The Writer’s Guild of Great Britain has announced the winners of this years annual honours today, with the award for "Best Writing In A Video Game" awarded to Variable State’s Jonathan Burroughs, Lyndon Holland and Terry Kenny for Virginia, the studio’s debut game. A game that features absolutely no dialogue.
It’s a big win for the team, with Virginia being a first-person mystery game and, as mentioned above, featuring not a single line of spoken language. The reward in this case is a testament perhaps to the game’s scripting and the way it tells a story non-verbally.
It was a year full of interesting nominations, as Virginia won out over Mata Haggis’s first person indie title Fragments of Him and FIFA 17 — EA’s yearly iteration of its monolithic football franchise — which had a full campaign this year written by Tom Watt, Martin Korda and Matthew Turner.
Develop interviewed Variable State in June last year, which you can see here.