Zelda and Nintendo clean up at the DICE Awards
Breath of the Wild wins four including GOTY, while Nintendo was involved with a further seven winners
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received four awards at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas last night, including the prestigious Game of the Year trophy.
Nintendo's celebrated revival of the Zelda franchise received three other awards: Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Game Design, and Adventure Game of the Year. Breath of the Wild was the also the highest rated game on Metacritic in 2017, as well as GamesIndustry.biz's own choice for Game of the Year.
Nintendo was involved with a slew of other DICE Awards, the most notable of which was the Lifetime Achievement Award presented to special corporate advisor Genyo Takeda, for his role in the creation of the N64, the GameCube and the Wii.
Super Mario Odyssey won Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe won Racing Game of the Year, Intelligent Systems' Fire Emblem Heroes won Mobile Game of the Year, MercurySteam and Nintendo's Samus Returns won Handheld Game of the Year, and SFB Games' Snipperclips picked up both Family Game of the Year and the DICE Sprite Award.
After Zelda, the single biggest winner of the night was StudioMDHR's visually stunning platformer Cuphead, which picked up three awards in total: Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Animation, and Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition.
The rest of the winners are listed below, with Guerrilla's Horizon Zero Dawn, Ready at Dawn's Lone Echo/Echo Arena and PUBG Corporation's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds all notable for receiving two awards each.
- Immersive Reality Technical Achievement - Lone Echo/Echo Arena
- Immersive Reality Game of the Year - Lone Echo/Echo Arena
- Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay - PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
- Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year - Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
- Sports Game of the Year - FIFA 18
- Role-Playing Game of the Year - Nier: Automata
- Fighting Game of the Year - Injustice 2
- Action Game of the Year - PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
- Outstanding Technical Achievement - Horizon Zero Dawn
- Outstanding Achievement in Story - Horizon Zero Dawn
- Outstanding Achievement in Character - Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Senua