1998. The ceremony is held each Winter, honoring games released during the previous calendar year.

The nominees are chosen annually by a select group of Academy members known as “Peer Panelists.” In their attempt to harvest a wide-ranging set of opinions each year, the AIAS reaches out to industry experts from all corners of the game industry, including art, design, engineering, animation, performance, and production.

For the final vote, the entire Academy votes for the four major awards (“Game of the Year,” “Mobile Game of the Year,” “Online Game of the Year,” and “Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game”), while voting on creative/technical categories is limited to developers within that field (“Game Design & Production,” “Art, Animation & Programming,” and “Audio Design & Music”).

From 1998 through 2012, the ceremony was known as the Interactive Achievement Awards, though the public would often refer to it as the “DICE Awards” because of its connection to the DICE Summit. After more than a decade, the AIAS officially adopted the new name in 2013.

All the “Game of the Year” winners from the DICE Awards can be found here…

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2024-2025 DICE Awards Deals its “Game of the Year” Award to Astro Bot

Astro Bot had the momentum coming out of the 2024 Game Awards with four total wins, including “Game of the Year” honors. But there wasn’t a clear frontrunner going into awards season, and there was no guarantee it would be able to fend off the rest of this year’s field of contenders forever.

All that said, Sony’s adorable little automaton ended up dominating the 2024-2025 DICE Awards in similar fashion. Astro Bot, and developers from Team Asobi, took home the “Game of the Year” prize last night, as well as statuettes for “Family Game of the Year”, “Outstanding Achievement in Game Design”, “Outstanding Technical Achievement”, and “Outstanding Achievement in Animation”.

Not to be outdone, the rest of the “Game of the Year” contenders performed pretty well during rest of the ceremony, with Helldivers II, Balatro, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle divvying up the majority of the remaining awards.

Helldivers II nearly matched Astro Bot‘s total as it collected four statuettes for “Online Game of the Year”, “Action Game of the Year”, “Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition”, and “Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design”.

Meanwhile, Balatro (“Mobile Game of the Year”, “Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year”, and “Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game”) and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (“Adventure Game of the Year”, “Outstanding Achievement in Character”, and “Outstanding Achievement in Story”) earned three awards apiece.

Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller and IGN’s Stella Chung returned to host this year’s DICE Awards, and you can watch a full replay of the ceremony (as well as find a complete list of all the winners and nominees) after the break.

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The Video Game History Foundation’s Research Library is Now Open

Work had already begun on the Video Game History Foundation’s Research Library when it was first announced in December 2023, but the VGHF team has spent the last year making their online presence even better, diligently cataloging and scanning many of the materials available in their collection.

But the time has finally come, and beginning today, the Research Library is now open to all.

Though it’s officially in “Early Access”, the Video Game History Foundation Library (available at library.gamehistory.org) is a searchable catalog of the VGHF’s holdings. That includes magazines, newsletters, development documents, correspondence, commercials, and more. Best of all, material from the collection that’s been digitized can be viewed online from anywhere for free through the Digital Archive (archive.gamehistory.org).

This is an amazing resource for researchers or anyone who wants to learn more about games. For example, did you know Nintendo’s Rad Racer was originally going to be titled 3-D Racer? I didn’t, but I do now after digging through Nintendo’s Publicity Folder from CES 1987. Thousands of little tidbits of information just like that are waiting for you in the Video Game History Foundation’s Research Library.

Discover even more of what this (virtual) space offers with Library Director Phil Salvador in the video below:

I’m very excited to dive in to the Research Library and you can learn more about it on the Video Game History Foundation Blog.