More Lists – Page 2 – Video Game Canon

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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Baldur’s Gate 3 Stacks Up Another “Game of the Year” Award at the 2023-2024 DICE Awards

Continuing its momentum from The Game Awards, Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 won “Game of the Year” at last night’s DICE Awards. Unsurprisingly, the expansive RPG also won “Role-Playing Game of the Year”, as well as “Outstanding Achievement in Story”, “Outstanding Achievement in Game Design”, and “Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction”.

With five total awards, Baldur’s Gate 3 had a good night, but Spider-Man 2 doesn’t just do whatever a spider can, it also won six statuettes for Insomniac Games. The wallcrawler’s third Sony-published PlayStation outing collected “Action Game of the Year”, “Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition”, “Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design”, “Outstanding Achievement in Animation”, “Outstanding Technical Achievement”, and “Outstanding Achievement in Character” for Miles Morales.

More than a dozen other titles also claimed victory at this year’s DICE Awards, including Cocoon (“Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game”), Diablo IV (“Online Game of the Year”), The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (“Adventure Game of the Year”), and Street Fighter 6 (“Fighting Game of the Year”).

Finally, Nintendo’s Koji Kondo took the stage last night as the latest recipient of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’s “Hall of Fame” award. It was a fitting tribute to the composer, especially on the same night that Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which he worked on as Sound Director, won the statuette for “Family Game of the Year”.

The 2023-2024 DICE Awards, which were hosted by Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller and IGN’s Stella Chung, was a fantastic showcase for the developers that made 2023 such a great year for games. You can watch the full ceremony, as well as view a list of every winner and nominee, after the break.

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“The Resties Required Reading List” Includes the 25 Games You Need to Play to Understand the History of Games

Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick host The Besties, a podcast where they talk about “the best game of the week” every week.

The Besties is part of the sprawling McElroy media empire, but episodes produced solely by the non-McElroy members of the show appear as a spinoff show known as The Resties, and for the last 18 months they’ve been sporadically adding games to “The Resties Required Reading List“.

Not a Best Games list, the “Required Reading List” is a collection of titles that serve as the best introduction to the wider world of video games. Plante likes to refer to it as “a syllabus for Video Games 101” and further described the project like this…

Our goal is to curate and contextualize a “must play” list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. These aren’t the best games or even our favorite games. They’re the games that should be experienced by everyone who wants a fundamental appreciation of the medium. They’re the games that will give you a richer connection with every other game you play.

Plante and Frushtick split the “Required Reading List” into eight episodes, each covering a five-year span that lands somewhere between 1980 and 2020. Within these smaller chunks of time they picked two-to-four games that best represent the era and a specific corner of gaming they wanted to highlight. In the end, 28 games made it through these mini-debates before the hosts cut three titles to reach their 25-game goal. Counter-Strike (from the 2000-2004 episode), along with Hearthstone and Spelunky HD (both from the 2010-2014 episode) ultimately ended up on the chopping block.

So which games did make the grade? You’ll find all the foundational classics from the 1980s (Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda), as well as the modern games that are currently moving the needle (Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Outer Wilds). In between there’s Doom (1993), Pokemon Red/Blue, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Minecraft, and more than a dozen others.

Wanting to argue with a Best Games list is the most natural reaction in the world, but it’s hard to quibble with any of the choices on “The Resties Required Reading List” as the games you need to play to best understand the history of games. Or, to steal a phrase from one of The Resties, the “Required Reading List” is a way of “thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators”.

You can see all 25 games from “The Resties Required Reading List” after the break.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 Wins “Game of the Year” and “Player’s Voice” at the 2023 Game Awards

Geoff Keighley’s Trailer-Palooza took place at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles last night… oh, and he also found the time to hand out The Game Awards too! If it felt like there were even more “World Premiere” trailers than ever before, that was by design. Keighley shortened up the already-pretty-short awards portion of the ceremony this year, limiting acceptance speeches from winners to just 30 seconds.

The Game Awards has jumped from controversy to controversy over the past few weeks, and this latest misstep is just the latest in a long line of mistakes made by Keighley.

Even before the nominees were announced, there were calls for the Game Awards host to open the show with a statement about the thousands of layoffs that have ravaged the game industry this year. More recently, he has been criticized by most of the members of the Game Awards Future Class, who asked him to make some kind of public plea for a “long term ceasefire” in Israel’s war on Gaza. Keighley failed to acknowledge either request during last night’s show, and it’s possible the new rules about acceptance speeches were a way to keep the show on-brand.

So the 2023-2024 awards season began on something of a sour note, but a lot of great games received recognition from the judging panel and the public, even if they didn’t have enough time to thank anyone after receiving their statuette.

Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 was the big winner of the night, and the team climbed the steps to the stage a total of six times, including for “Game of the Year” and “Player’s Voice” (it was also the first time a single game had won both awards). Unsurprisingly, the RPG also won “Best Role Playing Game,” as well as “Best Multiplayer” and “Best Community Support.” Neil Newbon rounded out the game’s haul with a “Best Performance” win for his role as Astarion.

Remedy’s Alan Wake II wasn’t far behind, as the survival horror sequel won three statuettes (for “Best Game Direction,” “Best Narrative,” and “Best Art Direction”).

Even the hype around 2023 as the best year for gaming ever got a nod, with the rest of the night’s awards going to a wide variety of different titles. Just some of the other winners are The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (“Best Action/Adventure Game”), Super Mario Bros. Wonder (“Best Family Game”), Pikmin 4 (“Best Sim/Strategy Game”), Final Fantasy XVI (“Best Score and Music”), Hi-Fi Rush (“Best Audio Design”), and Sea of Stars (“Best Independent Game”).

A video replay of the 2023 Game Awards can be found after the break, along with a list of all the nominees and winners. Hopefully next year they’ll actually get to speak.

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Zelda: Breath of the Wild is #1 in “The 100 Greatest Games of Edge’s Lifetime”

The magazine racks at your local bookstore (or even your local Barnes & Noble) are mostly empty these days. And that’s doubly-true for game-focused publications like Nintendo Power, GamePro, and Electronic Gaming Monthly, all of which closed down more than a decade ago.

Those three (and many others) might be gone, but Edge endures. The venerable UK-based magazine launched in October of 1993, and it’s come back again and again to deliver thousands of pages of outstanding game journalism to readers in all the months since.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the editors at Edge did what they do best… they put together another Best Games list. But rather than reach all the way back to Pong and the beginning of the video game industry, they kept things simpler and tried to determine “The 100 Greatest Games of Edge’s Lifetime” in Edge 390.

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Lists From the Past: The First Ten Years of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Video Game Acquisitions”

Are video games art? It’s a question that has dogged players, developers, and critics for decades, and even now, it’s one without an easy answer.

This cultural dustup was at its most brutal in 2010, after film critic Roger Ebert declared that “video games can never be art” in an opinion piece on his website. It was a familiar drumbeat from Ebert, but this round of vitriol was in reaction to a TED Talk delivered by Kellee Santiago, a developer who was working on the then-upcoming Journey at thatgamecompany. While praising Santiago as “bright, confident, [and] persuasive,” everyone’s favorite film critic ultimately objected to every one of her arguments, sparking a huge backlash of counter-opinions in the gaming press.

After several months of sniping, the two warring factions reached a truce (or at the very least, a ceasefire) in July when Ebert invited everyone to “play on [his] lawn” and admitted that games could be art. It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t entirely put the question to bed, and it’s something we’re still talking about today. Want proof? Look no further than the recent HBO adaptation of The Last of Us and the argument that it contains “the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.” Many people agree… and many people absolutely do not.

But Ebert’s reaction was just a preview to the main event. So let’s jump to November 2012, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired a collection of 14 games to form the core of their Applied Design exhibit (which would open in 2013), and seemed to settle the question once and for all.

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A Few Final Fantasy XVI Developers Shared Their Favorite Final Fantasy Games

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XVI is finally available on store shelves, and it has instantly entered the “Game of the Year” conversation, with the early reviews describing a game that takes the franchise in a bold new direction.

But how did the development team navigate the creation of this new path? And what titles rom the franchise’s 35-year history did they look to for inspiration in designing the game?

IGN recently sat down with six members of the development team, including Director Hiroshi Takai and Producer Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida, to tease out their favorite Final Fantasy games.

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2022 GOTY Scoreboard: Elden Ring, Vampire Survivors, God of War: Ragnarok, and More

After wandering in the wilderness during the early part of the PS4 era, the God of War franchise came back in a big way with God of War (2018). With a new pantheon to slay, Kratos slashed his way into our hearts, and he helped Sony Santa Monica collect a decent chunk of accolades from reviewers and players alike during the 2018-2019 “Game of the Year” season (including a sweep at all five of the major year-end awards shows).

But it’s been five long years since Kratos first brought his unique brand of godly violence to the Norse realm, what could the Ghost of Sparta do for an encore?

God of War: Ragnarok, which was released this past November, answered that question with spectacular battles against the one-eyed Allfather, Odin, and the Mighty Thor himself. But not even the end of the world could topple From Software’s Elden Ring, which has steamrolled the competition.

Elden Ring was named “Game of the Year” by dozens of publications and took home the statuette at three major awards show. Only one game managed to break through From Software’s stranglehold on voting bodies across the industry, with Poncle’s Vampire Survivors taking the last major year-end award.

You can see more of last year’s most-acclaimed titles in the 2022 GOTY Scoreboard after the break.

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Vampire Survivors Snaps Elden Ring’s Streak and Wins “Best Game” at the 2022-2023 BAFTA Games Awards

Sony Santa Monica’s God of War (2018) is the only game in history to win “Game of the Year” honors at all five major year-end shows.

With the SXSW Gaming Awards off the calendar, and after Elden Ring‘s victories at The Game Awards, the DICE Awards, and the GDC Awards, it was looking extremely likely that Kratos would soon have some company. But it was not to be… and God of War: Ragnarok wasn’t even the one to snap the streak.

Instead, “Best Game” at the 2022-2023 BAFTA Games Awards went to Poncle’s Vampire Survivors.

The retro-styled “bullet heaven” shooter has been steadily picking up steam since it was released in early access in December 2021, and won over even more converts after its official launch in October. I’m sure a lot of people will look at this as an unlikely victory, but the membership of the British Academy has always tended to go their own way (most famously in 2017-2018 when it chose What Remains of Edith Finch over The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild). To further push that point home, Vampire Survivors also won the “Game Design” statuette.

So what of Elden Ring? From Software’s dark fantasy also won two awards, “Original Property” and “Multiplayer.”

Believe it or not, the biggest winner of the night was actually Sony Santa Monica and God of War: Ragnarok. The conclusion to Kratos’s Norse adventures took home six total awards, including three for the developer (“Animation,” “Audio Achievement,” and “Music”), both performance awards (Christopher Judge for “Performer in a Leading Role” and Laya DeLeon Hayes for “Performer in a Supporting Role”), and the fan-voted “EE Game of the Year.”

The complete list of winners and nominees from the 2022-2023 BAFTA Games Awards, as well as a replay of the ceremony, can be found after the break.

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Elden Ring Wins “Game of the Year” at 2022-2023 GDC Awards

Hold on to your hats, but From Software’s Elden Ring is now three-for-three at the major year-end awards after it collected a total of three awards, including “Game of the Year,” at the 2022-2023 Game Developers Choice Awards. In addition to the top prize, the development team will need to find room in their trophy case for the “Best Design” and “Best Visual Arts” statuettes.

“Three” was the theme of the night as things definitely happened in threes during the ceremony, starting right at the top with the hosting duties of Leslee Sullivant, a triple threat Game Producer, Writer, and TikTok creator (you’ve absolutely seen at least one of her “stories from the games industry” videos).

The other big winner last night was Sony Santa Monica’s God of War: Ragnarok, which also won three awards. The godlike technical feats performed by Kratos netted “Best Audio” and “Best Technology” for the developer, while a public vote secured the “Audience Award.”

Finally, four other awards went to four very deserving games (the theme suffers when your program has ten awards). Obsidian’s tale of medieval murder, Pentiment, won “Best Narrative.” Immortality‘s innovative use of video was the snared an “Innovation Award” for Half Mermaid. BlueTwelve continued their streak with another “Best Debut” award for Stray. And Citizen Sleeper was given the “Social Impact Award.”

Congratulations also to John Romero, who was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Doom, Quake, and a laundry list of other games; and to the family of Mabel Addis, who was posthumously awarded the Pioneer Award for her work on The Sumerian Game.

The full list of winners, nominees, and honorable mentions from the 2022-2023 GDC Awards can be found after the break.

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