The Golden Snub Award is a unique category in the Vidya Gaem Awards. It recognizes the best video game that has never won an award in the show before, highlighting games that have been overlooked or snubbed in previous years.
Why have an award called “Golden Snub”?
Ever feel like something deserving didn’t win in an award show? That’s called a snub. The term is used when a person, film, video game, or any work in a specific category is perceived to have been overlooked or excluded from receiving a nomination or award, despite being deserving of it.
A snub can happen for various reasons, including politics within the industry, biases, or simply an oversight by the nominating committee. Often, fans and critics express their disappointment over a snub, as they feel that the overlooked work or individual was more deserving of recognition than other candidates. Snubs are thus largely subjective, and many have different opinions on what qualifies as an outstanding performance or piece of work.
In the Vidya Gaem Awards, we allow the public to nominate and vote on all categories within the show, and we try to address snubs by having a diversity of categories for games to qualify for, including “best game nobody played” which, since 2019, includes only games that weren’t nominated in other categories in the /v/GAs.
These measures aren’t foolproof though. Even though our voters have many unique tastes, our preferential voting system means the most preferred nominee must win, and not all nominees can win first place.
Thus, the “Golden Snub Award” offers a chance for these runner-up games to receive recognition and attention, even for games well after their initial release.
How “Golden Snub” was presented
The award opens in a darkly lit room, with a pillar, a wooden table, and green commercial dumpster. The camera goes up, Persona 5 is shown as a nominee with 25 Sweep Points, and a copy of the game is place on the table.
The same happens for Outer Wilds, Sonic Mania, and Papers Please. Each are placed on the same wooden table.
Then, a screen says “Your Winner Is: Dragon’s Dogma (2012)”. It sits high on the wooden pillar. The dumpster is now open.
Then, a remarkably unexpected thing happens. The pillar opens from its side, and a spring-loaded pusher begins to emerge, extending out to push the four runner-up games toward the dumpster. Indeed, in this award, they had been snubbed once more.
Four eerie quotes are heard, each with an echo.
- “You need to shut the fuck up.” ~ Penn Jillette
- “Your fantasies can’t ever be quenched, can they?! When will you learn… when will you learn… that your actions have consequences?” ~ SammyClassicSonicFan
- “He never scored… What a loser.” ~ Beavis (from Beavis & Butthead)
- “Into the trash it goes.” ~ Penn Jillette
After which, the award ends. Dragon’s Dogma won the Golden Snub… but at what cost to the other four games?
My thoughts
It’s true, Dragon’s Dogma didn’t win anything in the 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards. It placed 2nd in the “/v/irgin Award” for best new IP. But while it was a great new IP, the game that was nominated in 2012 and the game that was nominated in 2022 are not exactly the same.
Allow me to explain. The rationale for not doing re-dos of our past awards is because games are unique, and can be updated or expanded upon over time through patches, updates, or other changes.
Such was true for a game like Dark Souls, which won our Best Game of the Decade Award as a 2011 title, but didn’t win our Least Hated category in 2011 (Deus Ex: Human Revolution did). For context, Dark Souls was locked on the PlayStation until 2012, and its Prepare To Die edition had a very troubled and glitchy launch.
It is for that reason I think Dragon’s Dogma is in a similar boat. It launched as a console exclusive until porting to the PC four years later, in 2016. The game is sold under “Dragon’s Dogma : Dark Arisen” banner because of the eponymous expansion. It is not the same game as 2012’s Dragon’s Dogma.
Nonetheless, Golden Snub as a concept was fun to try out, and explore what results from the runners up of “Golden Snub”. But remember, like all things in this world, such actions have consequences.
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The Vidya Gaem Awards are an award show for video games originating from 4chan’s “/v/ — Video Games” board. It is an award show that features both positive and negative award categories, has been held each year online since 2011, and made possible by a group of volunteers who work on the project for free. Learn more about “What are the Vidya Gaem Awards?” here.
Disclosure: I am the current Head of Outreach and the former Executive Producer of the Vidya Gaem Awards (2013–2015, 2017).
This article was written with the assistance of GPT-4.
