I know there’s no point in getting heated about the Game Awards every year, but the 2025 nominations are really making this year’s event feel like it’s gonna be the Taco Bell of award ceremonies. By that, I mean it feels like every category’s nominations are made up of the same five or so games. Clair Obscur and Ghost of Yotei were eating, but pretty much anything else got snubbed. But I’m not here to yell about games, actually. I’m here to call attention to one of the most egregious snubs of the show, which is found in a non-game category. Specifically, where the hell is Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in the Best Adaptation category?
Best Adaptation was added to the Game Awards’ categories in 2022, rewarding TV and film adaptations of video games for finally getting off of the Uwe Boll assembly line and sometimes being things worth watching. Now that pretty much every company from Nintendo to Sony is trying to get into streaming services and multiplexes, it’s a worthwhile category to have at a video game award show. However, the 2025 Adaptation category is so vile in its inclusions and omissions that it’s enough to make a hedgehog vow to destroy the world for his dearly departed best friend.
This year’s nominees range from forgettable to absolute dogshit. Here’s what we’re working with:
First of all, don’t even get me started on The Last of Us season two; you can read literally thousands of words I wrote on it earlier in the year. Meanwhile, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the movie that currently holds the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of any video game adaptation, is nowhere to be seen. There are a few reasons this probably happened. The cinematic adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2 came out last December, just late enough to miss the 2024 awards but still be eligible for the 2025 ceremony. That’s long enough for the jury to have forgotten that the movie could compete for the prize, and for stinkers like Minecraft and The Last of Us to be top of mind. This is an especially heinous oversight given the Very Bad Knuckles Paramount+ show, which sidelined the actual Sonic characters for the most obnoxious of its human originals, was nominated in 2024.
Part of getting past the whole “putting stock in award shows” phase of your life is recognizing that they are often merely reflections of what the jury actually got around to. That’s likely why 2025’s nominees, rather than representing the breadth of the medium, wound up being so many of the same games over and over again. Some of the categories, such as Accessibility and Esports, are voted on by a jury of experts, while a lot of the rest are more generalized, which often keeps the more niche games, like the IMO obvious GOTY contender The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, from getting the nods they deserve. And sometimes you just get weird oversights, like Sonic the Hedgehog 3 missing out on a nomination for Best Adaptation, while Jack Black saying “Chicken jockey!” gets to cosplay as a good film for a night. God, The Last of Us season two is going to win, isn’t it? I gotta lie down. Keanu Reeves didn’t deserve this.
