VGC | John – Page 2 – Video Game Canon

“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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Meet the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025: Quake, GoldenEye 007, Defender, and Tamagotchi

The James Bond films famously open with 007 dispatching another would-be assassin and a wisp of white smoke escaping from the barrel of a Walther PPK. This cinematic bit of tradition was also used to open Rare’s GoldenEye 007, and it helped set the stage for one of the greatest video game adaptations of all time.

Today, as wisps of white smoke also floated over the Vatican after the conclusion of the papal conclave, the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame announced that GoldenEye 007 had been selected as part of the institution’s Class of 2025.

The classic Nintendo 64 game was honored alongside three other title, including the other dominant shooter from the late 90s, id Software’s Quake. Williams’s Defender and Bandai’s Tamagotchi digital pet also got the nod as part of the Class of 2025. This year’s induction ceremony included appearances from Eugene Jarvis, the team on Defender; John Romero, the co-creator of Quake; and Tara Badie, the head of Tamagotchi for Bandai Namco.

After the ceremony, curators and historians from the Strong Museum attempted to place these games in their proper context within the history of video games.

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The BAFTA Games Awards Polled the Public and Shenmue is “The Most Influential Video Game of All Time”

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts did more than select the winners of the 2024-2025 BAFTA Games Awards last month (once again, congratulations to Astro Bot).

In the leadup to this year’s ceremony, the group gave the public a chance to vote for “The Most Influential Video Game of All Time“. With all the votes now tallied, Sega’s Shenmue appeared at the top of the list, and it was followed by 20 additional titles.

Chris Schilling, formerly of Edge Magazine, helped introduce the breadth of games on display:

As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.

Shenmue launched to near universal acclaim in 2000 and is ostensibly about Ryo Hazuki’s search for his father’s killer. But the game also works as a massive life simulation, giving players the opportunity to also play arcade games, chat with NPCs, and even drive a forklift. It’s a bit of a surprising choice for the top spot, but also not, as you can see the ripple effect that Shenmue‘s open world design and focus on minigames caused in the 2000s (and beyond). Shenmue‘s influence can be seen clearly in subsequent games in the Grand Theft Auto and Yakuza franchises, but also in Animal Crossing, Final Fantasy, and the games of Quantic Dream.

“The Most Influential Video Game of All Time” is actually a pretty solid list top to bottom, with foundational games like Pong (#13), Tetris (#11), and Super Mario Bros. (#3) sitting alongside newer classics like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (#20) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (#16). Doom (1993) (#2) and Half-Life 2 (#9), two games that often make the cut on lists like this, were also well-represented in the top ten.

Though I have to admit, I was a bit baffled that you’ll also find Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (#7) sandwiched between Super Mario 64 (#8) and Minecraft (#6) in the top ten. Warhorse’s sequel has received some fantastic reviews so far this year, but it’s also only two months old and hasn’t influenced much of anything yet.

The complete list of games from BAFTA’s “The Most Influential Video Game of All Time” can be found after the break.

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2024 GOTY Scoreboard: Astro Bot, Balatro, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, More

People who focus on the business side of games predicted that 2024 would see fewer AAA releases than 2023 and more layoffs throughout the industry. Sadly, they were right on both counts. It’s rough out there for people who make games.

But the dour cloud that’s currently hanging over the industry is all the more reason to celebrate the developers that did great work last year.

The year’s biggest success story might be the most surprising, as Team Asobi’s Astro Bot collected the most “Game of the Year” hardware from journalists and players, as well as three of the four major awards (The Game Awards, the DICE Awards, and the BAFTA Games Awards). But there was plenty to celebrate from 2024, with a dozen other games earning at least one “Game of the Year” accolade and dozens more appearing further down the lists.

That cohort includes LocalThunk’s Balatro (which won “Game of the Year” at the GDC Awards), Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Atlus’s Metaphor: ReFantazio, and MachineGames’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

The latest adventure starring everyone’s favorite archeologist is an interesting case, as it released so late in the year that many outlets (including The Game Awards) were unable to properly evaluate it. Will its recent launch on the PS5 give a boost to its 2025 GOTY Scoreboard crusade? I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s possible that Nintendo’s shiny new Switch 2 will steal this year’s spotlight.

But that’s a conversation that won’t begin until December. For now, you should definitely check out more of 2024’s most-acclaimed games after the break.

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The Strong Museum of Play Acquires Prototypes and Development Documents from Volition’s 30-Year History

Volition opened their doors in 1993 and they spent the next 30 years developing a slew of critically-acclaimed action games such as Descent, Red Faction, and Saints Row. But that all came to an end in 2023 when the studio was shuttered by parent company Deep Silver. In the year-and-a-half since that closure, curators at the Strong Museum of Play have been in contact with many former developers from he company to collect and catalog Volition’s expansive history.

Earlier this week, the museum’s Director of Digital Preservation, Andrew Borman, announced the acquisition of the Volition Collection on LinkedIn:

While we have only just begun to process the collection, I am beginning to understand some of what it might contain. […] We can explore games that were unreleased and never made it to market, such as various Saints Row spinoffs and their prototypes, many of which haven’t been seen before. We are honored to preserve the history and legacy of Volition, and the work of many Volitionites that made such incredible games.

The Strong was given a massive trove of discs containing game builds and other supporting documents, including an early prototype of Saints Row (which was then known as Bling Bling) and development materials connected to Descent 4 (an unreleased prequel that was reworked into Red Faction).

Staff members at The Strong are currently working with the collection and “organizing, cataloguing, and migrating data from optical discs and other storage formats” to make it available to researchers and museum guests at a future date.