The game award that changes the lives of its winners
Added 2025-05-22 04:00:00 +0000 UTC
This week on Post Games, “You won the biggest award in indie games. Now what?”
Act 1: The history of indie games and its biggest award, The Independent Games Festival’s Seamus McNally Grand Prize
Act 2: An interview with the latest IGF Grand Prize winners about how post-award life changes – and stays the same
Act 3: The news of the week, including incredible and rare games you can now play in English
Plus: For Patreon subscribers, a bonus interview: The story of the high school kids who won the first-ever IGF Grand Prize in 1999 for Fire and Darkness. One of the game’s creators actually hopped on a call and shared what became of the team and their lost game
Image: Outer Wilds, winner of the 2015 IGF Grand Prize (Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive)
Subscribe to Post Games on Patreon. Keep the show alive, get tons of cool stuff, and listen to new episodes early! Next Friday: why you can't escape porn/sex/lewd games! And on Monday, June 2, the first video in the Video Game Journalism 101 series!
Reference materials:
Act 1: The IGF
A web memorial for Seamus McNally at Gamedev.net, including photos of the family accepting the IGF Grand Prize and Seamus standing alongside John Cormack and his Ferrari. Cormack
A letter by Cormack on meeting Seamus through the Starlight Foundation
Act 2: Consume Me:
Consume Me on Steam
Jenny's guide to prototyping personal experience
Jenny’s 2017 GDC talk “Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute.”
Act 3: News of the Week
One of my fave newsletters, Read Only Memo. covered the brand new localization of Sakura Wars 2. To quote a review that ROM found: “Sakura Wars 2 is a shining light not just of RPGs but games as a whole. It's a triumphant masterpiece, and every day I try to live my life a little bit more like it.”
Also localized: Princess Crown, a beloved Sega Saturn game made by the team that would become Vanillaware – 13 Sentinels!
Other exciting localizations: Ganbare Goemon 2
Also discussed:
Take-Two CEO says he doesn't play video games
Lost in Cult announces beautiful physical games, including Thank Goodness You're Here
Just for Patreon:
Bonus Act: Fire and Darkness, the lost winner of the first IGF Grand Prize
A 2013 interview with the winners of the 1999 IGF Awards
A photo of Dave Scherer, a developer of Fire and Darkness, at IGF 1999
A magazine story on Fire and Darkness from 1999
Free game of the week:
(GTA - guns) + nude dude = Nude Awakening
Recommended via Warp Door
The week in video game links
"Meet the man who designed Pokémon's iconic logo" (IGN)
Relevant to our Consume Me conversation: "Eating Disorder Content Is Infiltrating TikTok. Some Creators Are Going Viral Debunking It" (Wired)
Blades of Fire sounds like a souls-game for people who can't get into souls-games (Eurogamer)
An incredible collection of words: "Overwatch players freak out over supposed Widowmaker butt nerf, proving that Marvel Rivals gooner skins have wound back the clock 10 years" (PCGamer)
Video game preservation matters... even for the Wii U (Time Extension)
What else I'm playing, watching, hearing, and reading
Want to spend the weekend with the definition of a lovable 7/10 video game? Try Deliver at All Costs.
I love staying up late watching a classic thriller. They don't get much better than The Breaking Point, an overlooked adaptation of Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" that has more in common with great heist flicks than leisurely literary adaptations. It's now streaming on Criterion Channel.
It will take me the entirety of the baseball season to finish the audiobook for The New York Game. This non-fiction doorstopper about baseball and New York City has become my go-to for long drives to and from LA.
