It Takes Two gets crowned Game of the Year at the DICE Awards
Phil Spencer and Ed Boon also honoured by the academy.
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The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' 25th annualDICE Awardstook place yesterday, and among the big winners were Hazelight’s It Takes Two and current man-of-the-gaming-moment Phil Spencer, who received a lifetime achievement award. In case you’re curious, DICE stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain.
There are quite a lot of awards: I’ll put the full list below, but the biggies are probably It Takes Two scooping both Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Game Design. Deathloop received Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, which sounds rather similar to the latter, while Halo Infinite bagged both Action and Online Game of the Year. Age of Empires 4 scored the best strategy/simulation title, while Forza Horizon 5 got Racing Game of the Year. There was a bit of love for Unpacking, too, which received the Outstanding Achievement for an Indie Game award.
After all the game awards, focus switched to the people. Xbox chief Phil Spencer received DICE’s lifetime achievement award, while Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon was inducted into the DICE Hall of Fame. Get over here Ed!
Hazelight founder and It Takes Two writer and director Josef Fares kept his reaction to the game’s latest success short and sweet:
This is incredible, thank you so much😭🙏❤️ https://t.co/8unt72oPlrFebruary 25, 2022
It Takes Two has been a huge hit for Hazelight and EA,selling over 5 million copiesand receiving many awards, including biggies likeThe Game Awards' game of the year.Our reviewhighlighted the game’s sheer imaginative variety: “Throughout my time with It Takes Two, my partner and I have tinkered with time inside a cuckoo clock, escaped from a lair of ferocious moles, traveled on the back of a giant ghostly catfish, and had a fistfight with a squirrel on top of a flying plane—and that’s not the half (quarter, fifth or sixth) of it.”
The DICE award recognitions are another huge vindication for the studio, and Fares personally, who has been pushing for fresh ways of thinking about co-op for many years with the likes of Brothers and A Way Out.
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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”
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