Game Awards interview - ‘there are four or five’ reveals on the scale of Elden Ring

Ahead of The Game Awards 2021, we speak to Geoff Keighley about what it's like behind the scenes and what to expect at the show.

At one point in time, Geoff Keighley was known as a video game journalist – one who specialized in telling behind-the-scenes stories. These days, thanks to the relationships and contacts he built up in that former life, he’s more of a curator. He holds many of the industry’s secrets in his head and works with almost every major publisher to create The Game Awards, a celebration of video game development and a yearly event for teasing and revealing new games. 

What’s that shift been like for Keighley himself? 

“Well, I wish I had more time to play games,” he laughs. “We’re so busy making the show. I really want to play Halo, but I don’t have time.” 

It’s not just a shift in priorities, however. Because of his position as both producer and presenter of The Game Awards, Keighley often has to keep critiques to himself these days – he has to bottle his previous self away. This impartiality recently led to him coming under fire for saying he was looking at how to “navigate” Activision Blizzard’s involvement in the show, following recent allegations of workplace harassment and abuse at the company. Many took this as him saying he isn’t taking sides, though that’s not something he actually said. Keighley would later follow up with a more concrete statement on Twitter, saying Activision Blizzard wouldn’t be involved in the show outside of nominations for some of its games – games voted on by media outlets. 

“It’s always tough for me because I have to be Switzerland now,” Keighley says. “I’m not involved in the voting and it’s always tough when a game gets nominated and people get annoyed at me. I see it in my feed all the time. It’s like, ‘Keighley screwed these guys, Keighley fanboyed this game,’ or whatever. I’m inextricably linked to the show and I get that my name is on it. I host it, I own it, so anything about it ultimately does roll up to me. But you just have to divorce yourself from that. 

“I’m glad that I am Switzerland because it lets people have the debate and I can kind of step out of that, versus people asking me who I think should win Game of the Year. And honestly, this year? I think there’s no frontrunner. There are certain years where I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s gonna be God of War or Red Dead.’ This year, you could argue Resident Evil is great, or It Takes Two, or Psychonauts. Maybe Deathloop would be a frontrunner in some senses. This is a fun year for me because the voting is very split.”

Keighley is right. Even as someone who’s been writing and thinking about 2021’s games for a year, it’s hard to pick a winner. It’d be nice to see Deathloop developer Arkane get its dues, but there’s also a part of me that wants to see what kind of nuclear explosion would happen if Hazelight’s Josef Fares went on stage to accept Game of the Year for It Takes Two. Fares is responsible for one of The Game Awards’ most memorable and meme-able moments. He joined Keighley on stage in 2017, asked politely if he could swear, Keighley said yes, and Fares went on to say “F*** the Oscars” three times while sticking his middle finger up at the camera (coincidentally, you can summon Josef Fares if you do this in a mirror at midnight). Anyway, you can pinpoint the exact moment Keighley’s soul leaves his body. 

“He was coming from the right place,” Keighley replies when I ask if he died a little inside. “What I tolerated about it was he wasn’t saying, ‘F*** The Game Awards,’ right? It would have been much worse for me if he was going off on our show. He was paying us a compliment. He told me before we went on air, he had just flown in from Sweden. He opened up the LA Times that day, and there was an article about The Game Awards. He got really riled up about how we don’t need to be compared to the Oscars because we’re doing our own thing. 

“It’s tough because when you’re in a live show, you have so much to get to and when I start the show, I feel so much pressure. We have two and a half hours of stuff to get through. In my introductions, I’m like, ‘Hi, welcome to the show. Let’s go.’ So he started going off and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what’s gonna happen?’ There’s so much stuff sequenced and happening so I got a little thrown off, but it was a great moment. He’s been such a good friend of the show. We announced A Way Out at our first show in 2014. He’ll be there in person , and it’s nice that most of the nominees will be in the house as well.”

Outside of The Game Awards, Keighley has been setting Twitter alight with Summer Game Fest, a digital event created to fill the void left behind by E3, LA’s yearly games convention. While E3 has been struggling during the pandemic, Keighley’s more accessible event has been thriving. In June this year, after two years of people begging for it to be at Keighley’s shows, the first gameplay trailer was shown off for Elden Ring, the next game from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware. If you watch the reveal back now, you can see the satisfaction in Keighley’s face as he says the name. 

“That was two or three years in the making,” Keighley says. “Every show got questions about it, and even last year’s Game Awards, people really wanted something. It won Most Anticipated Game, but they weren’t ready There was a lot of built-up pressure. And that’s the thing I think people don’t realize – the things they want, sometimes developers just aren’t ready to show them. There will be things again this year, I’m sure, where it’s like, we want to show things, but they’re just not ready. 

“I was very happy because the trailer was great. It was a great asset, a highly anticipated game that really delivered. There were a lot of things that were good about that so yes, I was uniquely excited to be able to bring that to people. This year? Oh, God, there are probably four or five things of that level. I can’t wait to show people this stuff. Summer Game Fest was a new thing that I had created. The fact that FromSoftware bet on me and Summer Game Fest where they could have done more traditional E3 stuff, that meant a lot to me. It was a huge honor to work with the From guys, so stay tuned, there may be more coming.” 

According to Keighley, people will get a sense of “true next-generation gameplay at the show”, so expect at least one or two big reveals for PS5 or Xbox Series X. He reads all of the rumors online – they’re mostly wrong, apparently – and knows what games people are hoping to see. Some might be there, some haven’t even started discussions yet, and others are games you don’t even know you want – brand-new reveals from major studios. 

“That’s always the fun part,” he says. “Because you’ll have the known quantities of like, ‘I want this developer doing this game,’ or ‘I want this sequel.’ But what if there’s this new IP? Probably six or ten of our games are things that people don’t know exist, but we’re going to reveal them at the show in a fun way. We’ll see how it all plays out, but I feel pretty good. It’s a very diverse lineup from a lot of studios across the industry. It really did come together this year. There will always be people that will be disappointed that X game is not there or the studio didn’t show up with something. But by and large, I think it’s one of our stronger lineups that we’ve had across the entire show.” 

When he says he hopes to reveal the games in a fun way, Keighley is talking about the collaboration between the game creators and the people behind The Game Awards. They work closely together on each reveal, ensuring that every trailer is shown in a way that keeps the audience excited about what’s next. 

“The thing that means the most to me is I really get to collaborate with these studios,” Keighley says. “It’s fun to me. I wake up most mornings and it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s a new kind of trailer.’ It’s very collaborative. Some people think that we just get the trailer sent to us and we run them, but we’re working with developers on their cuts, we’re commenting on things, we’re really trying to collaborate on the theatricality of how these things are revealed in the show.” 

That’s how it is close to the air date, at least. The Game Awards, however, always begins with fear. Every show starts with nothing, and no one can dictate the release schedule – often not even game publishers. It’s a game of musical chairs until the last moment when everything is finally locked in. 

“It’s fun to know these secrets, but it also creates a lot of pressure,” Keighley says. “What’s going to be ready? And because I don’t make the games, the fear I always have is: what if there’s one year at The Game Awards where there’s just nothing to announce? Everything the internet wants is stuff we’ve asked for. Maybe they’re not ready or maybe they’re delayed. So I always live in fear that we’re not going to have enough announcements in the show, but every year it seems to work out. 

“Last year was pretty hard just because of the pandemic – a lot of things got delayed and pushed. I think we pulled it off. We had Mass Effect, Perfect Dark, Sephiroth in Smash and a lot of other great stuff. But this year – especially the first like 30 or 45 minutes of the show – we’ve got some pretty major stuff.”

Despite The Game Awards not being done yet, Keighley and the team are already thinking ahead. “Once we get to next year and all the world premieres, it’s gonna be an insane show on that front,” he says. “I’ll tell you that.” Fear is a hell of a motivator. 

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.