Golden Joystick Awards 2019 Needs You!

It’s time for vox populi in the gaming industry. The Golden Joystick Award turns 37 this year. Though the ceremony is scheduled on November 15 in London, GamesRadar lets its visitors vote for videogames they consider the best of the industry in 2019.

2019 Nominations

Though it’s quite seductive to list here all the nominations and the nominees, we’d like to focus on the most prominent and unexpected ones, as well as tendencies. The complete list is always available on GamesRadar.

Even one look tells you that games are considered quite an art now. Look: The Best Storytelling makes games akin to literature or cinema. Best Visual Design is recognition as graphic art. Best Audio is somewhat about music or, again, movies.

The Most Stunning Nominees

It’s 2019, and there are many things in the industry we shouldn’t get surprised at. But still, we do.

• Mortal Kombat a nominee for The Best Storytelling? Seriously? In mass vision it’s nothing but arena, but geeks have always been into its unique mythology. It lacks a movie – well, a good movie – to break that alienation, like comic books have done with Cinema Universes.
• A multiplayer Tetris? We remember it back in the 1980s, when Brick Game boxes anticipated the upcoming smartphone epidemic. It started as a hole you fall out of society all alone. But Tetris99 is a multiplayer version of the cult game.
• Have Fortnite and GTA Online already entered the Still Played category? Along with WoW and Minecraft? Time really flies.
• GTA Casino was listed later, in Best Expansions. This nomination indicates that it’s not enough for the industry to evolve. Every single game now needs to evolve on its own.
• Nominees available on Apple Arcade. You may be far from taking it seriously as a gaming platform, but Sayonara Wild Hearts, a Best Visual Design nominee, is already there. And it’s just the beginning. Well, there is even one smartphone (Honor 20 Pro) nominated among VR headsets, gamepads and consoles as a gaming device of the year.
• Indie games rule. Not much of a news, but still Outer Wilds, an indie open-world mystery, is in with a powerful dash. There are some more in most nominations.
• There are enough playable AR/VR games. Finally. The nomination is quite a celebration, introducing both expansions and original games.

The rest of the nominations are quite traditional. You better check them yourself while the voting is on, and get your free issue of a digital magazine or book of your choice. For example, it includes PG Gamer issues, complete guides for Minecraft and Fortnite, and “A Hideo Koj!ma Book” on both Metal Gear Solid history and the person of Kojima.

A Little Bit of History

Even the name – Golden Joystick Award – redirects us to times when games didn’t need today’s gamepads. A single joystick with two buttons and a trigger was quite an advanced device, as even one button first appeared in joysticks in 1969 only. Well, 1983, the year the award was established, was quite a Golden Era year. So now the name is quite a piece of legacy, similar to Grammy: gramophones are gone, the symbol remains.

Now the ceremony is almost as grand as that of Grammy: it takes place now at Bloomsbury Big Top, London. The host is Danny Wallace, a comedian who returns for this mission again. The show will be streamed, and you’ll know the names immediately.