If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, this is the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
Of games award shows, most do a top 10. We thought about doing similar, and when we chose to do one winner with two runners up like all our other categories, I worried it would make the deliberation exceptionally difficult. It’s not easy by any means, but if you approach the challenge with the right mindset, it’s not much harder than any other category. There will always be great things that don’t make the final list- just accept it, know it’s not intended as an insult, and move on. And so while I am exceptionally proud of the winners this year, it is of course an honor to be nominated. So many things didn’t even make it to the conversation, after all.
The Winner
The Making of Karateka
Jordan Mechner is a legendary game designer, but who could have guessed that his obsessive tendencies would lead to the most remarkable game about making games? It’s hard to imagine how else The Making of Karateka could come about: this interactive game, library, and documentary all in one is built on the extensive notetaking and record keeping Mechner has done throughout his life. Plenty of games let you see some development documents. How many have working prototypes, a timeline of events, numerous versions of a game’s release plus an entirely new one… the list of features could keep us here quite a while, truly.
One thing about video games as a medium is, they’re badly preserved. To be sure, laserdisc and Betamax are hard to play anymore, and there isn’t a lot of support for HitClips these days. But games are the worst at having influential, important games left behind by hardware changes, with minimal effort to document them or make them playable on future hardware. Naturally, it shouldn’t just be “influential” games that get this treatment: games should stay playable. Art should remain accessible. And knowledge on how it was made, and what it means to people, is deeply important to the medium. That this industry and medium fail at the bare minimum is devastating.
The Making of Karateka is a style of document I don’t think we’ll ever see as extensively again. It represents a documentation and exploration of a classic and its iterations that’s downright miraculous- as close to perfection as I could imagine. It came from another world, where we tried much harder to treat games as art. We’re truly lucky to have it.
The Runners-Up
Alan Wake II
Unlike some, I didn’t doubt that Alan Wake II would happen at some point. Remedy keeps getting the budget to make games, and those games (apparently) keep doing well enough to let them pitch their next project. Given how much Alan Wake left unsaid by its end, it felt inevitable they’d get a chance to make a sequel eventually.
I couldn’t have imagined the ambition with which II would be tackled. Rather than just a medium-budget game they somehow got greenlit, Alan Wake II is a love letter- sorry, no, a love song, to the culture of Remedy’s native home Finland, the horror works of Stephen King (among others), their own history of games, and more. There are so many sequences and choices in Alan Wake II that are astonishing in their ambition and imagination, so much so that even as someone who wants nothing to do with horror or Stephen King, I have to pay my respects.
Would that all cult classics begging for a sequel were granted one in such splendid fashion.
Lunacid
Recent years have taught me a newfound appreciation for the PlayStation 1: it appears the makers of Lunacid share my affection. This work seems at first glance a tribute to King’s Field, and it’s not that this is incorrect- it’s that this is selling it short. The grim and cruel world of Lunacid hides a secret kindness- rather than the smirking, scheming miserable NPCs of FromSoft, this game has sincere and compassionate souls that offer you respite from the endless searching.
Many FromSoft imitators struggle with knowing what part of the studio’s iconic opaque design to incorporate. Lunacid has no such issue: who knows what’s around the next corner, but you’ll never be wondering what basic stats do. Mystery is a tool to be deployed carefully, and Lunacid is very cautious, veiling the world but not the game, as it were.
They’re definitely FromSoft fans, though. The opening of the game explains that the whole world has basically become a poison swamp. Miyazaki must be proud.
That’s it for the Gimmick Awards! There will be one final capper to the whole thing at the end of next week- not a podcast, just a post- but for actual awards, we’re done! Thank you so much for joining us for this long journey, and may 2024 find you better than 2023.
or than its first two months if we’re being honest.
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