Baldur’s Gate 3 Cruises to its Third “Game of the Year” Award of the Season at the 2023-2024 GDC Awards

The voters at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards have thrown their lot in with the biggest RPG of the year for the second straight year, bestowing “Game of the Year” honors on Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 earlier this week at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

This is the third major “Game of the Year” trophy that Larian has collected this season (including the DICE Awards in February and The Game Awards in December). We’ll know if they can complete the sweep after the conclusion of the BAFTA Games Awards in a few weeks.

That said, Larian wasn’t quite done with the 2023-2024 GDC Awards. Members of the development team took the stage an additional three times to collect “Best Design”, “Best Narrative”, and the “Audience Award”. But Baldur’s Gate 3 couldn’t win them all, and there were six other awards up for grabs during this year’s ceremony.

Two of those prizes went to Nintendo for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which took home the “Best Technology” trophy and the “Innovation Award”. Venba, from Visai Games, also bested the competition in a pair of categories. The game’s story of an immigrant family and the food they cook to preserve their culture won “Best Debut” and the “Social Impact Award”.

That leaves just two awards, and they were split between a pair of impressive titles. “Best Audio” went to Tango Gameworks’s Hi-Fi Rush, while “Best Visual Art” belonged to Remedy’s Alan Wake II.

The 2023-2024 GDC Awards were hosted by Alanah Pearce, and you can watch the ceremony, along with a complete list of all winners, nominees, and honorable mentions, after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

Jordan Mechner’s “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family” is Now Available

Jordan Mechner previously chronicled the early portions of his career in The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985 and The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993, but more recently he’s turned his illustrator’s eye to his own family history.

Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family is now available in bookstores in hardcover and as a downloadable ebook via First Second Books, and it tells the story of “his family’s journey through war, Nazi occupation, and everyday marital strife.”

Writing on his official website, Mechner describes Replay as “a very special [and] personal work for me” and explains that the graphic novel memoir “interweaves the story of my life as a game developer (making Prince of Persia, Karateka and The Last Express) with my dad’s flight from Vienna as a child refugee in 1938-41 through Nazi-occupied France, and my grandfather’s back story as an Austrian teenage soldier in World War I”:

In this intergenerational graphic memoir, renowned video game designer Jordan Mechner traces his family’s journey through war, Nazi occupation, and everyday marital strife.

1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment office when his idyllic life in a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I.

1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic.

2015. The creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow.

Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world.

The Internet Archive will be hosting a virtual Book Talk event for Replay with Mechner on March 27 at 1:00 PM (Eastern Time). It’ll be hosted by Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse (coincidentally, the developer behind The Making of Karateka compilation for the PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S), and tickets are currently available for free.

Here’s the Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024

Spring is in the air, and that means it’s time for the curators at the World Video Game Hall of Fame to unveil this year’s ballot of possible inductees. The Class of 2024 will be the tenth to be welcomed into the Hall, and this year’s competition will include a grab bag of previous finalists and a eclectic slate of newcomers.

Leading the pack is a trio of two-time finalists, including Capcom’s Resident Evil (previously up for consideration in 2017 and 2022), Harmonix’s Guitar Hero (2020 and 2021), and Cyan’s Myst (2017 and 2019). All three have a strong case for induction, but they’ll be competing against a few other previous finalists, including Elite (which was a finalist in 2016), Asteroids (2018), and Metroid (2018).

But don’t count out the rookies, who come from some of gaming’s less-crowded corners. There’s a browser-based classic from the early 2000s (Neopets), the original city builder (SimCity), an early dating simulation (Tokimeki Memorial), a big name in extreme sports (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater), Richard Garriott’s groundbreaking RPG (Ultima), and the chaotic trivia game that inspired the Jackbox franchise (You Don’t Know Jack).

“Even ten years in, there’s no shortage of deserving contenders that have had enormous influence on pop culture or the game industry itself,” said Jon-Paul Dyson, the Director of the Hall of Fame’s parent organization, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum. “These games span decades. Asteroids is an icon of the late 70s arcade. Myst showed the potential of CD-ROM technology in the 90s. Neopets became a staple of browser-based, free games as we entered the 2000s. And Guitar Hero, which is less than 20 years old, has already proven its staying power.”

As always, the World Video Game Hall of Fame is opening up the voting to the general public between now and March 21. Make your choice at WorldVideoGameHallOfFame.org, and the three games that receive the most votes will be submitted as a Player’s Choice ballot alongside the other ballots from the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 will be announced on Thursday, May 9, at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time). And if you’re unfamiliar with any of this year’s finalists, you can learn more about them after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

Here Come the AAAA Games… But What’s a AAA Game and Why Do We Call Them That?

Where did the AAA designation come from? And what even qualifies as a AAA game?

I investigated both of those questions in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2013, and a lightly edited and updated version of that article was reprinted here on Video Game Canon after Microsoft tried to announce a AAAA game in August 2020.

But a few recent discoveries have given us a clearer look where the AAA designation came from, and this article was rewritten to incorporate those updates in February 2024.

The console changeover from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation to the PS4/Xbox One generation brought a lot of worry about the spiraling budgets and massive teams required to create AAA games. Many felt it was hurting the industry, and while there was a reduction in games with blockbuster-sized budgets, these types of games continued to push the conversation among developers, publishers, and players. These same fears are being echoed today in light of the massive wave of layoffs that game executives inflicted upon the industry in 2023.

But for all the hand-wringing about how the AAA game was (and still is) detrimental to smaller developers, no one could seem to agree on what exactly a AAA game was or when the AAA designation was even first used.

In attempting to solve this etymological mystery, I found that the AAA designation shares much in common with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s obscenity test from a 1964 case (“I know it when I see it”). But I also found out that no one’s quite sure what the future of AAA games will look like.

[Continue Reading…]

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…

[Continue Reading…]

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.

[Continue Reading…]

2023 GOTY Scoreboard: Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake II, Tears of the Kingdom, and More

How do you even begin to talk about what happened in the video game industry in 2023?

From January all the way through to December, 2023 was one of the best years for games ever. New classics literally appeared out of nowhere, while dozens of other hotly-anticipated new releases absolutely lived up to the hype. But it was hard to celebrate last year’s triumphs without also looking back at the seemingly endless parade of developers who lost their job in 2023. Multiple times per week, we would hear about a mass layoff or studio closure at yet another company.

Farhan Noor, an artist who previously worked with Telltale and Activision, has been tracking these job losses at Game Industry Layoffs and he estimates that at least 10,500 people were laid off in 2023. The final tally is most likely quite a bit higher and things don’t seem to be slowing down as we head into 2024.

One outlet, But Why Tho?, directly confronted this grim reality by selecting “The People Who Make the Games Industry” as their “Top Video Game.” Picking the developers, artists, and writers who lost their jobs over any of the games they played in 2023, it’s hard to argue with their reasons for making this choice:

Many of the games on this list and on lists across games media were made by people who are no longer employed by the studios that developed, published, or are the owners. We saw the shuttering of not only studios but also of websites dedicated to covering video games. We can not celebrate a stacked year of fantastic games without trying to honor those who deserve to be respected as talented people who have given us hours and days of play in fantastic worlds. They matter, their futures matter, and the beauty of the video games we love so much is only possible when the developers are respected, cared for, and fought for, too.

So with that in mind, let’s take every chance we can to honor the actual people behind our favorite games, and the fabulous work they did in 2023 while mired in chaos.

Any discussion of 2023 will begin with a trio of games… Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake II, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Fans spent years waiting patiently as each game slowly moved through the development process and all three delivered (including a “Game of the Year” nod for Baldur’s Gate 3 at The Game Awards).

Larian (including Director Swen Vincke, Producer David Walgrave, and a talented troupe of voice actors) first unleashed Baldur’s Gate 3 in Early Access in 2020, but the expansive RPG still seemed to come out of nowhere. Likewise, Sam Lake and Remedy had been slowly building out a sequel to Alan Wake since its launch in 2010. Most of this work was done away from the public, but it likely won’t take 13 more years to get the next chapter in Alan Wake’s story.

And then there’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Eiji Aonuma and his team at Nintendo EPD poured everything they had into this Breath of the Wild sequel and redefined what a console like the Switch can offer players in its waning days. Its seemingly-limitless world mesmerized critics and players, and left other developers wondering exactly how Nintendo was able to pull it off.

But dozens of other games also competed for attention and accolades, including Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2, Capcom’s Street Fighter 6, Geometric Interactive’s Cocoon, Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4, Tango’s Hi-Fi Rush, Square Enix’s Final Fantsasy XVI, From Software’s Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Blizzard’s Diablo IV, Mintrocket’s Dave the Diver, and on and on and on.

Even the long shadow of Wordle continued to inspire new daily browser-based games, including the time-gobbling Connections, Puzzmo, and Immaculate Grid.

Altogether, more than 25 games were selected by at least ten publications, and a total of more than 200 games appeared on at least one list. It was truly an historic year for video games, and you can see how it all shook out by viewing the 2023 GOTY Scoreboard after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

Guardian Faber Will Publish Keza MacDonald’s “Super Nintendo” in 2026

Keza MacDonald has been writing about video games for a long time. She is currently a Video Games Editor at The Guardian (as well as serving as the regular steward of their Pushing Buttons newsletter), and has previously written for Kotaku and IGN. MacDonald is also the co-author (with with Jason Killingsworth) of You Died: The Dark Souls Companion.

But for her next trick, she’ll be flying solo with Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, a new book all about Nintendo and why the company is “the key to understanding video games and what they do for us”:

Super Nintendo explores the cultural and social impact of video games through the franchises of Nintendo; the Japanese company is universally regarded as being the most influential in the industry, having produced landmark series such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon.

Having exploded in popularity in recent years, video games are now the dominant cultural medium of the 21st century, adored by millions of people around the world. By telling the stories of these games – of those who made them and those who play them – MacDonald will provide readers with an unparalleled understanding of how and why Nintendo spreads the joy it does, revealing what our affection for games tells us about ourselves. In doing so, she speaks to that most human of desires: the desire to have fun.

MacDonald recently published a fantastic interview with Shigeru Miyamoto for The Guardian, so she’s clearly the right person for this topic.

Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun will be published in the UK by Guardian Faber in Spring 2026. A worldwide release will presumably follow.

Puzzle Games Have Always Had Personality… Featuring Threes, Dr. Mario, Peggle, Tetris, and a Lot More

Wordle jumpstarted a new wave of addictive puzzle games after it was released to almost universal praise in 2020. Players found competition and comradery in those green and yellow squares during the COVID pandemic, and this little bit of personality continues to fuel the game’s popularity today.

But puzzle games have always had personality, and on the second anniversary of Wordle‘s acquisition by The New York Times, I decided to look back on an article I wrote for Warp Zoned in 2014 that argued exactly that. A lightly edited and updated version of that article has been reprinted here.

As video games begin to resemble film and television productions more and more with each passing generation, it’s interesting to observe that puzzle games continue to remain a vibrant genre.

Puzzle games burst onto the scene at the very beginning, back when gaming was nothing more than a handful of pixels projected onto an old television. While everyone in the real world was attempting to master a Rubik’s Cube in as few moves as possible, puzzle game players were tackling the line destruction of Breakout and the line construction of Tetris. However, you might not have realized it, but the puzzle genre has become just as story-driven as everything else the game industry produces today.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when puzzle games started being produced with characters and, occasionally, a plot. But one of the newer games that best personifies this trend is the mobile blockbuster Threes. The goal of Threes is simple: slide around a series of playing cards on a 4×4 grid so that matching numerals are placed next to each other. When slid together, these numerals merge to create an even bigger number. Repeat until the board is full and you have no more moves.

But Threes does a lot with its simple conceit through expert music selection and the face given to the game’s cards. The smallest cards are white with a thin slice of yellow running along the bottom, and within this slice are two dots for eyes and a small mouth that responds to events on the board. For example, when two cards that match join the board for the first time, they let out a shout and do a little dance. And when they get close to each other, their expressions change to acknowledge their new friend.

Each card also has a unique name and voice, and some of the larger cards are fully decked out with additional accessories like fangs or headphones.

Thanks to the funky background music, I’ve heard Threes referred to as “the ultimate party simulator.” The player is actually meant to be the host, and is attempting to push party guests with similar interests towards one another. And when two cards occupy the same space, that’s meant to show two people merging their separate relationships at the party into a single group.

Players interact with numbered playing cards to play Threes, but the game’s use of numbers is actually completely superfluous. There’s no math involved in the card matching, and they could actually depict any type of symbol or sign and the game would still play exactly the same. But by making them pseudo-people, the three creators of Threes deepen our connection to the game.

This conception of Threes as a puzzler populated by people was in place from the very beginning, as Vollmer described the search for voice actors in a collection of emails chronicling the game’s development: “Let me know if saying silly things into your microphone sounds at all like a fun time and I’ll send you a list of possible characters for you to play.”

While Threes personifies its characters in subtle ways, other developers have chosen a much more overt strategy. Shigeru Miyamoto famously once said that he considers all of Nintendo’s characters a repertory company of actors. Mario is not a plumber who was sucked into the magical Mushroom Kingdom. Instead, he’s an actor playing a role. The theory explains how Mario can spend an entire game bashing Bowser for kidnapping the Princess and then turn around and spend a fun afternoon go-karting with the big lug. It also explains how he can don a doctor’s white coat and dispense vitamins in Dr. Mario.

Dr. Mario‘s puzzling premise is just as simple as Threes. A vertical well (depicted as a sample bottle) full of tri-colored viruses have to be removed by matching them with three vitamins of the same color. Again, the viruses could be anything (their faces are actually too small to make out in the well), and the vitamins are just a facade laid over a simple game of color matching blocks.

But thanks to the game’s vertical well, Nintendo is able to literally fill in the edges and give the world of Dr. Mario something extra. The vitamins themselves are doled out by a random sequence deep within the game’s programming, but because the right side of the screen shows them being dispensed by Dr. Mario, the player is able to picture the plumber as his or her helper. A magnifying glass on the left side of the screen shows a closeup of the three viruses. Each virus has a different personality and they will react in exaggerated ways as you clear the well of their offspring. With the viruses now large enough to see, you’re no longer doing color matching in a puzzle game, you’re defeating a foe.

You can even see how much of a difference these choices make as Dr. Mario came together. The magnified viruses were not present in the earliest builds of the game, which used a generic setting and title (the game was originally known as Virus). You can see how it looked for yourself at The Cutting Room Floor).

Almost all of Nintendo’s classic puzzle games used a variation of this branding trick over the years. Yoshi, Yoshi’s Cookie, and Kirby Avalanche all used Nintendo characters as a wrapper over a tile-matching game. Sega even took Kirby Avalanche (originally released as Puyo Puyo in Japan) and rewrapped it with Sonic the Hedgehog characters and called it Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. Taito also pulled off this trick with Bust-A-Move, plugging in characters from Bubble Bobble as the cannon operators of the color-matching puzzle game.

And let’s not forget Peggle.

PopCap’s Peggle is yer another puzzle game that’s simple on the inside (use a cannon to shoot a little ball at a board covered in pegs) with a lot of characterization on the outside. Each of the Peggle Masters has a name and a backstory, but all they do is serve as a cover for a pretty standard set of power-ups. In a world where Grand Theft Auto V and Call of Duty: Ghosts sell millions of copies a year, conventional wisdom would state that giving the Lisa Frank treatment to a puzzle game (after all, Peggle‘s mascot is a magical unicorn) would be the kiss of death. Instead, Peggle and its one-and-a-half sequels have become huge hits.

But what about our three examples from the top? Surely the hard lines of a Rubik’s Cube, Breakout, and Tetris could not possibly have character hidden within them? Well…

The Rubik’s Cube became the star of a short-lived cartoon, Rubik: The Amazing Cube. In the show, a magic Rubik’s Cube helped three children overcome their problems, which included an evil magician. Breakout quickly spawned an entire genre of block-breaking games, and one of the first, Arkanoid, posited that the bar along the bottom of the screen was actually a spaceship and the metal ball was used to defeat aliens.

As for Tetris, the original game didn’t give the pieces a personality, but who among us didn’t view the game’s piece selection AI less as a random sequencer and more as a malevolent entity who flooded the board with S and Z pieces while withholding line pieces. It knew! I swear it knew! Oh, and aliens would eventually find their way into the franchise courtesy of 2001’s Tetris Worlds, which recast the tetrominos as extraterrestrials that just wanted to go home. Nintendo themselves even took this a step further when they reskinned Tetris with Nintendo characters in 2006’s Tetris DS.

While we may think of the puzzle game as a personality-less entity that helped us goof off in class or filled in as a time-waster between real games, the truth is the puzzle genre is filled with memorable characters. And the secret to creating a puzzle game that lasts is to give it a personality that players can relate to. Or alternately, you just need to stuff a few aliens in there.

“Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment” is Coming from Jason Schreier on October 8, 2024

After releasing Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made in 2017 and Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry in 2021, investigative journalist Jason Schreier is getting ready to publish his next deep dive into the development side of video games.

Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment will explore Blizzard’s founding and its early years creating classics like Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. But it’ll also tackle the company’s more recent woes as corporate intrigue surrounded its Irvine campus in the wake of its merger with Activision, as well as an examination of the sexual misconduct and discrimination lawsuits levied against the company, and Blizzard’s eventual acquisition by Microsoft in 2023.

[Continue Reading…]