This one was another last minute idea. Despite vowing to not do any of these again after the Super Mario World/Sonic 2 debacle, it keeps happening. I realised no one on the 1UP Pod team had time to do a December episode, which is where we’d usually fit in our GOTY content, and I wanted to get something out for the feed so I devised the idea of doing my own GOTY episode where I could talk about some of the games that I loved and wouldn’t find time to cover in any future 1UP Pod content.
The awards show parody idea came from that. It was shortly after The Golden Joystick Awards and The Game Awards for that year turned out to be unique clusterfucks. There are always a few gaming awards shows towards the end of the year and they’re often frustratingly shit. They either disrespect the talent or they hold the audience in contempt, and they increasingly favour marketing over the games being celebrated. Making all that into a naff farce seemed pretty easy.
I’m not completely happy with how it all came together but it was a victim of time constraints. I recorded half of the episode before I had to re-record big chunks and re-edit them into the episode. I hadn’t played Alan Wake II or Super Mario Bros Wonder initially, so there were different games up for several nominations. Spider-Man 2 was up for Best Story, Dredge was up for visual presentation, FFXVI was up for sound, Diablo 4 was up for Multiplayer, and Baldur’s Gate 3 was also up for gameplay. In those pairings, BG3 still won for story, Zelda would’ve won for visuals, dead space would have won for sound, b3 would have still won for multiplayer, and zelda would have still won for gameplay.
I re-recorded parts of these sections to save myself time but I didn’t like how the re-records worked out, the sound quality was terrible on my first attempt, so I did it again with a better sound set up. Unfortunately this was after Christmas and I had over indulged to the point where I was physically uncomfortable at all times and utterly exhausted, so the energy level of my re-records is massively down compared to my first recording. I couldn’t find a way to match that original energy, sadly, so things sound uneven. It stands out massively to me, which it would, but I feel like it’s noticeable to anyone and I can’t shake my disappointment that I didn’t get to put out the best possible version of this idea.
I loved the stuff I did in my original edit too much to re-record the entire episode and I’d done too much work on it to scrap the whole thing, so I just figured it was better to power through and hope the good parts outshine the parts that bug me.
I need to be kinder to myself. I beat myself up enough about the Mario/Sonic episode and this was a last mintute idea that needed to adjust multiple times. The fact it got done at all is a miracle, honestly. I still really like most of it.
One of the gags didn’t play out the way I devised, though. Joe Biden Kid was supposed to be a more direct analogue of the Bill Clinton Kid who derailed Elden Ring’s GOTY win at The Game Awards 2022, but I couldn’t get my voice to sound convincingly child-like and didn’t want to ask my eldest child to do the part since the culmination of that gag had always been the kid being savagely beaten by hired goons. It didn’t feel right to me having my own kid in that role for some reason. So I just made Joe Biden’s rambling bollocks sound like it was coming from a weird little chipmunk child. I don’t think that gag lands nearly as well, and didn’t really need to be in there. I just felt like there was too much dead air in the story if I removed it.
I was happy with all of the other gags – especially the two ads that I produced.
I had always planned to make this a recurring part of the series going forward, and have a separate GOTY storyline planned in advance, so I hopefully know how to avoid all of these pitfalls in future. Such as not eating so much fucking food at Christmas.