5 Game of the Year Games That Aged Like Milk
Writing from the Chicagoland area in Illinois, Robert is an avid movie watcher and will take just about any excuse to find time to go to his local movie theaters. Robert graduated from Bradley University with degrees in Journalism and Game Design with a minor in Film Studies. Robert tries his best to keep up with all the latest movie releases, from those released in theaters to those released on streaming. While he doesn't always keep up with the latest TV shows, he makes it a goal to watch nearly every major new release possible. He has been honing his craft and following any and all movie news all his life, leading up to now, where he has a vast knowledge of film and film history. He also logs every movie that he watches on his Letterboxd page, and has hosted a weekly online movie night with his closest friends for over 6 years.
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Just like the film industry has award for Best Picture and the music industry has Song and Album of the year, the video game industry has used various Game of the Year awards to celebrate the very best in video games within a given year. There are various different Game of the Year awards, whether it be the wide array of awards running since the 80s and 90s, the Spike Video Game Awards in the 2000s and early 2010s, or the now massively popular Game Awards run by Geoff Keighley.
While several of the recipients of these awards are still massively celebrated and looked back on as some of the greatest games of their generations, there are also a select few winners that have aged considerably worse than their competition did. Due to technical limitations of the time or just outright incorrect decision-making by those who gave out the award in the first place, these once celebrated Game of the Year winners aren't nearly as enjoyable to play in a modern context. For the sake of this list and as not to complicate with so many different publications, it will strictly be looking at winners of Game of the Year awards from Golden Joystick, Spike Video Game Awards, and The Game Awards.
5 'Grand Theft Auto III' (2002)
It's certainly easy to understand why Golden Joystick awarded Grand Theft Auto III with the Game of the Year, as it was a groundbreaking action game that helped massively popularize the concept of open worlds, with a sprawling environment unlike anything else released at the time. However, Grand Theft Auto as a franchise has evolved so much since its first 3D entry, making the more poorly aged aspects of this PS2 classic all the more apparent to those who have played more recent entries (which, going off of sales data, is pretty much everyone).
The Grand Theft Auto formula has had so many quality-of-life improvements, better vehicle physics, more effective shooting controls, and actual checkpoints during missions, that this original entry can feel tediousat times. For the time it certainly made the most sense to award this groundbreaking game, but looking back, it's easy to see a wide array of great games that could have won the award instead, including the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, or most notably, the original Halo: Combat Evolved.
4 'Madden NFL 2004' (2003)
One of the strangest choices for a Game of the Year winner, Madden NFL 2004 was actually the very first Game of the Year winner awarded by the Spike Video Game Awards. Ironically, this sports simulation game isn't nearly as bad as one would think, considering just how pitiful the franchise has gotten in recent years. Many people actually consider this to be one of the best Madden games, but it still has its clear poorly aged attributes and is an absolutely shocking Game of the Year winner compared to its competition.
Several of the issues that the game faces are largely a facet of gamers growing accustomed to improvements in later entries, such as surface-level computer AI and poorly balanced players. Cover player Michael Vick (who has aged like milk in his own ways) is so overtuned in the game that he completely destroys any semblance of balance. What's most shocking of all are the games that this ended up beating, as it's hard to imagine anyone, even gamers in 2003, who would have given the award to this game over Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Fandom Should You Join? Harry Potter · Lord of the Rings · Star Wars · Star Trek
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: what you put on when you need cheering up, how deep you go into the things you love, what you argue about, what you keep on your shelf. Answer them and we will tell you where you belong. Four of the biggest fandoms on earth are taking new members, and they could not be more different from one another.
⚡Harry Potter(Wizarding World)
💍Lord of the Rings(Middle-earth)
⚔️Star Wars(A Galaxy Far Away)
🖖Star Trek(The Final Frontier)
01
What do you put on when you need cheering up? Nobody is brave about this one.
02
How deep do you go into something you love? There is no shallow end here, only different deep ends.
03
What do you and your friends actually argue about? Every fandom has one argument it has been having for years.
04
How do you feel about a room full of strangers? Every one of these comes with a very big room.
05
Where would you rather spend a week? Pick on instinct rather than on budget.
06
What do you believe about people, mostly? All four of these stories have an answer, and they disagree.
07
What is actually on your shelf? Look over at it before you answer.
08
What do you actually want from a story? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your fandom.
Membership Confirmed Your Fandom Is…
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.
Harry Potter
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting you.
- You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within about five minutes and has never stopped.
- This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every single person in your life would be.
- The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you do with things you love.
- The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the arguments are about to start all over again.
Lord of the Rings
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
- You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
- This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
- Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all, which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
- Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make that argument.
Star Wars
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
- You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
- Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly 1980 with no sign of resolution.
- The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
- You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good time.
Star Trek
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
- You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
- The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
- Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
- You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you will always find somebody willing to have it.
3 'Thunder Blade' (1988)
In the early days of the video game industry and the fledgling beginnings of video game publications, many of these institutions were still fine-tuning and figuring out the best ways to judge and award the best games in a given year. This at least attempts to explain Golden Joystick's choice to give one of their 3 Game of the Year awards in 1988 to Thunder Blade. This 8-bit Sega Master System port of the beloved arcade game won the Game of the Year award specifically for home console releases, while the other two awards were for games released for 8-bit computers and 16-bit computers.
Even excusing the fact that there is no real reason to play this downgraded port in the modern day as opposed to the superior arcade original, Thunder Blade's win speaks to a larger issue of cultural differences in Golden Joystick and their EU readers compared to the modern day. What was once impressive in porting a 3D experience onto an 8-bit console now just doesn't impress beyond a novelty. It certainly doesn't help that several much greater and more iconic games could have won this award instead, such as Phantasy Star, Shinobi, Metroid and Castlevania.
2 'Overwatch' (2016)
One of the only multiplayer-only games to have won Game of the Year at The Game Awards, Overwatch was an undeniable sensation of the industry when it first released, evolving the hero shooter genre with Blizzard's then exceptional track record to create what was one of the best multiplayer experiences of the era. However, in the modern age of games as a service and constant updates, the game that so many players fell in love with is not the same as the version of Overwatch that people play today. For Overwatch, this concept is taken quite literally, as the original Overwatch that won Game of the Year was taken offline in 2022 to be replaced by what was once Overwatch 2, before the sequel changed its name back to just "Overwatch" earlier this year.
At the very least, every other Game of the Year winner can still be played in the modern day in the iteration that won Game of the Year, a facet that just doesn't apply to Overwatch. Even before the free-to-play sequel replaced the original game and filled it with toxic microtransactions and false promises of real single-player content, the original game was certainly dwindling in the eyes of players. A myriad of awkward balance decisions and uninteresting new heroes had players losing passion and fun they once had with the game, especially with many new and more exciting hero shooters being released in the wake of Overwatch's success.
1 'John Madden Football' (1990)
I promise that I did not intend to repeatedly dunk on the Madden series when constructing this list, but even more shocking than Madden NFL 2004's victory is that Golden Joystick awarded the original John Madden Football Game of the Year for games released on 16-bit consoles. At least 2004 is still appreciated and played by some die-hard Madden fans today, while this 16-bit sports sim game, while certainly groundbreaking for the era, is overwhelmingly outdated and improved upon by nearly every Madden game released since. There is some charm in seeing an effective football game work on a 16-bit console, but novelty and retro charm alone do not make a well-aged game in the modern age of gaming.
The game simply feels sluggish and unresponsive to play today when considering the overwhelming quality-of-life changes that football video games have received in the decades since this game's release. While Golden Joystick wasn't able to choose from the various great SNES games released in 1990, since the region didn't receive the console for a few more years, there were still numerous great Sega Genesis games more deserving of the award than this sports sim game. Most notably, icons of the Genesis library like Golden Axe, Strider, Phantasy Star II, Columns, and Altered Beast were all overlooked in favor of a game that is rarely ever looked back on today.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.