There’s probably a good argument to be made that entertainment pop culture is over-scheduled. We lose our minds at the idea of events that announce things to add more events — be they movies or video games or whatever — to our agenda. Movie producers can stand on massive stages with timelines of logos behind them and Twitter will explode. Until recently, E3 was treated as the major gaming event for the year, though a pandemic and mismanagement seem to largely be eroding its status. The gaming industry, for whatever reason, craves some degree of structure to its calendar.
In that sense, The Game Awards provides a fairly useful end point for the year. While producer and founder Geoff Keighley has always tagged the event as a celebration of gaming, it’s probably more resonant as a season finale. The award show, which is more of a vehicle for major game announcements, acts as a coda for the year, the post-credits scene at the end of a comic book movie. Keighley has, through both hard work and honestly force of will, established it as a tentpole event.
All this is a longwinded way of saying that Keighley has once again announced a time and place for the show this year, coming back to the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on December 8.
In addition to the usual categories, which include things like Best Direction, Best Debut, and obviously Game of the Year, the 2022 Game Awards will be introducing Best Adaptation. The category, in their words, will “recognize creative work that authentically adapts video game intellectual property to other popular media, including but not limited to theatrical movies, streaming shows, podcasts, novels, and comic books.”
In essence, it’s giving an award to the not-video game that best adapts a video game. I assume in 2022, this is an award created for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but presumably Tom Holland’s Uncharted movie is also going to be a contender. Even if it hadn’t been delayed, the Super Mario Bros. movie would have been after The Game Awards this year and thus been ineligible, so it joins Borderlands and possibly Ghost of Tsushima in 2023’s set. Of course, Showtime’s The Last of Us will be a big part of that, too.
It’s also expected that the show will have more reveals, of course. Last year featured a CG Elden Ring trailer, Alan Wake 2, Sonic Frontiers, and more. There’s no telling what we’ll get this year, but Keighley has more or less said that the new Tekken will be part of the festivities.
