The Game Awards are coming back for their yearly installment on December 8th, 2022. In honor of that event, former Nintendo employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang talked about a bit of Nintendo history from The Game Awards back in 2017.

You can hear the entire discussion above, which focuses on Nintendo’s expectations for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at The Game Awards 2017. Long story short, Nintendo didn’t think Breath of the Wild was going to win Game of the Year, and that feeling led to all kinds of stress within Nintendo’s walls.

You can see a summary of the major tidbits below, courtesy of Phantom Thief on Famiboards.

  • Nintendo wavers on supporting the VGAs, sometimes going big and others going quiet
  • In 2017, Nintendo wanted to go big on core gamer attention, thus the TGA support
  • Nintendo got worried Breath of the Wild wouldn’t win game of the year
  • Super Mario Odyssey was also nominated, and they thought the vote would be split
  • Nintendo thought this would lead to Horizon: Zero Dawn winning Game of the Year
  • this line of thinking led to what Kit and Krysta described as ‘mass panic’ at Nintendo
  • Nintendo spent literal months on acceptance speeches
  • when Zelda & Mario didn’t win other categories they were nominated, morale dropped
  • once Zelda won Game Direction, Nintendo’s confidence was restored
  • Nintendo’s Aonuma and Fujibayashi were extremely excited and pumped
  • this made it clear to Kit & Krystal that individual developers do care
  • Aonuma felt Zelda winning GotY was the culmination of the BOTW journey for him
  • Koizumi had already accepted that Zelda would beat out Super Mario Odyssey
  • Koizumi is a producer for the Switch, so he counted BOTW’s win as a win of his own
  • everyone at Nintendo was incredibly happy and celebrated hard at the afterparty

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Comments (4)

Most Upvoted

kuribo

Nintendo devs shouldn’t worry and put much stock into the Video Game Awards to be honest. It’s not the end all and be all of accolades and often is not the best reflection on the past year of gaming.

kuribo

1+ y ago

Nintendo devs shouldn’t worry and put much stock into the Video Game Awards to be honest. It’s not the end all and be all of accolades and often is not the best reflection on the past year of gaming.


ridleysaria

1+ y ago

Seeing how many people were buying and loving the game should have been enough validation. A silly little award wasn’t needed. It just makes them look insecure to “panic” over it.


sligeach_eire

1+ y ago

"Koizumi is a producer for the Switch, so he counted BOTW’s win as a win of his own"

Except, BOTW is a Wii U game. I read the headline and was interested, only to see Kit and Krysta. I absolutely loathed Nintendo Minute. BOTW fully deserved its Game of the Year award. Here's hoping that Tears of the Kingdom wins many, many Game of the Year awards next year.

Edited 1 time

socar

1+ y ago

"Koizumi had already accepted that Zelda would beat out Super Mario Odyssey"

Good thing it won in the end