The unique world that players inhabit in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons has helped a lot of people cope with the events of the last two years, and the curators at the National Videogame Museum have embedded themselves within this welcoming community, collecting stories from the public for their excellent Animal Crossing Diaries online exhibition.
Recently, the UK-based museum expanded their oral history project with the launch of The Animal Crossing Diaries podcast on Spotify.
GameSpot and IGN changed the video game media landscape after they debuted in 1996, but did you know there’s another site celebrating a quarter-century on the journalistic front lines this year?
Shacknews began life as a Quake fansite before growing into a full-service news portal and file directory in the early 2000s. The site was briefly owned by GameFly a decade ago and is best-known today as the destination for David L. Craddock’s fantastic Long Reads series. I’m guessing this newfound focus on game history served the editorial team well when they launched the Shacknews Hall of Fame last week.
Honoring not just games, the Shacknews Hall of Fame also exists to shine a spotlight on the creators, platforms, technology, and publications that built the game industry into what it is today:
Microsoft’s anniversary celebration for the Xbox has reached its final form with the release of Power On: The Story of Xbox, a new six-part documentary series.
Power On was produced in-house by Microsoft and it promises to tell the full story (“glitches and all”) behind the creation of the original Xbox. Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved gets the spotlight in the fourth episode, and viewers who stick with the series to the end will be able to dive into the fallout from some of Microsoft’s costly mistakes, with two final episodes devoted to the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death and the Xbox One’s TV-centric debut.
During the last two years, Wata Games and Heritage Auctions have positioned themselves at the forefront of the retro gaming boom. But while demand has skyrocketed, the two companies have come under fire recently for possibly engaging in self-dealing and price manipulation. In the wake of these claims, the market for retro games (especially sealed titles graded by Wata Games and sold by Heritage Auctions) has cooled considerably.
In an attempt to be more transparent with the general public, Wata Games rolled out their first-ever Population Report for NES Games last week. This report includes a full count of every NES game Wata has graded (and any packaging variants available), as well as how many copies exist within each grade. From there, it should theoretically be easy to determine just how rare a given copy really is by matching data from the report to sales listings.
Deniz Kahn, the President of Wata Games, introduced the Population Report in the company’s Email Newsletter:
The team at WATA is excited to share with you our first-ever Population Report. This initial release is centered on Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games and we will be expanding the report to include games from other systems in the coming months. We are putting the finishing touches on a full, dynamic population report – including all games and grading categories – by early next year and we can’t wait to share that with you.
To zero in on a recent high profile example, we can see the copy of Super Mario Bros. that was recently sold by Rally for $2 million is currently the only copy of the game with a “hangtab” variant to receive a grade of 9.8 from Wata. Does that make it worth $2 million? I don’t know. But it is very useful information to have if you’re a collector.
Kahn also confirmed that Population Reports for all platforms would be coming soon:
Q: Why not wait to release a full Pop Report?
A: We felt compelled to share something of note with our collecting community now and while this is by no means a full picture, it does provide a solid look at grading stats for NES games. This particular report is a limited, temporary effort while we work on the more robust process of generating dynamic Pop Reports for all systems.
The release of their first Population Report doesn’t answer all the questions swirling around Wata Games, but it does give the public a slightly better overview of what the market for graded retro games actually looks like.
The new release calendar was a bit thinner in 2021 for a variety of reasons, so this year’s slate at The Game Awards was truly a free-for-all. With no clear frontrunner, many people expected a big night for Arkane’s Deathloop, which received nine nominations across eight categories (including “Game of the Year”). But with more than 100 games receiving at least one nomination, there were bound to be some surprises.
And there were definitely some surprises… such as It Takes Two winning “Game of the Year.” Hazelight’s weird and wild multiplayer adventure also won “Best Multiplayer” and beat out four Nintendo-produced titles to triumph in the “Best Family Game” category.
In between a dizzying amount of trailers for upcoming games, musical performances, and a short scene from The Matrix Resurrections, host Geoff Keighley gave out a few other awards.
While it was denied the big prize, Deathloop collected two statuettes (for “Best Game Direction” and “Best Art Direction”). Other “Game of the Year” nominees had their moment in the sun, including Nintendo’s Metroid Dread, which won “Best Action/Adventure Game.” And Maggie Robertson’s appearance as Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village won over the Internet earlier this year, which made her “Best Performance” win at The Game Awards rather fitting.
Other multi-award winners included Microsoft’s Forza Horizon 5 (“Best Audio Design,” “Best Sports/Racing Game,” and “Innovation in Accessibility”), Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV (“Best Ongoing Game” and “Best Community Support”), Ember Lab’s Kena: Bridge of Spirits (“Best Independent Game” and “Best Debut Indie”).
This year’s group of nominees also included Cyberpunk 2077, which was released in December 2020 and missed the cutoff for last year’s judging period. While it received a chilly reception at launch, after a year of updates and bug fixes, CD Projekt’s sprawling futuristic RPG received two nominations, but didn’t win in either category. This year’s cutoff (November 19th) was particularly early, so we’ll likely be talking about Halo Infinite at the 2022 Game Awards.
But that’s next year. Right now, you can find a video replay of the 2021 Game Awards after the break, as well as a complete list of winners, and all the nominees.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Computer Space (and the dawn of the commercial game industry), this year’s edition of the Golden Joystick Awards included a special category for the “Ultimate Game of All Time.” Forced to choose from a shortlist of 20 groundbreaking games, the public overwhelmingly voted for From Software’s Dark Souls.
But the editors at Games Radar, the popular online publication that administers the Golden Joystick Awards, weren’t content to stop there. They extended the shortlist to a full 50 games and published “The 50 Best Games of All Time” last week.
You’ll find most of the classic classics (including Tetris, Pac-Man, and Street Fighter II) in the shortlist for the “Ultimate Game of All Time” competition, so there was a lot of room for new classics such as God of War (#26), Hades (#43), and Animal Crossing: New Horizons (#50) in the supplemental list. The listmakers also picked up the slack where the shortlist fell a little… well… short, and made sure to include perennially-popular games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (#21), BioShock (#22), Resident Evil 4 (#24) in the early part of the 21-50 range.
Games Radar’s “The 50 Best Games of All Time” will be included in the next update to the Video Game Canon sometime in 2022.
The original Xbox made its worldwide debut on November 15, 2001, and Microsoft has been celebrating 20 Years of Xbox with special Anniversary Edition swag and the #Xbox20 hashtag all year long. The consolemaker will also roll out a six-part documentary series, Power On: The Story of Xbox, in December.
But first, they’ve opened the virtual doors to an Xbox Museum at Xbox.com.
Trevor Strunk is the host of the No Cartridge podcast, though you might also know him as @Hegelbon on Twitter. As of today, he is also the author of Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, which was recently published by Prometheus Books.
Story Mode looks to examine how several popular game franchises (such as Call of Duty) have changed over the years, as well as how those games have begun to rewrite our culture in their own way:
In Story Mode, video games critic and host of the No Cartridge podcast Trevor Strunk traces how some of the most popular and influential game series have changed over years and even decades of their continued existence and growth. We see how the Call of Duty games—once historical simulators that valorized conflicts like World War II—went “modern,” complete with endless conflicts, false flag murders of civilians, and hyperadvanced technology. It can be said that Fortnite’s runaway popularity hinges on a competition for finite resources in an era of horrific inequality. Strunk reveals how these shifts occurred as direct reflections of the culture in which games were produced, thus offering us a uniquely clear window into society’s evolving morals on a mass scale.
Story Mode asks the question, Why do video games have a uniquely powerful ability to impact culture? Strunk argues that the participatory nature of games themselves not only provides players with a sense of ownership of the narratives within, but also allows for the consumption of games to be a revelatory experience as the meaning of a game is oftentimes derived by the manner in which they are played.
An excerpt from Story Mode detailing the rise of id Software’s Doom and how it eventually gave way to “acceptable” violence in games (“How To Get Away With Making An Ultraviolent Video Game”) can be found at Defector.
By the estimation of the Golden Joystick Awards, more than 1.1 million video games have been released since Atari’s Computer Space ushered in the medium’s commercial era in 1971. But is it possible to sweep away all the chaff and crown one single title as the “Ultimate Game of All Time”?
I still don’t know the answer to that question. But that’s not going to stop the people behind the Golden Joystick Awards from trying. And they want your help.
Promising “a fresh angle on a familiar topic,” Boss Fight Books is back with Nightmare Mode, a new ebook-exclusive anthology.
Now available to download through their official website, the collection features essays and interviews from previous Boss Fight authors David L. Craddock, Alexa Ray Corriea, Alyse Knorr, Alex Kane, Salvatore Pane, Philip J Reed, Gabe Durham, Jon Irwin, Chris Kohler, and Michael P. Williams:
- David L. Craddock on how Shovel Knight‘s developers collaborated with speedrunners
- Alexa Ray Corriea on the characters and themes in Kingdom Hearts III
- Alyse Knorr on how Princess Peach’s story draws on 2000 years of women in peril
- Alex Kane interviews the man behind Star Wars Battlefront II‘s use of motion capture technology
- Salvatore Pane on the fan projects that have kept the Mega Man series alive
- Philip J Reed interviews S.D. Perry about her beloved Resident Evil novels
- Gabe Durham on how Zelda‘s fandom influenced the official Zelda timeline
- Jon Irwin savors the anticipation of waiting for a new Mario game
- Chris Kohler interviews Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu about his legendary soundtracks
- Michael P. Williams on how Chrono Trigger fits into the Japanese tradition of retrofuturism
Nightmare Mode is Boss Fight’s second digital anthology, carrying on the tradition started by Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology, which was originally published in 2015.
