Why The Orange Box Isn't a Game (It's a Box)

We expect some of you, while reading our Shacknews Game of the Year Awards 2007, will take umbrage with our unspoken decision not to treat Valve's mega-bargain The Orange Box as a single game, so let me speak on it here.

There are multiple reasons we went that route. One was the principle of the thing. You may or may not notice on Shacknews that we go out of our way to refer to games by the developer, not their publisher--if you don't go out of your way to look for this, you might be surprised by how many sites and magazines do not do this consistently. It is part of a general appreciation for developers, and the craft of game development. In that vein, we see Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2 as individual works, not as one large product.

Certainly, you can buy them all together, but we are less concerned with how games are purchased than with how they are developed, played, and experienced--in the case of The Orange Box, they are developed, played, and enjoyed as individual experiences.

There is also the practical consideration that to give an award to The Orange Box would detract from the greatness of its individual components. Sure, a collection of three new Valve games and two classics is better than some other game, but stating that seems more like a formality than an interesting judgment.

It is much more worthwhile and impressive to honor Portal as the best game of the year, to honor Team Fortress 2 for its artistic achievement, to honor Half-Life 2: Episode Two for its excellent action. To give these awards to the compilation as a whole would be to dilute the reasons each award was being given.

On an even more logistical note, though every game in The Orange Box is excellent, we clearly do feel that they have different strengths, and we wanted to be able to highlight those strengths in game-specific ways rather than by simply throwing awards left and right at a compilation package, when in reality we are intending those honors to be bestowed on individual games in that package.

You may still disagree, but we stand firm in our decision to treat Valve's three new remarkable games of 2007 as three separate games. With the level of quality each brings to the table, they deserve to be recognized individually.