VGC | John – Page 24 – Video Game Canon

The “Spider-Man Script Book” is Now Available in Book Stores

Insomniac’s Jon Paquette wants the world to know what a game script looks like. Paquette was the head writer on Spider-Man, which was released for the PS4 to near-universal acclaim in 2018. Since then, he’s been hard at work trying to get the game’s script published by meeting regularly with his bosses at Insomniac, Sony, and Marvel.

According to Paquette, there isn’t a lot of publicly-available information on how to develop a game script, and he wanted to pull back the curtain a bit on the process. So after a lot of back-and-forth, the three companies are finally ready to share a written version of the game’s story with fans, and will jointly publish the Spider-Man Script Book later this week:

Go behind the scenes of the smash hit video game sensation with the complete script to Marvel’s Spider-Man… together with a stunning gallery of artwork from the production process! The life of Peter Parker and that of his ever-amazing alter ego are about to collide in major fashion in this all-new take on the world of the wall-crawler, filled with fan-favorite characters… including Mary Jane, Aunt May, Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius and Miles Morales… spun into an unexpected web of drama, spectacle and classic action in the Mighty Marvel Manner!

When Spidey finally removes the Kingpin of Crime from the mean streets of the Big Apple, how will the mysterious Mister Negative’s ascent to power bring Peter’s two worlds crashing together? Learn how the words and the world of a blockbuster hit video game are crafted, and feast your eyes on a wealth of bonus content, via text and art from the team at Insomniac Games and fan-favorite Marvel writers such as Christos Gage!

The 240-page hardcover will include concept art and screenshots paired with text from all the game’s cutscenes. Earlier this week, Paquette shared part of the process with Vice and said that the entire script for Spider-Man runs much closer to 400,000 words and over 2,000 pages):

Insomniac’s take on the popular Marvel character was celebrated not just for how joyous it was to swing around the city of New York, but for telling a damn good Spider-Man story, too. It punted straight past the origin story, starting eight years into superhero-ing, and grounded Peter Parker’s reality with some fresh twists, such as Mary Jane working at the Daily Bugle.

Paquette was not the only writer who contributed to the game, either. It was a group effort involving several other writers, and Paquette actually includes the “designers” as writers, too.

“The other part is writing the [game] experience,” he said. “This is the part that not a lot of people really understand. It’s very collaborative. We work for the designers in this capacity, because the designers come up with the gameplay and we help them structure the experience.”

The Spider-Man Script Book will be available on store shelves on February 11, but you can get an early peak at a few of the interior pages at Marvel.com right now.

Bite-Sized Game History: Happy Anniversary to Ghosts N Goblins, Let’s Admire Some Landfill Dirt, and Pac-Man’s Wild Atari 2600 Artwork

Why?

Why do some game franchises get forgotten by their publishers? Why would a clump of dirt be important enough to be donated to a museum? And why do some publishers decide to play it safe when deciding on a game’s cover?

All of these questions will be pondered in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

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The Washington Post Picks Ten Titles as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade”

The calendar is nearing the end of January, but here I am sifting through yet another “Best Games of the Decade” list. This time around, the Launcher team at The Washington Post gets their time in the sun, as they chose ten games to stand tall as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade“:

Gaming is now humanity’s favorite form of entertainment, and the medium’s legacy was cemented this past decade. While the early 2000s saw video games honing their ability to tell stories and build worlds in 3-D, this last decade built off those nuts and bolts of game making and propelled the medium toward bigger ambitions like open-world design, virtual and augmented reality and an influx of new genres such as battle-royale multiplayer.

The chronological list begins with 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, continues through the middle of the decade with 2014’s Destiny, and ends with 2017’s Fortnite. In between, you’ll find a few other familiar titles, as well as a more unusual choice in King’s Candy Crush Saga:

The Washington Post’s Launcher – The Most Influential Games of the Decade

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Candy Crush Saga
Dark Souls
Destiny
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Fortnite
Minecraft
Pokemon Go
The Walking Dead
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Apologies to all the games from 2018 and 2019 that didn’t make the cut for The Washington Post’s list.

Kosmic Shaves Less Than Half a Second Off His Super Mario Bros. “Any%” World Record (and Then Retires)

KosmicD12 has completed his last “Any Percentage” speedrun of Super Mario Bros..

The Mario maestro has set multiple world records over the years (including a blistering time of 4:55.96 in 2018), but his most recent feat of crackerjack platforming might just be unbeatable. Using a combination of Warp Zones, glitches, and his own tip-top thumbs, KosmicD12 shaved a little less than half a second off his previous record, and finished the game in an astonishing four minutes and 55.646 seconds.

He then promptly delivered a short retirement speech and walked away from any future “Any Percentage” attempts:

“This is everything I have ever wanted to accomplish in this speedrun, and even a little bit more. It is still improvable but I am not interested in the ridiculous things required to beat this, so that’s history for someone else to write!”

KosmicD12 still plans to keep playing Super Mario Bros., but he’s looking for a new challenge today. He said he’d like to tackle some of the game’s other speedrunning categories, which he’ll continue to chronicle on his Twitch channel.

Listology 3.0: North American Critics Choose the Best Video Games of All Time

A few weeks ago, I reordered the Video Game Canon to focus solely on the picks made by UK publications. That Listology article, Critics from the UK Choose the Best Video Games of All Time, was an interesting look at how our friends across the pond feel about some of the “universally-acclaimed” classics. They weren’t too fond of games like Contra and Tecmo Bowl and Ninja Gaiden, but they had a lot of praise for homegrown heroes like Sensible Soccer and Elite and Lemmings.

But what would Version 3.0 of the Video Game Canon look like if I flipped the switch the other way? What if North American publications had all the power? Let’s find out…

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Slant Magazine Highlights the Games That Point the Way Forward in “The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s”

Slant Magazine has published a list of the “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” twice in recent years, and both times they’ve included 2010’s Red Dead Redemption as the highest-ranked game from the previous decade (#4 in 2014 and #2 in 2018). But the publication’s editors went in a different direction for “The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s,” awarding the #1 spot to Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata instead.

Rockstar’s western would have to settle for the #8 spot in Slant’s reevaluation of the decade.

For the remainder of the list, Slant’s staff looked to “the games that point the way forward” as they chose to focus on how much the game industry has changed in the last ten years:

This was the decade that saw tiny studios, lone creators, and crazy concepts reign supreme. This was the decade that saw every platform become a viable place for ideas to sprout and bloom. The limits of the medium are seemingly bound only by the human imagination, and at every level, regardless of the horsepower needed, it now feels like anything is possible.

So which other games from the past does Slant think can give us a glimpse at the future? The Top Ten includes a few obvious picks (Mass Effect 2 at #4 and God of War at #5) while also veering off the road less traveled (Outer Wilds at #7 and Superhot at #9).

Further down the list, which is available below, you’ll find titles as varied as PT (#41), Tales From the Borderlands (#51), Gorogoa (#90), and 91 others.

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Wired Goes Their Own Way With “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames”

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

Whether you attribute this quote to George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, it turned out to be fairly accurate when comparing “The Best Games of the Decade” lists created by Wired and Wired UK. The publications could only agree on three games… Mojang’s Minecraft, From Software’s Dark Souls, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Instead, Wired’s “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames” hit upon some rather obscure indies in the bottom half of their Top Ten (including Thirty Flights of Loving, Pathologic 2, and Cibele), before locking on to some more mainstream titles (including the aforementioned trio) in the Top Five:

Wired – The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames

1. Fortnite
2. Minecraft
3. Dark Souls
4. Gone Home
5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
6. PT
7. Nier
8. Cibele
9. Pathologic 2
10. Thirty Flights of Loving

In between, the outlet delivered a nice little note about Hideo Kojima’s PT, the legendary Silent Hills demo that never got the chance to become a full game, as well as Fulbright’s Gone Home, and Square Enix’s Nier.

But it was Epic’s Fortnite that landed at #1 on Wired’s list, with Julie Muncy praising the battle royale as “one of the only games of the decade to truly infiltrate broader pop culture.”

Get Excited for Thrillist’s List of “The 20 Best Video Games of the 2010s”

We’re a few days into 2020 and Thrillist wants you to get excited about the score of titles they chose to highlight in “The 20 Best Video Games of the 2010s“:

The past ten years of gaming were a whirlwind of fantastic triple-A titles, curious indie gems, and a series of excellent remakes and sequels that turned into smash hits. From sprawling RPGs to aesthetically impressive puzzlers, there was a spread that could please even the most discerning player, with exciting narratives and compelling mechanics baked into each title.

Now that a new decade is upon us, it’s time to take a look back on the games that were more than memorable — they defined the art form from 2010 to 2020.

Thrillist’s selections should actually look rather familiar, as they’ve included games like Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, CD Projekt’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Blizzard’s Overwatch, and Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 in their unranked list.

Though they did travel a bit off the beaten path as the only outlet (so far) to select Capcom’s Devil May Cry 5 as one of the best of the decade. See the full unranked list after the break.

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Stuff Selects “The 25 Best Games” of the 2010s

The writers at Stuff Magazine love a good Best Games list. Want more proof? The long-running “lad mag” delivered their verdict on the “100 Greatest Games” in 2008, the “100 Best Games Ever” in 2011, the “Best Games Ever” in 2014, and “The 50 Greatest Games of All Time” in 2017.

So even though they closed up shop in the US more than a decade ago, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Stuff’s UK branch pushed out “Stuff of the Decade: The 25 Best Games” earlier this week.

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“Ranked For Your Displeasure”: Wired UK Expects Some Disagreement With Their “Best Games of the Decade”

The 2010s were an absolutely incredible decade for video games, but as we take our first baby steps into 2020 (and new hardware from Microsoft and Sony sometime this year) some publications are still interested in looking back.

Wired UK understands the futility of trying to rank ten years worth of games, which is why they’ve used “The Best Games of the Decade, Ranked For Your Displeasure” as the title of their retrospective.

But while Wired UK’s contributors were quick to temper expectations, they ultimately made the uncontroversial choice of naming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as the best game from 2010 to 2019. Nintendo’s Pokemon Go also landed near the top of the list at #3.

Wired UK – The Best Games of the Decade, Ranked For Your Displeasure

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2. The Last of Us
3. Pokemon Go
4. Red Dead Redemption 2
5. What Remains of Edith Finch
6. FIFA 17
7. Minecraft
8. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
9. Return of the Obra Dinn
10. Dark Souls
11. Spider-Man

Sony was the only other publisher to place two games on Wired UK’s list, with Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#2) and Insomniac’s Spider-Man (#11) both making the cut.

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (#4), Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch (#5), EA Sports’s FIFA 17 (#6), Mojang’s Minecraft (#7), PUBG Corporation’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (#8), Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (#9), and From Software’s Dark Souls (#10) made up the rest of Wired UK’s list.

You know, that’s not really a displeasing selection of titles at all.