VGC | John – Video Game Canon

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Has Another Big Night and Wins “Game of the Year” at the 2025-2026 DICE Awards

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Ghost of Yotei were nominated for eight awards ahead of the 2025-2026 DICE Awards ceremony. However, when it came time to hand out the statuettes, Sandfall Interactive’s RPG continued its awards season dominance in Las Vegas.

As it did at The Game Awards, Clair Obscur was named “Game of the Year” by DICE’s voting body of more than 30,000 industry professionals. The game’s developers also collected four additional awards, including “Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction”, “Outstanding Achievement in Story”, “Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction”, and “Role-Playing Game of the Year”.

But don’t worry, Sucker Punch didn’t go home empty-handed. Ghost of Yotei earned three awards at this year’s DICE Awards, including “Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition”, “Adventure Game of the Year”, and “Outstanding Achievement in Character” for Atsu.

Other big winners at the ceremony included Kojima Productions’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (“Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design” and “Outstanding Technical Achievement”) and Tonda Ros’s Blue Prince (“Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game” and “Outstanding Achievement in Game Design”).

The DICE Awards honored quite a few other games this year with their genre awards, including Hades II (“Action Game of the Year”), Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection (“Fighting Game of the Year”), Mario Kart World (“Racing Game of the Year”), and more.

A complete list of all the nominees and winners at the 2025-2026 DICE Awards can be found after the break. And you can also catch a replay of this year’s ceremony, which was once again hosted by Greg Miller and Stella Chung.

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2025 GOTY Scoreboard: In Progress

The New York Game Awards were held this weekend and that officially marks the start of the second half of the 2025-2026 awards season for video games.

We kicked things off with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 winning “Game of the Year” at The Game Awards and the Golden Joystick Awards… and that’s more or less where things have stood ever since. Sandfall Interactive’s turn-based RPG has continued to dominate the conversation ever since, winning “Game of the Year” honors from more than a dozen publications.

Though like most years, a handful of other games were able to collect at least one “Game of the Year” statuette of their own, including Blue Prince, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Despelote, Dispatch, Donkey Kong Bananza, Ghost of Yotei, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Silent Hill F.

Links to these lists can be found below, and I will continue to add more in the weeks ahead, as well as monitor the results of the three remaining major ceremonies.

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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 150 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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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Racks Up Nine Wins, Including “Game of the Year”, at the 2025 Game Awards

Geoff Keighley’s Trailer-Palooza, also known as The Game Awards, was shaping up to be a tad more anti-climactic in 2025 than ever before. Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went into the ceremony with 13 nominations, the most of any game in Game Awards history. With most critics and commentators treating its victory as inevitable, we were probably going to have to look elsewhere for surprises. But then…

…the thing that everyone expected to happen actually happened.

Yes, the critics and commentators (the people who actually vote on the winners) turned out to be right. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won “Game of the Year” at the 2025 Game Awards. The throwback RPG also collected an additional eight trophies, including “Best Game Direction”, “Best Narrative”, “Best Art Direction”, “Best Score and Music”, “Best Role Playing Game”, and “Best Performance” for Jennifer English. And not to add more fuel to the fire over what qualifies as an independent game, but Clair Obscur also won both “Best Independent Game” and “Best Debut Indie Game”.

While the night definitely belonged to Clair Obscur and the team from Sandfall Interactive, a handful of other games also took home some Game Awards hardware, though each was limited to a single category. Battlefield 6 (“Best Audio Design”), ARC Raiders (“Best Multiplayer”), South of Midnight (“Games For Impact”), Doom: The Dark Ages (“Innovation in Accessibility”), Umamusume: Pretty Derby (“Best Mobile Game”), and The Midnight Walk (“Best VR/AR Game”) each scooped up a statuette.

Meanwhile, Hades II (“Best Action Game”), Hollow Knight: Silksong (“Best Action/Adventure Game”), Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (“Best Fighting Game”), Donkey Kong Bananza (“Best Family Game”), Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (“Best Sim/Strategy Game”), and Mario Kart World (“Best Sports/Racing Game”) were victorious in the genre-specific categories.

And that pretty much does it for the 2025 Game Awards. I’m struggling to think of anything that didn’t go according to plan, and all I can come up with was that extra-weird trailer for the upcoming Street Fighter film adaptation and the reveal that Capcom dropped the numerals from the upcoming Mega Man 12 in favor of a subtitle.

A replay of the 2025 Game Awards ceremony can be found after the break, as well as a list of all the nominees and winners.

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“Animal Crossing” and Undertale” Lead the Way for New Book Series About Games at University of Chicago Press

Boss Fight Books might have some competition thanks to the recent launch of a similar, though more academically-inclined, series from University of Chicago Press. Books from the publisher’s Replay series will attempt to connect the personal experiences of the author with “gameplay with insights into a game’s development, reception, and implications for contemporary social life.”

Replay is a series of short general interest books, each about a single game. Accessible and engaging, the books connect authors’ personal experiences of gameplay with insights into a game’s development, reception, and implications for contemporary social life. A book about Animal Crossing: New Horizons might explore how the game offered safety and social connection during the COVID-19 pandemic; another, about the location-based Pokémon GO, might investigate urban gentrification; yet another, about Windows Solitaire, might probe the relationship between preinstalled desktop software and computer literacy. We invite any author who has a deep connection to a game and can express both relatable and surprising observations to a wide audience. Our first proposals have come from journalists and scholars with expertise in queer and feminist game criticism, Black studies, and Native American studies.

Replay launched this month with two books, Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Can a Game Take Care of Us? and Undertale – Can a Game Give Hope?. Future volumes are expected to focus on Pokemon Go, Windows Solitaire, and other games.

You can learn more about both books after the break.

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Dexerto Updates “These Are the 100 Best Games of All Time” for 2025

Dexerto updated their Best Games list, “These Are the 100 Best Games of All Time”, for 2025 earlier this month.

From Software’s Elden Ring retained the top spot, and led a top ten that looks mostly the same, though Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 moved up (to #3) and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (#11) was displaced by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (#8).

The most interesting part of Dexerto’s list was the huge number of 2025 releases that made the cut. This year’s leading Game of the Year contender, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, was ranked the highest (at #20). But the site’s editors also found space for Split Fiction (#41), Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (#47), Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (#75), and Blue Prince (#83).

The games from the 2025 edition of Dexerto’s “These Are the 100 Best Games of All Time” will be added to the Video Game Canon as part of the next update.

Computer Entertainer, a Game Magazine from the 1980s, is Available to Everyone Thanks to the VGHF

Aside from the venerable Edge and the recently-relaunched Game Informer, it’s hard to find dedicated game magazines at your favorite bookstore in 2025. But even though they’re long gone, we’re not short of nostalgic odes to defunct titles like Nintendo Power or GamePro or Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Computer Entertainer doesn’t have the name recognition of any of those periodicals, but maybe it should, because no one was covering games like they were in the 1980s. And I mean that literally. It was published from 1982 until 1990 by Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan, sisters who also ran a video game store. There were other game magazines available in the 1980s, but from 1984 until 1987, Computer Entertainer was (most likely) the only magazine available in the United States that was solely dedicated to video games.

So why are we talking about this now? Well, the Video Game History Foundation has acquired the rights to Computer Entertainer and they’re making available to anyone, for free, through a Creative Commons license. That means that as long as you give credit to the VGHF, you can use articles from Computer Entertainer however you want.

I’ll let them explain.

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GOTY Flashback: 2015-2016 DICE Awards

Because everyone loves round numbers, let’s take a look back at the 2015-2016 DICE Awards, which celebrated games that were released exactly ten years ago.

Operating on a slightly different wavelength than 2015’s The Game Awards, the voting panel from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chose to award Crystal Dynamics’s Rise of the Tomb Raider with the most nominations… though the second entry in Lara Croft’s rebooted series of adventures only managed to score a single win (“Outstanding Achievement in Character”).

Instead, Bethesda’s Fallout 4 was the most-awarded game of the night as it took home the “Game of the Year” statuette, as well as “Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction” and “Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year”. However, it also had to share the stage with a trio of other games that won a trio of awards.

The unique audio/visual experience of Moon Studios’s Ori and the Blind Forest contributed to its victories in the “Animation”, “Art Direction”, and “Original Music Composition” categories.

Psyonix’s vehicular soccer game, Rocket League, embraced its status as a crowd-pleaser by winning the “DICE Sprite Award” (the previous name of the “Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game” award), as well as “Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay” and “Sports Game of the Year”.

Finally, Geralt of Rivia (or rather, the development team from CD Projekt Red) stomped on stage to collect three statuettes for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The expansive RPG was the recipient of Outstanding Achievement awards in “Game Design” and “Story”, as well as “Outstanding Technical Achievement” for its depiction of The Continent.

A handful of other games were winners at the 2015-2016 DICE Awards, including Star Wars: Battlefront (“Action Game of the Year” and “Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design”), Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (“Adventure Game of the Year”), Super Mario Maker (“Family Game of the Year”), Mortal Kombat X (“Fighting Game of the Year”), and more.

Speaking of Hideo Kojima, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences inducted the always colorful developer into their Hall of Fame, and Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata was posthumously awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work leading Nintendo from 2002 until his death in 2015.

A complete list of all the winners and nominees from the 2015-2016 DICE Awards, as well as a replay of the ceremony, can be found after the break.

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“Life is Strange”, “Dragon Age II”, and “Legend of the River King” Coming Soon to Boss Fight Books Season 8

Like a fish trying to stealthily peek its face out of the water (this intro will make sense in a minute), Boss Fight Books is back with an announcement for their next slate of books.

Boss Fight Books: Season 8 will include a trio of new books, all focusing on titles that had their own unique impact on the world video games.

First up is a travelogue-style approach to the world’s first portable fishing RPG, Legend of the River King, by Alexander B. Joy. Closely connected to the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, more than a dozen River King games have been released in Japan, but Legend of the River King was the first to make its way to North America. Launching just before Pokemon, it built up a cult following among Game Boy players and Joy will plumb the depths of what Legend of the River King has to say about “the fields of art, culture, philosophy, and ecology.”

Next is Kaitlin Tremblay’s Life is Strange, which will explore the adventure game’s relationship to “personal history, YA fantasy, identity formation, grief, and most of all, choice.” Life is Strange was something of an unexpected blockbuster, possibly because of its ability to give players the chance to make choices that “[say] something about who we are and who we want to be.”

Finally, Charlotte Reber will unpack exactly what happened during the notoriously short development cycle of Dragon Age II. Hoping to capitalize on the massive popularity of Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare rushed a sequel into production that ultimately divided fans and critics alike. Was it a flop? Was it a secret success? New interviews with the game’s narrative team (David Gaider, Jennifer Hepler, Lukas Kristjanson, and Karin Weekes) will attempt to get to the bottom of it.

Boss Fight Books is currently seeking funding for Season 8 through Kickstarter until August 5th, and they’ve promised that a fourth book in the season will make its debut in a separate campaign later this year.

But in the meantime, you can learn more about Legend of the River King, Life is Strange, and Dragon Age II after the break.

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Zelda: Breath of the Wild is #1 in Giant Bomb’s “The 100 Best Games of the 21st Century” Community Vote

Giant Bomb decided to piggyback off of the New York Times’s massive “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century” feature with their own take on “The 100 Best Games of the 21st Century“.

The site’s editors opened up the voting to their community, and began collecting ballots a week and a half ago. Each voter was given the chance to choose any ten games released after 2000, and ranking a game higher up on the list ensured it received more points in the final tally.

After receiving a total of 3171 ballots, Giant Bomb unveiled the final list this morning, and it features many of the heavy hitters we’ve come to know and love over the last quarter century. So what made the cut? Please read on to find out…

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