Derek Yu is a visual artist, game designer, and sometimes writer, best known for creating the Spelunky series of games. For many years, he was also the Editor-in-Chief of TIGSource, the independent games website and community. He goes by @mossmouth on Twitter.
It was a busy year for me workwise, trying to get Spelunky 2 out the door with BlitWorks and our other collaborators, but I can’t really stop playing video games, can I?! That said, I’m still catching up on games from the last century, let alone this year, so I can’t realistically make a Top 10 list of games that were released in 2020. You’ll have to settle, instead, for a Top Ten list of games I played in 2020 that were meaningful to me.
Enjoy!
10. Dunk Lords
After Andy Hull and I finished Spelunky, I took a break from game development to write a book about its development and Andy began work on Dunk Lords, a fantastical 2v2 arcade basketball game featuring a swole strawberry, a circus strongman, and my favorite character, a cybernetic rockabilly biker named D. Rock. So okay, this is an extra biased pick for my GOTY list, seeing as how my jersey is also hanging on the hallowed walls of Dunk Baby Academy. But the game really does scratch a serious itch for me as someone who has enjoyed many hours of NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, Mutant League Football, NES Ice Hockey, and many other unrealistic sports titles. Like those games, Dunk Lords is great to play with friends (locally), but it also comes with a single-player story mode that is surprisingly extensive for this genre. There’s also a surprising amount to learn--it takes time to figure out how to make use of the numerous techniques at your disposal, from basketball-inspired alley oops and dashes to the wild special moves that give the game a fighting game feel. Not to mention the many items that you can equip between quarters, each one lovingly designed to look and feel unique.
When Andy offered to help me with Spelunky, he had just spent five years as a wooden toy designer, and neither of us had much experience programming console games. I was confident we’d be able to figure it out together, though. As a toy designer, Andy was a hard-working, meticulous, and multi-faceted craftsman, and after our 20+ years as friends, I knew he’d bring that to game-making, as well. Spelunky benefited tremendously from his skills and insight, and in Dunk Lords it’s on full display. Just like Andy himself, the game is much more complex than the cheery exterior might lead you to think!
9. Super Mario Bros. 35
I had a great time with Tetris 99 last year, but I could not, for the life of me, pull off a victory (the closest I got was 2nd place). Thankfully, I’m better at jumping around on blocks than I am at fitting them together, and I thoroughly enjoyed coming out on top in numerous games of Mario 35! If any eSports teams are looking for their next superstar, you know where to find me.
8. Doom Eternal
Like many, I was skeptical of Doom’s 2016 reboot, especially when I saw the up-close glory kills, which felt like they might slow down the game unnecessarily. I cynically assumed they were an attempt to make the “dead simple” gameplay of the originals feel superficially more cinematic. I was wrong, though--yes, they did make the game feel more cinematic, but they also flowed naturally from the gunplay as a type of risk-reward mechanic. Overall, Doom 2016 felt like it captured the feeling of the original games while also moving the series forward in a slightly unconventional direction.
And what Doom 2016 established, Eternal expanded on and refined. I have to imagine that at some point, Marty, Hugo, and rest of the id crew realized that their vision of DOOM had a lot in common with '90s coin-up arcade games and leaned into it--as I flew around the game’s arenas like a murderous acrobat, I felt like I was playing a first-person version of Smash TV taken to its logical conclusion. The 1ups seemed to be an obvious nod to that era of video games and an embrace of the beautiful ridiculousness of this artform. Only in games can it make perfect sense that a demon would spit out armor, ammo, or health depending on how you kill them.
I’m curious to see where the team takes this franchise. On social media I quipped that I hoped to see it go partially off the rails. The Fortress of Doom reminds me of the Sky Palace from ActRaiser… would it be crazy if Doom Guy oversaw the rebuilding of Earth from up on high by alternating between blood-soaked city-building simulator and blood-soaked FPS? One can dream!