The 1990s, the decade that went unrecorded

What survives

We have just added the 1990s to this database. Ten seasons, from 1990 to 1999. Together they hold 22 Game of the Year awards from 7 outlets in 3 countries.

For comparison: the 2025 season on its own holds 765 awards from 683 outlets in 59 countries.

That is not a gap in our research. It is the shape of the record itself.

Four years that rest on one award each

4 of those ten seasons come down to a single sourceable award. The entire surviving verdict on 1993 is that one American magazine named Samurai Shodown. Nobody else's pick from that year can be cited today — not because nobody picked, but because what they picked was printed on paper and never transcribed.

Two more seasons end level, with no game ahead. In 1999 four different outlets named four different games, one award each. We show that as a tie rather than crowning whichever sorts first, because with a field this small a tie is not a close race — it is the absence of a result.

No game in the decade collected more than 2 awards. 18 different games share the 22 awards between them.

Why the ceremonies survived and the magazines did not

Of the 22 awards, 8 come from an award ceremony and the rest from publications. That ratio is upside down compared with any modern season, where the press outnumbers the ceremonies by hundreds to one, and the reason is institutional rather than editorial.

An academy keeps its own records and puts them on its own website, where they stay. A magazine prints its awards in a December issue, the issue goes out of print, the publisher folds or is sold, and thirty years later the award exists only if a volunteer scanned that issue. Everything we hold from Electronic Gaming Monthly — the single largest source in the decade — traces back to its printed Buyer's Guides, cited by issue and page.

There is one web page in the set worth naming. GameSpot's 1996 award still sits in the Internet Archive, on a page that opens "Game of the Year: Diablo" and explains that productivity in the office had ground to a halt. It survives because someone crawled it. Its 1998 and 1999 equivalents are excluded for a different reason: by then GameSpot handed out a Console and a PC award side by side, and a platform award beside other platform awards is not a Game of the Year.

What this decade may and may not be used for

Every 1990s season is marked partial, and partial here is not a soft warning. These seasons are excluded from every cross-year comparison on this site: the median winning share, the dominance rankings, the franchise and studio tables. A season holding one award cannot produce a meaningful percentage, and letting it try would corrupt every figure it touched.

15 of the 22 rest on a primary or archival source — the award body's own page, a scanned magazine, a printed issue cited by page number. The remainder rest on a third-party list and are marked as the weaker tier. None of them rest on somebody's memory.

What the decade is good for is the opposite of comparison. It is a record that these awards happened, kept so that a claim about the 1990s can be checked rather than asserted. If you know where a 1990s Game of the Year award is documented that we do not list — a scanned issue, an archived page, a ceremony's own records — that is exactly the kind of thing this database exists to absorb.

What we found in the 2000s while we were there

The same research pass went back over 2000–2010, the years that always looked thinnest after the archive itself. It added 22 awards, and the single largest omission was not a magazine at all: the Game Developers Choice Awards were missing for every season from 2000 to 2010.

That is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the intuition. The early 2000s are thin here not because obvious names are absent — most of the big outlets were already tracked — but because the tracked field genuinely was small, and it grew from 40 outlets in 2003 to 683 in 2025. The long tail of small sites that existed then was never recorded anywhere, and no amount of research recovers what was never written down.