VGC | John – Page 9 – Video Game Canon

Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2022 Includes Final Fantasy VII, GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64, and Many More

The Council of the Old, better known as the editorial team at Shacknews, has announced the latest inductees into the Shacknews Hall of Fame.

The Shacknews Hall of Fame was created in 2021 to honor “the creators, the platforms, the technology, the publications, and the games that have influenced the direction of our industry and shaped our favorite hobby.” Like any good Best Games list, last year’s wide-ranging inaugural class (comprised of more than 100 titles in total) featured many beloved favorites alongside a few more obscure surprises. The Class of 2022 has blown the doors open even wider, with 57 additional titles, all released before May 31, 1998.

As you might expect, multiple games from the heyday of the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 can be found amongst the more than four dozen selections. The PlayStation faithful will be pleased to see that Bushido Blade, Final Fantasy VII, Gran Turismo, Grand Theft Auto, and PaRappa the Rapper all made the cut. The Nintendo 64 was famous for its multiplayer games, and they’re now well-represented in the Shacknews Hall of Fame by GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

You also don’t have to look very far to find a few PC titles in the Class of 2022, including Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Fallout, and Quake II.

An eclectic group of people were also inducted into the Shacknews Hall of Fame this year. There’s a quintet of Mario actors (“Captain” Lou Albano, Danny Wells, Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Charles Martinet), a few athletes (John Madden and Ivan “Ironman” Stewart, a trio of Midway men (Ed Boon, John Tobias, and Dan Forden), and the unmatched Raul Julia.

All of the games included in the Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2022 will be added to the Video Game Canon in a future update.

Elden Ring Wins “Game of the Year” in Bizarre Finale to the 2022 Game Awards

Though it’s faced some stiff competition over the last year, Elden Ring‘s coronation as “Game of the Year” has sometimes felt like an inevitability ever since it was released all the way back in February.

That expectation became a reality during last night’s Game Awards ceremony, as From Software’s already stellar reputation was burnished with “Game of the Year” and three additional statuettes (“Best Game Direction,” “Best Art Direction,” and “Best Role Playing Game”). But what happened next threatened to overshadow the entire show, as a teenager bypassed security and walked on stage alongside the developers. After Game Director Hidetaka Miyazaki delivered his acceptance speech, the teenager addressed the audience, and dedicated the award to “my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton.”

It was certainly one of the oddest moments from the show’s history.

But before all that, the night certainly belonged to God of War: Ragnarok. Though it missed out on “Game of the Year,” Sony Santa Monica’s game took home a half-dozen statuettes, including for “Best Action/Adventure Game,” “Best Audio Design,” “Best Score and Music,” and “Best Narrative.” Ragnarok also won the “Innovation in Accessibility” award for its expansive accessibility options and Christopher Judge’s portrayal of Kratos won “Best Performance.”

Stray was also denied “Game of the Year” honors, but it did win a pair of prizes for “Best Independent Game” and (unsurprisingly) “Best Debut Indie.”

Finally, Nintendo had a good night with multiple wins spread across its impressive 2022 lineup. The consolemaker collected statuettes for “Best Family Game” (for Kirby and the Forgotten Land), “Best Sim/Strategy Game” (for Mario + Rabbids: Spark of Hope), and “Best Multiplayer” (for Splatoon 3). Things are also looking good for 2023 as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom won “Most Anticipated Game.”

A video replay of the 2022 Game Awards can be found after the break (skip to 3:53:00 if you’re solely interested in “my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton”), along with all the winners and nominees.

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Lists From the Past: The Library of Congress’s “Game Canon”

Henry Lowood has served as the Curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University since 1983. Thanks to this role, he’s been part of the growing field of Game Studies practically since its very beginning, and in 2006 he used his position to pitch a proposal to the Library of Congress about the importance of the academic study of games.

Partly inspired by the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry and his own efforts to preserve important game-related artifacts since 1998, Lowood asked for the Library’s assistance in creating a “Game Canon,” a group of titles that would best represent the cultural and historical significance of video games. He got his wish a year later, and a committee (comprised of Lowood, his Stanford colleague Matteo Bittanti, game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, and Joystiq’s Christopher Grant) was formed to decide on the canon’s initial composition.

After a lot of debate, the committee delivered ten recommendations for the “Game Canon,” ultimately highlighting 15 titles in total. Civilization and Civilization II were grouped together as part of this initial batch of games, as were the four games in the Warcraft series (Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and World of Warcraft). The rest of the eight selections covered a wide range of genres from the first three decades of game history, starting with 1962’s Spacewar! and moving forward through time to the aforementioned Warcraft series.

In between you’ll find 1985’s Tetris, 1989’s SimCity, 1993’s Doom, and a few other foundational games…

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Bite-Sized Game History: Early Box Art for Zelda and Punch-Out!!, Marketing Marvel Vs Capcom Origins, and Jurassic World’s Secret Origin

Like with any creative endeavor, actually completing development of a video game is only half the battle. The other half involves getting eyeballs in front of your completed game and getting these new fans to (hopefully) tell their friends all about it.

Game publishers have tried lots of different marketing methods over the years, and we look at two of them in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as what happens when you need to pitch your game to the most famous film director in the world.

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Cliff Bleszinski Takes Readers Behind the Chainsaw in “Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games”

Whether you know him as CliffyB, Dude Huge, or The Guy Who Made Gears of War, game developer Cliff Bleszinski just added another title to his long list of monikers… Memoirist.

Bleszinski has been promising for years to pen a book about his life in game development, and it finally became a reality earlier this week with the release of Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games. Published by Simon & Schuster, Bleszinski’s memoir will chart his career from teenage programmer through his post-Epic projects, as well as include his thoughts on the games industry of today:

Video games are dominating the planet. In 2020, they brought in $180 billion dollars globally—nearly $34 billion in the United States alone. So who are the brilliant designers who create these stunning virtual worlds? Cliff Bleszinski—or CliffyB as he is known to gamers—is one of the few who’ve reached mythical, rock star status. In Control Freak, he gives an unvarnished, all-access tour of the business.

Toiling away in his bedroom, Bleszinski created and shipped his first game before graduating high school, and at just seventeen joined a fledgling company called Epic Games. He describes the grueling hours, obscene amounts of Mountain Dew and obsessive focus necessary to achieve his singular creative visions. He details Epic’s rise to industry leader, thanks largely to his work on bestselling franchises Unreal and Gears of War (and, later, his input on a little game called Fortnite), as well as his own awkward ascent from shy, acne-riddled introvert to sports car-driving celebrity rubbing shoulders with Bill Gates. As he writes, “No one is weirder than a nerd with money.” While the book is laced with such self-deprecating humor, Bleszinski also bluntly addresses the challenges that have long-faced the gaming community, including sexism and a lack of representation among both designers and the characters they create.

Control Freak is a hilarious, thoughtful, and inspiring memoir. Even if you don’t play games, you’ll walk away from this book recognizing them as a true art form and appreciating the genius of their creators.

Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games is now available in stores.

UPDATE (12/9/22): Literary Hub recently shared an excerpt from Control Freak about Bleszinski’s quest to climb the leaderboard in Super Mario Bros.

Over 1000 Games Have Been Ranked by Hardcore Gaming 101’s “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” Podcast

The folks behind Hardcore Gaming 101’s “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” podcast have been ranking their favorite games for nearly seven years, and while they haven’t reached their goal just yet, they hit a major milestone last month when they added the 1,000th game to their list.

The visually-impressive Vectorman, a side-scroller from Sega that debuted during the waning days of the Genesis, was the subject of the landmark episode, and the podcast’s hosts ranked it at #385 (just ahead of BioShock and just behind Wasteland).

“The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” features a dynamically-ordered list, and each new episode of the podcast adds at least one more game to the overall ranking. Unfortunately, Vectorman hasn’t been able to hold onto its position in the weeks since, and as of today, the game has fallen to #403 (where it’s still just ahead of BioShock and just behind Wasteland). You can visit Hardcore Gaming 101 to see where your favorite game is currently ranked.

Tetris currently holds the #1 spot, and you’ll find some interesting choices in the rest of the Top Ten (including NetHack at #2, Nier: Automata at #4, and Katamari Damacy at #7). There’s also a lot of Mario near the upper reaches of the list (including Super Mario Bros. at #3, Super Mario 64 at #6, and Super Mario Bros. 3 at #9), but things get pretty wild pretty fast (Minesweeper at #76!), and Mirage’s infamous Rise of the Robots sits at the very bottom at #1023.

Congratulations to everyone at “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” podcast on this accomplishment. Just 46,835 games to go!

Bite-Sized Game History: Celebrating 30 Years of Mortal Kombat with Ed Boon and John Tobias

Ed Boon has nurtured the soul of the Mortal Kombat franchise for more than 30 years now. Development began in 1991 when Boon, alongside co-creator John Tobias, pitched a fighting game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme to their bosses at Midway. That part of the plan quickly fizzled out, but the decisionmakers at the company were still interested in creating an original fighting game to piggyback on the success of Street Fighter II.

A year later, Boon and Tobias (and John Vogel and Dan Forden) were ready to deliver the first cabinets for Mortal Kombat to arcade operators on October 8, 1992. Pre-release reactions to the game, both within Midway and from the public, were trending in the right direction, but the team had no idea just how much of an impact their creation would soon have on the game industry… and the entire world.

To celebrate the fighting franchise’s 30th anniversary, Boon and Tobias have been sharing stories from Mortal Kombat‘s development over the last year on Twitter. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

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The 2022 Update to the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000 is Here

This article refers to an older Version of the Video Game Canon. View the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the list.

The 2022 Update (Version 6.0) to the Video Game Canon is here… and it’s more or less a maintenance update.

I was able to add a handful of newly-published lists from 2021 (including Games Radar, IGN, and Shacknews), as well as a GamesTM list from 2018, but little changed about my ranking of gaming’s top tier. With these additions, the Video Game Canon is now comprised of 70 Best Video Games of All Time lists that were published between 1995 and 2021.

The Video Game Canon’s scoring system, known as the C-Score, has remained the same for the 2022 Update. This formula ranks each game against the rest of the field by adding together a title’s Average Ranking across all lists with the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency.

For a good example, look at Tetris, which yet again landed in the #1 spot on the Video Game Canon. The puzzle game has an Average Ranking of 17.63 across all lists and, because only four publications chose to exclude it over the years, a staggering Appearance Frequency of 94.29%. Plugging those numbers into the formula gives us a C-Score of 23.34, considerably lower than any other game.

But nearly every other title in the Top 10 was shuffled around, though nothing else managed to break into the absolute top tier of the Video Game Canon. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, A Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64 all moved up slightly, while Red Dead Redemption and Ocarina of Time dipped. And after flipping places in 2021, Half-Life 2 and Resident Evil 4 flipped back in 2022. Capcom’s survival horror masterpiece slid back into the #3 slot, while Valve’s shooter sequel reclaimed the #2 ranking…

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Press Run, a New Book Publishing Imprint, Launched by Limited Run Games

“Forever Physical” is the rallying cry of Limited Run Games, and the boutique publisher has done to their best to live up to those words over the last seven years, publishing hundreds of physical games across more than a dozen platforms.

Limited Run also recently invited several prominent game historians to their headquarters to create bonus material for some of their upcoming releases, as well as work on other projects. We got a look at one of those mystery projects last week, when the company announced that they’re expanding their already-pretty-massive operation with the launch of a new book publishing imprint.

Known as Press Run, the imprint will focus on “good reads for gamers” and it’ll be led by Jeremy Parish (the creator of Retronauts and the Video Works series) and Jared Petty (an IGN alum who also hosts the Top 100 Games Podcast).

“Readers searching for meaningful, informed, and entertaining stories by great writers will find a lot to love in Press Run books,” said Press Run Senior Editor and Project Manager Jared Petty. “We’re helping authors share their passion for games with larger audiences… it’s a thrill to get up every day and be a small part of that process.”

“Our long-term goal with Press Run is to create an ever-growing library of great books covering a wide array of topics, across a variety of formats and styles by a diverse lineup of authors,” said Press Run Media Curator Jeremy Parish. “Press Run will exist to keep great books in circulation for as long as people want to have them.”

Parish had even more to say about this mission in a lengthy blog post published on LimitedRunGames.com.

The first batch of titles from Press Run will include…

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Bite-Sized Game History: The Godfather II’s Brass Knuckles, The Lurking Horror’s Centipede, and StarTropics’s Letter

Game publishers seem to love a little friendly (and not so friendly) competition with each other, and we’re now about 20 years out from a rather silly arms race over which one could produce the most elaborate special edition package.

It wasn’t the first fancier bundle for collectors, but the bonus disc included with Halo 2‘s Limited Collector’s Edition (which was housed in a “luxurious” tin) was one of the first I remember from that era. The practice quickly escalated from those humble beginnings, and prospective players were soon being wooed with promises of night vision goggles (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), drones (Call of Duty: Black Ops II), a Batarang (Batman: Arkham Asylum), so many wearable helmets (Doom Eternal and Mass Effect, to name just two), and even a statue of a bloodied and bikini-clad torso (Dead Island: Riptide).

This retail trend has mostly run its course these days, but not before Volition tried to sell Saints Row fans on a one-of-a-kind “Million Dollar Pack” for Saints Row IV. The ridiculously over-the-top bundle included multiple cars and trips, as well as admission to a spy training school, and a voucher for plastic surgery. While obviously a parody of all the weird and wild special editions mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m sure Volition would have tried to mass-produce the “Million Dollar Pack” if anyone had offered to buy it.

Publishers definitely went a little overboard chasing this fad, but it was more or less an extension of the old “Big Box” releases that would often include a world map or a small trinket with a highly-anticipated game. Let’s look at three of those bundles in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…

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