The Embers of the Year
Abstract
An essay about the final four months of the year as a sequence of embers: September, October, November and December, each carrying one last concentration of anticipation before the calendar burns out and begins again. Beginning with Tokyo Game Show in September, then looking toward New York Comic Con in October, Xbox's 25th anniversary in November and The Game Awards in December, The Embers of the Year turns a childhood observation about the shared "-ber" ending of the months into a personal philosophy of anticipation. Along the way it considers Gargoyles, Banjo-Kazooie, Oddworld, Legacy of Kain, Fumito Ueda, Jurassic Park, Middle-earth, Star Wars, Zelda, Bloodborne and the future of consoles, while asking why announcements, reveals and creative surprises still matter. At its centre is a simple conviction: video games remain a uniquely life-resembling art form because they require participation, decision and consequence, and a year is richer when there is at least one genuinely exciting thing to look toward in every month.
Introduction: When the Year Becomes Ember
For as long as I can remember, I have liked the last four months of the year for a reason that is partly seasonal, partly linguistic and partly something I invented for myself when I was young. September, October, November and December all end the same way. They are the "-ber" months, a grouping that exists independently of me and is used in different cultures and online shorthand, but the association I made as a child was with a different word: ember. I heard that ending and imagined a fire. By the time September arrives, the main blaze of the year has already happened. January has ignition in it. The first half of the year has the feeling of expansion, plans, new releases, launches, school terms, projects, milestones and the strange confidence that comes from believing there is still plenty of year left. Then, at some point, the light changes. The calendar has fewer blank pages in front of it than behind it. The year is still alive, but it is no longer a new fire. It has burned down into embers. The etymology is not actually about fire, and I like that distinction. September comes from the Latin septem, seven, October from octo, eight, November from novem, nine, and December from decem, ten, reminders of the old Roman calendar in which these were the seventh through tenth months. The shared ending is generally traced to the Latin form of those month names, probably involving an adjectival suffix rather than anything remotely connected to the English word ember. I do not need a false etymology to preserve the image. The historical truth and the personal association can sit beside each other. The names were never designed to describe a dying fire. To me, they simply sound as if they do, and once I noticed that as a child I could never quite unhear it.
There is also something pleasingly Australian about refusing to make the metaphor depend too heavily on northern autumn. I live in Canberra. September through December do not carry us into winter darkness. They carry us through spring and toward summer. The physical world around me is becoming brighter rather than dimmer. That makes the metaphor more clearly about time than weather. The year itself is burning down even while the days lengthen. In that sense, the embers are not grey ash. They are the concentrated heat left when a fire has become smaller and, sometimes, more beautiful. An ember can glow with extraordinary intensity. It can relight a fire. It can be the last thing visible before darkness or the first point from which something new begins. I have carried another private rule for years: I want one cool thing a month. I do not mean that every month needs a major purchase, a holiday, a spectacle or a life-changing event. The rule is more modest than that. I like having one point on the horizon that gives a month shape. It might be a film, a game, an exhibition, a concert, a convention, a conversation, a launch, an anniversary or simply the possibility that something I love will return. Anticipation is part of the experience. The days before something can have their own texture. A month becomes easier to remember if it has one bright object inside it. The embers of the year are where this rule becomes especially visible because the remaining calendar is finite. In January, there is almost too much possibility. In October, there are twelve weeks. In November, there are eight. In December, the countdown is no longer conceptual. We feel it. The final quarter naturally becomes a series of last chances for the year to surprise us. A reveal in October feels different from a reveal in March because it belongs to the closing movement. A November anniversary can carry twenty-five years of memory into a few minutes. A December awards show can become a ritual in which the industry looks backward and forward at once.
For 2026, I can see the sequence unusually clearly. September's ember was Tokyo Game Show. October's ember is New York Comic Con. November's ember is Xbox at twenty-five. December's ember is The Game Awards. They are not equal in scale, and I do not expect all of them to give me exactly what I want. That is not the point. The point is that each one represents a small site of possibility, a place in the calendar where the unknown can still enter. I also want to state what this essay is and is not. It is not a prediction sheet dressed up as philosophy. I am not claiming insider knowledge. I do not want to turn wishful thinking into rumour, or rumour into fact. In games and entertainment, that distinction matters because anticipation can make us easy to manipulate. A logo in a background becomes a sequel. A registration becomes a release window. A silhouette becomes a confirmed character. A journalist's report becomes an official announcement after being repeated enough times. I would rather keep the categories clean. Some things below are confirmed. Some are plausible. Some are long shots. Some are simply what I would love to see. That last category is valuable. Hope does not need to masquerade as information. It can be declared as hope and still be worth writing about. The final four months are, for me, the natural time to do it.
The September Ember: Tokyo Game Show
September's ember has already burned. Tokyo Game Show 2026 ran from 17 to 21 September at Makuhari Messe, its longest edition to date and a thirtieth-anniversary year for the event. It arrived at exactly the right point in the calendar to establish the rhythm I mean. The northern gaming summer had already delivered its main showcases. The year's largest releases were either known, delayed, released or moving toward launch. Tokyo Game Show did not need to carry the whole industry. It needed to provide another concentration of possibility after the long middle of the year. I have always liked Tokyo Game Show because it carries a different imaginative geography from the American and European events. Even in a globalised industry, place matters. Japanese developers, publishers and audiences have shaped the medium at every level, from hardware and arcade history to role-playing games, action design, survival horror, platforming, visual language and controller conventions. A Tokyo event can therefore feel less like a regional branch of a global calendar and more like one of the places from which the calendar is generated. This year's show also overlapped neatly with Xbox's anniversary story. Xbox held a Tokyo Game Show broadcast on 17 September during a year in which the company is celebrating twenty-five years. The presentation included updates from Japanese and international publishers and, according to Xbox's own recap, seventeen new gameplay reveals and announcements, a surprise release and a world premiere. That kind of number can sound like marketing arithmetic, but the underlying appeal is simple: a concentrated hour can suddenly reorganise your personal future calendar. A game you did not know existed can become something you care about. A game you had almost forgotten can move back into focus. A project that seemed abstract can acquire a release date, music, a voice or a first playable idea. That is what an ember does in this essay. It does not have to be the biggest fire of the year. It has to glow strongly enough to make the final stretch feel alive.
Tokyo Game Show also reminds me why I still care about the old ritual of the reveal. There is a fashionable cynicism around showcases now. People complain that trailers are marketing, that cinematic reveals tell us too little, that release calendars are overpacked, that games are announced too early, that companies use nostalgia as a substitute for invention, that corporate presentations are designed to manufacture emotional response. All of those criticisms can be true. They do not cancel the pleasure of discovery. Marketing is not art, but marketing can be the doorway through which we first encounter art. A trailer can be manipulative and still introduce a world that later matters enormously to us. A title card can be commercially calculated and still produce a completely sincere response in the person watching it. I remember eras when learning that a game existed was itself an event. Magazines, demo discs, television spots, screenshots and word of mouth gave games long prehistories in the mind. Now information moves instantly, and that can flatten surprise. Yet the best reveals still cut through. A name appears. A few notes of music play. A silhouette resolves. A familiar sound effect arrives half a second before recognition. Suddenly the entire room you are sitting in feels charged. That reaction has never required me to believe a corporation loves me. It requires only that I love the art form enough for the possibility of a new work to matter. September is therefore the first ember because it tests whether there is still heat left in the year. In 2026 there clearly was. It also leaves a useful standard for the months after it. October does not have to imitate Tokyo. November does not have to outdo it. December does not have to validate the whole year. Each ember can have its own character.
The September ember is broad, international and industrious. It is halls full of playable builds, developers talking about systems, publishers arranging the next twelve months, people queuing to put their hands on games that have existed until then only as images. It is a reminder that interactive art remains physical even when distribution is digital. Someone still has to design the jump, animate the hand, tune the enemy, place the sound, write the line, test the collision, build the map and decide what happens when a player does the thing the designer did not expect. By the end of September, that ember had done its work. The year was smaller. The field narrowed. October arrived.
The October Ember: New York, Stone at Night, and Gargoyles
As I write this on 7 October, New York Comic Con has not quite happened yet. It opens on 8 October and runs through 11 October at the Javits Center, in its twentieth-anniversary year. That timing is almost too perfect for the idea of an ember. New York in October already has a mythology around it: darker evenings, architecture, stone, rain, Halloween, rooftops, old masonry, the city becoming more cinematic as the year closes. If there is one property that belongs to that exact atmosphere for me, it is Gargoyles. Gargoyles is an October object even when the calendar says otherwise. The series is full of moonlight, towers, stone, ancient curses, Manhattan canyons, medieval memory and nocturnal guardianship. It combines the childhood accessibility of an animated adventure with an unusually dense sense of history and consequence. Its New York is recognisable and mythological at once. The gargoyles sleep as stone through the day, then awaken over a modern city carrying the weight of a much older world. Few properties fit the image of an ember better. They are literally creatures of dormancy and reawakening. My connection to it is not abstract. I can still picture going with my dad to Toyworld in Fyshwick and getting the Goliath figure. Memory is strange in the way it preserves an object and a place together. I do not remember every ordinary purchase from childhood, nor every shop visit, nor every afternoon. I remember that. Goliath is not simply a character attached to a television series. He is connected to being small, being with my father, walking into a toy shop and seeing a fictional world become physical enough to hold. That is what long-lived popular culture can do. It accumulates around real life.
This is why I would love the October ember to contain something genuinely substantial for Gargoyles. It does not need to be exactly the thing I once imagined. A few years ago a report briefly claimed that Kenneth Branagh was attached to direct a live-action Gargoyles film. That rumour was quickly denied, including by co-creator Greg Weisman, and Disney itself reportedly said there was no truth to it. The actual live-action project that later entered development at Disney+ involved Gary Dauberman and James Wan's Atomic Monster. By September 2026, that version was no longer moving forward. Those distinctions matter because the history of Gargoyles revival talk is already crowded with projects people wanted so much that the wanting could start to feel like evidence. I do not need to rewrite that history. I can simply say that the Branagh idea sounded wonderful to me when it circulated. Branagh has a theatrical seriousness, a feeling for old stories and an ability to let heightened material remain emotionally sincere. Gargoyles needs exactly that respect. It cannot be approached as a joke about a 1990s cartoon that somehow survived long enough to become intellectual property. Its mixture of Shakespeare, mythology, urban fantasy, science fiction and serialized character drama needs someone willing to believe in the material. At the same time, the death of one live-action development should not be mistaken for the death of the property. Gargoyles has continued through comics, including new work written by Weisman. That continuity matters. It means the world is not purely an archival object. Characters can still move forward. Stories can still be added. A revival does not have to begin by pretending nothing happened after 1997. So my ideal New York Comic Con ember would be a Gargoyles announcement with direction. Not simply merchandise, not simply another retrospective, although both can be welcome. I mean an actual future-facing project. Animation would make enormous sense. A high-end continuation could preserve the voices, architectural mood and serialized complexity without having to translate everything into photorealism. A game could make sense too, especially now that licensed games have again become places where serious studios can make substantial work rather than disposable tie-ins. Even a clearly defined feature film, if it respected the source, could be fascinating.
The deeper reason I want it at New York Comic Con is that location can make an announcement feel right. The medium often forgets ceremony. Everything is uploaded everywhere at once, stripped of place. Yet certain announcements belong to certain rooms. A Gargoyles return revealed in New York would have an extra layer of meaning because the city is not a generic setting for the property. It is part of its identity. Goliath looking over Manhattan is one of the defining images of the series. The skyline is not wallpaper. New York is the second castle. There is also something appealing about asking October to give me one thing that is not simply another entry in a currently dominant franchise. New York Comic Con is enormous and packed with active properties. Marvel, DC, Star Wars, anime, streaming television and major studio franchises will naturally take up oxygen. My October ember would be a project with a different kind of cultural temperature, something beloved enough to have history but neglected enough that its return would feel like recovery. That is why Gargoyles is ideal. It has a fanbase, but it has not been industrially exhausted. It has not had annual games, constant film reboots and ten overlapping television series. It still has stored energy. A revival could feel like opening a sealed chamber rather than adding another floor to a building already under permanent construction. If nothing happens, October will not have failed. That matters to say because the ember idea is meant to protect anticipation from entitlement. I can hope for Gargoyles without deciding that Disney or NYCC owes me Gargoyles. A wish becomes ugly when it transforms into a demand that creators announce precisely what I imagined on precisely the date I selected. The joy is in allowing possibility to remain possibility. Still, if the lights went down in New York and the first image was stone cracking at sunset, I know exactly what that would do to me. That would be the October ember.
The November Ember: Xbox at Twenty-Five
November is where the metaphor gets almost absurdly neat. Xbox launched in North America on 15 November 2001. In 2026 it turns twenty-five. Microsoft has already been marking the anniversary throughout the year, and the final FanFest stop is scheduled for 12 November at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, followed three days later by the anniversary itself. Xbox describes that week as a celebration of its past, present and future, with history, playable games, developers, community events and surprises. I want the November ember to be larger than commemoration. Twenty-five years is long enough for Xbox to possess genuine generational memory. The first console is no longer a recent upstart. Halo, Project Gotham Racing, Fable, Forza, Gears, Xbox Live, the Duke controller, the Blades dashboard, Xbox 360, Kinect, the red ring era, Xbox One, Game Pass, acquisitions, multiplatform strategy, cloud, Series X and S, studio closures, leadership changes and the next-generation Project Helix all now exist inside one continuous story. The company can no longer define itself only by what comes next. It has an inheritance. That inheritance is why Banjo-Kazooie is the announcement I want most. I do not think I am unusual in that. Banjo occupies a strange place in Microsoft's catalogue. The original games belong emotionally to Nintendo 64 history, but the characters belong to Rare, and Rare belongs to Xbox. The series has therefore spent years sitting at an intersection of histories that makes every potential return feel complicated. Rare Replay kept the games available. Banjo and Kazooie appeared in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, producing one of those rare moments in which a corporate rights arrangement gave fans something that felt culturally correct. Yet a proper new Banjo adventure has remained absent. The timing now could hardly be better. Toys for Bob has already revealed Spyro: A Realm Beyond, an original new Spyro adventure rather than another remaster, showing how a mascot platformer can return without being reduced to preservation. Spyro matters here because it demonstrates a model. Nostalgia can open the door, but the work on the other side can be new. A character does not need to be trapped in the geometry of 1998 in order to remain themselves.
That is what I want from Banjo. Not a museum exhibit with better lighting. Not a cynical reconstruction of Spiral Mountain designed only to trigger recognition. I want a game that remembers why Banjo-Kazooie felt generous. The worlds were compact but dense. Music changed as you moved through spaces. Humour was woven into interaction. Collecting was pleasurable because objects gave the environment rhythm. The game understood that a platformer is partly about the joy of movement and partly about learning the personality of a place. A new Banjo should therefore be allowed to be strange, musical, British, tactile and funny. It should not be embarrassed by bright colour. It should not be inflated into an open-world content map simply because the hardware can render one. It should be made by people who understand the distinction between scale and density. It should have the confidence to be a platformer in an industry that has spent years rediscovering that people still like platformers. For Asha Sharma, now leading Xbox after an extraordinarily turbulent year, an announcement like that could carry symbolic weight beyond one franchise. Xbox has spent 2026 restructuring heavily. In July, Sharma announced a plan to reduce the organisation by roughly 3,200 roles over the financial year, with about 1,600 role eliminations at that stage and several studios leaving Xbox. In September, Matt Booty announced another 268 role eliminations as part of the same reset. It would be obscene to pretend a pleasant game reveal cancels job losses. People losing livelihoods cannot be balanced on a scale against a mascot trailer. But leadership also has to articulate what remains after restructuring. If a company repeatedly tells its workforce and audience that painful cuts are necessary to create a healthier future, eventually it has to show what that future values. Banjo would not solve Xbox. It could, however, communicate something useful: that the company's history is not merely inventory. That smaller and characterful games still have a place. That the purpose of owning Rare is not simply to possess a logo and a back catalogue. That twenty-five years of Xbox is not a funeral slideshow.
Conker belongs beside Banjo in this conversation, though in a different register. Conker's Bad Fur Day remains one of the strangest artefacts ever attached to a platform-holder's family tree, a technically accomplished, aggressively adult comedy built inside the visual grammar of a cute mascot platformer. A new Conker would be harder to get right because its humour belongs strongly to a particular late-1990s and early-2000s mode of transgression. Repeating the same jokes would feel archaeological. Sanitising it would miss the point. The interesting challenge would be to ask what Conker satirises now. If Banjo is a return to warmth, Conker should be a return to danger. Then there is Oddworld. The connection to Xbox is historically strong enough to make an anniversary-week appearance feel meaningful. Munch's Oddysee was an original Xbox launch title, and Stranger's Wrath became one of the most distinctive games on the console. Stranger in particular feels connected to that era in a way that is difficult to separate from the machine. The dusty frontier, live ammunition system, tonal mixture of grotesque comedy and ecological seriousness, and the gradual revelation of Stranger's identity made the game one of the most unusual big-budget experiments of its period. Oddworld itself is currently teasing a future. Its website says that a new war is brewing and that a new site is coming. Earlier in 2026, the studio also appended a "Part 3 coming" message to material relating to the good ending of Soulstorm, strongly suggesting that Abe's reworked quintology will continue. Fans have also looked at the current imagery and wondered about Stranger. The responsible way to put it is that Oddworld is teasing something, while the exact shape of that future has not been publicly defined. That uncertainty is precisely why November would be fun. An Xbox anniversary moment containing Banjo and Oddworld would connect the company's history to two completely different ideas of what games can be. Banjo is joyful spatial craft. Oddworld is industrial satire, creature design, environmental storytelling and systems built around exploitation and liberation. Neither needs to become Xbox's biggest commercial franchise. Their value is partly that they make the platform's identity less monotonous.
I would also love some acknowledgement of Conker, even if the path forward is less obvious. Rare's history contains a density of characters that most publishers would treat as an empire. Xbox has often seemed uncertain whether to revive them, reinvent them, license them out or leave them alone. Perhaps there is wisdom in restraint. Not everything needs to return. But twenty-five years is a good moment to reveal which parts of the past are still seeds rather than exhibits.
The Question of Halo
Halo deserves its own pause within the November ember because it is impossible to talk about twenty-five years of Xbox without it. Xbox exists in its present form because Halo: Combat Evolved gave the original machine an identity on day one. Master Chief is not just one successful character among many. He is foundational. The first Xbox could have become a historical curiosity without Halo's proof that a console entering a market dominated by established Japanese companies could arrive with a game that immediately mattered. That is exactly why I think Halo should sleep for a while. I do not mean disappear forever. I do not mean Xbox should stop caring about it. I mean the franchise has earned the right to recover its gravity. When a character is foundational, constant use can become a form of disrespect. Every announcement starts carrying institutional anxiety. Every new direction is asked to prove the brand is healthy. Every trailer becomes a referendum on Xbox strategy, studio management, monetisation, multiplayer population, graphics technology and whether the company understands what Halo used to mean. That pressure makes it difficult for a game to be a game. In September 2026 Xbox announced further organisational changes around Halo, including role losses and a broadened remit for Activision in the franchise's future. There may be very good creative work underway. I am not dismissing it before seeing it. My point is about tempo. Twenty-five years of Xbox should contain a moment in which the company says, through action rather than sentiment, that Master Chief is too important to be used merely because an anniversary needs a recognizable face. Let Halo become scarce again. Let people miss it. Let the next major entry arrive because someone has a specific reason to make it, not because an asset calendar demands another turn. Preserve the original games well. Support the community. Tell smaller stories if there is a genuinely good one. But do not force the chief to carry the whole platform while the company is still deciding what Xbox is. That is why Banjo feels more exciting to me for November. A Banjo reveal would not be a defensive move. It would feel like abundance. It would say Xbox can celebrate the past without always reaching for its most burdened icon. The November ember should be warm.
The December Ember: The Game Awards as the Final Flare
Then comes December. The Game Awards 2026 is scheduled for 10 December at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Whatever one thinks about the ceremony, its advertisements, its pacing or the ratio between awards and trailers, it has become the closest thing the games industry has to a global year-end stage. That makes it the natural final ember. In my version of the metaphor, December's ember is so bright that it almost becomes a firework. The year is nearly gone. Most of the commercial calendar is locked. Studios are beginning to disappear for holidays. Players are making lists, arguing about awards and deciding what they missed. Then, in the middle of that closure, the show opens a door into the next year and beyond. This is where I allow the wish list to become extravagant because the purpose is not forecasting. It is to articulate the kinds of futures I would like the medium to contain. Legacy of Kain is one of them. The franchise has already had a meaningful 2026. Crystal Dynamics released Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered and also published Legacy of Kain: Ascendance, a new canonical 2D action platformer set in Nosgoth. That matters because the series is no longer purely dormant. The question is whether this activity is preparation for something larger. A full-scale new Legacy of Kain would be one of the strongest possible December reveals for me because the series still occupies territory that few modern games attempt: operatic dialogue, metaphysical time travel, gothic ruin, philosophical fatalism and characters who speak as though every sentence has survived a thousand years. What I do not want is Legacy of Kain made ordinary. A modern budget should not require it to become a checklist world with a loot colour system and a battle pass. Nosgoth is interesting because it feels authored. Its mythology has weight. Kain and Raziel are compelling because their relationship is not built around uncomplicated heroism. The series understands betrayal, predestination and identity as dramatic engines. A new game should preserve that density and then use modern technology to deepen it, not smooth it away.
Jurassic Park: Survival is another obvious December hope, although in this case the game is already announced. Saber Interactive's project returns to Isla Nublar immediately after the events of the 1993 film and is built as a single-player first-person action-adventure focused on survival, stealth and evasion. The official site still does not provide a release date. A substantial new look at The Game Awards would therefore be welcome: real gameplay, systems, dinosaur behaviour, exploration and ideally a release window. Jurassic Park is a useful example of what I want from licensed games now. I do not need every famous property turned into a generic open world. I want developers to identify the fantasy inside the source and build mechanics around it. Jurassic Park's fantasy is not primarily killing dinosaurs. It is awe, vulnerability, systems failing, human arrogance meeting animals that do not care about narrative convenience, and survival through observation. If Survival understands that, it could become one of the most faithful adaptations precisely because it is interactive. And then, because this is a wish list, I want Dinotopia. A proper open-world Dinotopia role-playing game remains one of those obvious ideas that somehow does not exist at the scale I imagine. James Gurney's world already contains what an RPG needs: cities, cultures, travel, ecological relationships, architecture, social systems, mysteries, danger and the fundamental imaginative proposition of humans and dinosaurs building civilisation together. The art direction is sitting there. Waterfall City alone could sustain hours of exploration. A Dinotopia game should not be cynical. It should be beautiful. It should understand curiosity as a mechanic. It should let the player learn customs, navigate between human and dinosaur communities, travel through environments designed around creatures of different scales and discover a world that does not treat dinosaurs only as enemies. The industry has made hundreds of games about shooting things with teeth. Dinotopia offers the opposite fantasy: what if coexistence itself were the adventure? Would such a game be announced at The Game Awards 2026? Probably not. That is irrelevant. This section is partly about the announcement I want and partly about what the wanting reveals. I want more games that create worlds I have not already inhabited in ten slightly different forms.
Fumito Ueda and the Promise of gen ATLAS
One of the projects I most want to see at The Game Awards is not hypothetical at all. Fumito Ueda and genDESIGN have now properly revealed gen ATLAS, their single-player open-world action-adventure published by Epic Games. The project began as a cryptic announcement at The Game Awards in 2024, then received a fuller reveal and second trailer at Summer Game Fest 2026. The premise is immediately recognisable as Ueda and deliberately unlike his earlier work: an abandoned technological world, enormous mechanical bodies, a mysterious companion-like robot presence and a player moving through scale rather than merely looking at it. Ueda's games matter to me because they trust interaction to carry emotion. Ico does not need a dialogue system to explain why holding Yorda's hand matters. Shadow of the Colossus makes guilt physical by requiring the player to climb living bodies and drive a sword into them. The Last Guardian builds a relationship with a creature that does not behave like an extension of the player's controller. Trico hesitates, misunderstands, reacts, waits and sometimes refuses. That friction is the point. The bond feels alive partly because control is incomplete. gen ATLAS has the opportunity to extend that tradition into a different scale. The available material suggests an abandoned planet, immense ruins and giant robotic forms that can open access to new areas. Ueda has said he wants to surprise people rather than simply produce another extension of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus or The Last Guardian. That is exactly what I want from a creator with a distinctive sensibility. Style should be a way of seeing, not a prison. December 2026 also marks ten years since The Last Guardian's release. genDESIGN has already noted a major The Last Guardian art statue planned for December. The anniversary would make The Game Awards a particularly elegant place for another gen ATLAS appearance. A release year, a more substantial demonstration or even a short conversation with Ueda about how the project has changed would be enough. I do not need the game rushed toward a date. I want evidence of shape.
There is a temptation around long-awaited games to demand certainty because waiting feels like a consumer problem. Ueda's history should teach the opposite lesson. The Last Guardian became infamous for its long development, platform transition and disappearance from public view. The finished game was imperfect, but its imperfections are inseparable from a work that feels unlike almost anything else. I would rather gen ATLAS remain strange than arrive early and ordinary. The ember here is not the release. It is contact. Another glimpse of a world being made.
Middle-earth, Hogwarts and the Desire for Inhabitable Worlds
The Game Awards wish list also has a fantasy wing. Warhorse Studios is officially working on an open-world role-playing game set in Middle-earth. That sentence alone is enough to carry years of possibility. After Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel, Warhorse has demonstrated a particular interest in worlds that feel materially inhabited: clothing, food, class, law, travel, combat, architecture, routine and social consequence. Tolkien's world does not need another game that treats Middle-earth as a collection of famous battlefields separated by quest markers. It needs a game interested in life between the legends. It is obviously too early to demand footage. The project was only confirmed in 2026 and no release window has been announced. I would still welcome the smallest deliberate sign of direction. A landscape. A location. A sentence about period. A statement about what role the player occupies. The most interesting thing Warhorse could do is resist the pressure to make the player the centre of Tolkien's cosmology. Let us live near history rather than always becoming its chosen saviour. That is one reason Kingdom Come works. Its fantasy is density, not destiny. Adapting that instinct to Middle-earth could produce a world in which roads, inns, weather, local politics and distance matter. Tolkien's writing has always contained domestic texture beside mythic scale. Hobbits care about meals, gardens, birthdays and gossip even while ancient powers move across the world. A role-playing game that understands both scales could be extraordinary. Hogwarts Legacy belongs to the same desire for inhabitable worlds. Warner Bros. Discovery has now formally named a second installment of Hogwarts Legacy as part of its games pipeline, while withholding title, release date, platforms and almost every other detail. That is enough to make a Game Awards tease plausible without making it predictable. What I want from a sequel is deeper simulation rather than simply a larger map. The first game achieved the hardest thing: Hogwarts itself felt spatially convincing enough that walking through it had value independent of combat. A sequel should make that space more reactive. More classes that function as systems rather than cutscenes. More relationships with consequences. More reasons to return to common rooms, corridors and villages. More ways for the school calendar to matter. A world becomes magical when it behaves as though it continues without the player.
This connects back to the ember idea. The things I anticipate most are not always the largest. They are often promises of place. A castle at night. A road through Middle-earth. A ruined planet. Isla Nublar after the power goes out. Nosgoth under a broken sky. Games remain capable of creating environments that become part of autobiographical memory. I can remember virtual rooms in the same strangely spatial way I remember real ones.
Star Wars: Eclipse, Cal Kestis and a Galaxy That Needs Time
Star Wars is another obvious part of a December wish list, but I want two very different things from it. The first is Star Wars Eclipse. Quantic Dream's project was announced years ago and its official material still describes it as early in development, a branching action-adventure set in the High Republic with multiple playable characters whose choices can significantly alter relationships, locations, conflicts and outcomes. That language points toward something genuinely suited to interactive storytelling. Star Wars has spent decades asking moral questions through film and television, but games can make moral structure procedural. A player can be made responsible for the route by which a situation deteriorates. Eclipse has been quiet long enough that a substantial reappearance would suit The Game Awards. I do not need a date if the game is not ready. I would prefer a clear statement of what the player actually does. Quantic Dream's strength has always been branching narrative design and performance-driven drama, though its games have also been criticised for the limits and illusions of choice. Star Wars is an enormous canvas on which to test how far that structure can go. The second hope is the third Star Wars Jedi game. EA confirmed in 2024 that Respawn was developing the final entry in the trilogy around Cal Kestis. Because Star Wars Celebration is coming in 2027, I can easily imagine the formal title reveal being saved for that audience. It would make sense. Celebration gives Star Wars projects a context no general entertainment show can reproduce. Still, the Game Awards could offer a smaller signal. A title card, music, a date for the next reveal. Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor proved that a largely single-player Star Wars game could thrive by combining exploration, authored combat and an ongoing character arc. Cal's third game has the opportunity to close a trilogy rather than become another indefinitely extended branch of franchise content. I want it to end well.
Endings matter. One of the problems with modern intellectual property is the refusal to let anything stop. A successful character is kept in circulation until the shape of the original work disappears. Games, because they take so long to make, are sometimes better at resisting that pressure. A trilogy can still take a decade. A protagonist can age with the audience. If the third Jedi game really is the end of Cal's central arc, the most generous thing Respawn can do is give it an ending that remains an ending.
Zelda: The Film, the Next Game and the Impossible December Trailer
Then there is Zelda. Nintendo has already made 2026 a major anniversary year for The Legend of Zelda. The company held a fortieth-anniversary Direct in September, confirmed the live-action film title simply as The Legend of Zelda and set its worldwide theatrical release for 30 April 2027. It also announced anniversary hardware and an Ocarina of Time release for Switch 2. In other words, Zelda does not actually need another announcement this year. I still want one. The completely excessive version of the December ember would be a Zelda film trailer and, somehow, a first tease of the next mainline Zelda game. I know the second part is unlikely. Nintendo generally prefers to control its own presentation cadence, and the next mainline game does not need to be dragged into an awards show simply to create a viral moment. Tears of the Kingdom only arrived in 2023. The team should have time to discover what the next game is rather than merely announcing that it exists. But this is where a wish list is allowed to acknowledge irrational scale. A Zelda title card at The Game Awards would detonate across the internet because Zelda occupies a particular place in interactive art. The series repeatedly redefines how players understand space. The original game turned a screen-based adventure into a world of secrets. Ocarina of Time helped establish a language for three-dimensional action. Breath of the Wild reorganised open-world design around curiosity, physics and sightlines. Tears of the Kingdom added construction and systemic improvisation so powerful that players could spend hundreds of hours solving problems in ways the designers could not individually script. The question after Tears is therefore genuinely interesting. What is the next design thesis? Not the next map, villain or graphical upgrade. What is the next verb? Nintendo's best Zelda games begin with an idea about how a player inhabits space. If the team has found that idea, even the smallest glimpse would make the final ember blaze.
The film is a different kind of question. A live-action Zelda movie has to translate a series built around player presence into a fixed narrative. Link's silence has always been partly functional because the player occupies him. A film cannot rely on the same relationship. It must decide who Link is when nobody is holding the controller. The first trailer will therefore reveal more than costume and landscape. It will reveal tone. Is this myth played straight? Is Hyrule luminous or dirty? Is Link talkative? How does Zelda function as a protagonist? What kind of fantasy does Nintendo want cinema audiences to enter? I am curious because the film can never replace the games. It has to become an interpretation. That limitation might be healthy.
Bloodborne, The Duskbloods and the Right to Want Something Else
My most unreasonable Game Awards wish is Bloodborne 2. The first Bloodborne remains one of the strongest examples of a game whose mechanics, world and thematic identity are inseparable. Its speed, aggression, transformation weapons, Gothic city, cosmic horror and health-regain system all point in the same direction. The player is encouraged to move toward danger. The world begins as a hunt and gradually reveals that the hunter does not understand the scale of what is being hunted. FromSoftware is not creatively idle. The studio announced The Duskbloods for Nintendo Switch 2, an online PvPvE action game built around up to eight players. That is clearly its own project and deserves to be judged as such. My first response to it is simply that it is not the FromSoftware future I most want. I am allowed to have that reaction without converting it into a claim that the game is bad. A project can be expertly made and still not be for me. What I want is another concentrated single-player descent. It does not even have to be Bloodborne 2. FromSoftware has repeatedly shown that it can create new worlds rather than rely on sequel logic. Sekiro is not Dark Souls with Japan painted over it. Elden Ring transformed the studio's design language through scale, traversal and world structure. The next thing I want from them is another work with that kind of authored mystery, a place where the player is lonely enough to hear the architecture. Bloodborne 2 is the fantasy because the first game leaves so much emotional residue. Yharnam feels complete and unfinished at once. Its mythology suggests cycles, institutions and horrors beyond what the player directly sees. A sequel could return geographically or move outward into another culture touched by the same cosmology. It could be mechanically recognizable without repeating the first game's exact rhythm. Would I lose my mind at a Bloodborne 2 announcement? Absolutely. Would I accept a new FromSoftware single-player project instead? Just as happily, if it has conviction. The ember is not about brand loyalty. It is about wanting creators to keep making worlds with identities strong enough to change the air in the room.
The Consoles Themselves: Project Helix, PlayStation's Next Generation, and the Beauty of a Silhouette
There is one more form of December reveal that would break the scale of the evening: both platform holders teasing their next consoles. Xbox has already gone further publicly than Sony. Microsoft has discussed Project Helix, its next-generation first-party Xbox console, and described it as a machine designed to play both Xbox console and PC games while pushing the platform toward a more open relationship between console and Windows. That does not mean a finished consumer design, price or launch date is public. It means the next machine has a name and a direction. Sony has acknowledged investment in its next-generation platform in financial materials, but it has not publicly unveiled a PlayStation 6. That difference makes the fantasy of a joint December moment especially potent. Imagine The Game Awards showing a few seconds from each. No specifications. No price. No exhausting discourse about teraflops. Just industrial design, a sound, a logo, a date for fuller reveals. It would be internet-breaking partly because console generations used to function as cultural resets. A new machine did not merely mean improved performance. It changed controllers, media formats, interface design, visual expectations and the social organisation of gaming. That effect has weakened as platforms become continuous ecosystems, libraries carry forward and hardware becomes more PC-like. There are good reasons for that continuity. Backward compatibility is humane. Digital libraries should survive. Players should not have to repurchase everything because a box changed shape. Still, I miss the rupture. The best next-generation reveal would therefore promise continuity without aesthetic timidity. Let my old games work. Then show me something that makes the new machine feel as though it came from the future. Hardware design is part of the art of gaming. The original Xbox looked like a piece of alien consumer electronics. The GameCube committed to being a cube with a handle. The PlayStation 2 looked like a monolith. Even when the design was impractical, the object announced an era. A Project Helix tease beside the first true PlayStation 6 silhouette would create exactly the kind of December firework I mean. It would mark the threshold between one technological period and another while keeping the actual details for later. I do not expect it. I like imagining it.
One Cool Thing a Month
Behind all of these franchise names is the smaller rule I mentioned at the beginning: one cool thing a month. I have come to think of this as a way of resisting the flattening of time. Modern culture is abundant enough that every day can contain dozens of things that would once have counted as events. Trailers arrive constantly. Games shadow-drop. streaming services release entire seasons. News cycles replace themselves by lunch. The problem is no longer finding enough stimulation. It is allowing anything to become distinct. Choosing one cool thing a month is therefore a form of attention. It says: this is the point I will remember. It does not exclude everything else. It gives the month a centre. September 2026 had Tokyo Game Show. October has New York Comic Con. November has Xbox's twenty-fifth anniversary. December has The Game Awards. If something extraordinary happens outside those events, fine. The structure is not a law. It is a way of making anticipation visible. There is a childhood quality to this that I want to protect. When you are young, the calendar can be enormous. Birthdays are far away. Christmas is impossibly far away. A new game announced for next year feels as though it exists in another geological period. Adulthood compresses time. Months become administrative units filled with appointments, bills, deadlines and repeated routines. One year begins to resemble another if we do not mark it. Art is one of the ways we mark it. I can remember years by albums, games and films. I can remember the room where I first saw a trailer, the shop where I bought a figure, the friend I talked to afterward, the weather when I walked home, the console startup screen, the colour of a magazine cover. These are not the most serious events in a life. They are part of its texture. A life made only of serious events would be unbearable. The one-cool-thing rule gives permission for pleasure to have calendar weight. A game reveal does not need to be historically important to justify being important to me. The happiness of seeing Banjo again would not solve anything. It would simply be happiness. That is enough.
The Medium I Still Believe In
All of this anticipation matters to me because I still believe in video games. I believe in interactive art as an art form, not defensively and not conditionally. I do not need games to imitate cinema to become legitimate. I do not need every game to be profound. I do not need the medium to abandon commerce, spectacle, toys, mascots, competition or silliness. I believe in it because interactivity gives art a relationship to human action that no other medium possesses in quite the same way. Life is interactive. That sentence is simple enough to sound obvious, but I think it explains why games continue to feel uniquely close to lived experience even when their worlds are fantastical. In a novel, I can imagine choice, but the text does not wait for me to make one. In a film, I can identify with a character's action, but the image continues whether I approve or not. In music, I participate through attention, memory, movement and interpretation, but I do not usually alter the sequence of the composition by deciding to walk left instead of right. A game waits. The title screen waits. The avatar waits. The door remains closed until I open it. The puzzle exists in a suspended state until I understand or abandon it. The boss can defeat me because I failed to act well enough. A character can die because I chose badly. A landscape can remain unseen because I did not turn around. Even in a completely linear game, the work depends on my performance to become temporally complete. That changes authorship without abolishing the author. A designer creates a field of possibility. The player inhabits it. The art exists in the relationship between those two acts. This is why some of my favourite gaming memories are not plot points. They are behaviours. Holding Yorda's hand in Ico. Climbing a colossus and feeling the creature move beneath you. Waiting for Trico to understand. Learning that a Halo grenade can change the geometry of a fight. Discovering that Banjo's movement makes a world pleasurable before any collectible is counted. Hearing a guard in Oddworld and deciding whether to possess, distract, sneak or run. Looking at a distant mountain in Zelda and knowing the game will probably let me go there.
These moments resemble life because they require attention followed by decision. I perceive something, form an intention, act, receive feedback and revise. That loop is fundamental to being alive. Games can use that loop trivially. They can also use it with extraordinary sophistication. A horror game can make fear procedural by requiring me to move toward the place I do not want to enter. A role-playing game can make ethics uncomfortable by attaching consequences to decisions made with incomplete information. A strategy game can make abstraction emotionally legible by turning resources into trade-offs. A platformer can make joy physical through timing and momentum. A racing game can create concentration so complete that thought collapses into motion. Interactivity also allows failure to become authored experience. In most art forms, the audience cannot fail at the work in the same direct sense. I can misunderstand a poem or lose attention during a film, but the poem does not send me back to the previous stanza because I read it badly. Games can make failure part of the composition. Repetition becomes meaning. Mastery becomes character development occurring partly in the player rather than only on screen. That is why I become impatient when games are described as lesser versions of cinema or as technology products with stories attached. The medium can contain cinema, literature, music, architecture, graphic design, performance and systems design, then add agency. Its closest analogy may be life because both are structures through which experience emerges from action over time. This does not make games superior to other art. It makes them themselves.
The Industry and the Art Form Are Not the Same Thing
Believing in the art form does not require romanticising the industry around it. In fact, 2026 makes that separation necessary. Xbox's layoffs are only one part of years of instability across games. Studios close. Teams are reduced. Projects are cancelled after years of labour. People who make successful games can lose their jobs months later. Subscription strategies, acquisition debt, escalating budgets and executive targets can convert creative work into an accounting problem. It would be easy to respond by becoming cynical about the whole medium. I understand the temptation. If every beloved studio can be reorganised, if every successful franchise can be monetised into exhaustion, if every showcase sits beside another story about layoffs, then enthusiasm can feel naive. I reject that conclusion because the industry and the art form are not identical. A bad corporate decision does not make a good game retroactively meaningless. A studio closure does not erase the work people made there. A publisher's strategy can be foolish while an individual designer's craft remains extraordinary. The fact that a game is sold does not mean its artistic meaning is fake. Art has always existed inside economies, patronage systems, institutions and markets. The moral question is how those systems treat the people making it. This is why I want the Xbox twenty-fifth anniversary to contain both memory and evidence of care. Celebration should not become corporate amnesia. If the company wants to honour twenty-five years, it should honour the labour that created those years, including people no longer employed there. It should preserve games. It should credit creators. It should keep older works accessible. It should give current teams the conditions to finish work properly. The same principle applies to every ember. Announcements are exciting, but an announcement is a promise made with other people's labour. The more spectacular the trailer, the easier it is to forget the years behind it. I want to keep both truths in view. I can be delighted by a Banjo reveal and still care how the game is being made. I can want Bloodborne 2 without demanding that exhausted developers produce it on my preferred schedule. I can hope for gen ATLAS and accept that Ueda's process may take the time it takes.
Maturity as a fan should not mean losing enthusiasm. It should mean refusing to turn enthusiasm into ownership over strangers. That is another reason the ember metaphor suits me. An ember is small enough to watch. It does not need to consume everything.
What I Actually Want from the Final Three Embers
If I reduce all of this to its simplest form, my remaining 2026 wishes are surprisingly clear. For October, I want New York Comic Con to give me one project with soul. Gargoyles would be perfect. A real continuation, an animated return, an intelligently developed film or game, something that takes the characters out of permanent almost-revival and gives them a future. I want it in New York because the city belongs to the property. I want it in October because the month belongs to stone, darkness and reawakening in my mind. If it is not Gargoyles, I still want the same quality: a reveal that feels kindred rather than engineered. For November, I want Xbox to remember that twenty-five years of history contains delight as well as scale. Banjo is the top ember. A new Banjo-Kazooie would be my ideal anniversary gift because it would communicate confidence in colourful, authored, characterful games. Beside it, I would happily take Conker, Oddworld, a meaningful Rare project or an unexpected resurrection from the original Xbox era. I want a future-facing anniversary, not just a commemorative reel. I also want Xbox to let Halo breathe. That is part of the wish rather than a contradiction. Celebrating the platform should not require every icon to report for duty. Sometimes reverence means silence. For December, I want impossible abundance. I want The Game Awards to behave like the last coal suddenly bursting into flame. Legacy of Kain. Jurassic Park: Survival. Dinotopia, even if only in my dreams. gen ATLAS. Middle-earth from Warhorse. Hogwarts Legacy's second installment. Star Wars Eclipse. A signal from Cal Kestis. Zelda. Bloodborne 2 or the next great single-player FromSoftware world. Project Helix. A PlayStation 6 silhouette. Something nobody has guessed. The last category is the most important. Something nobody has guessed. The healthiest culture cannot consist only of correctly predicting which old logo will return. Surprise should not be a rearrangement of known trademarks. The reveal I really want is the one I cannot list because I do not know the name yet. A new world, new mechanic, new studio, new visual language, new combination of things that sounds wrong until somebody shows it working. That is the ember that keeps the fire from becoming pure nostalgia.
The Embers Are Not a Ranking of Months
I should also clarify what the metaphor does not mean. September through December are not inherently better than January through August. The year does not objectively become more meaningful because month names share letters. People in different cultures and climates experience the calendar differently. In the Philippines, for example, the "Ber months" have a strong association with the long Christmas season beginning in September. In Australia, the same months move through spring toward summer. In other places they mean school returns, harvest, winter preparation, religious observance, fiscal deadlines or nothing in particular. My use of ember is personal. That is exactly why I want to write it down. Private structures can become useful once articulated. They give memory a vocabulary. There is a pleasure in naming a pattern you have carried without formalising. I have thought of these months this way for years. Writing the phrase The Embers of the Year makes it feel canonical in my own little system. That word, canonical, is deliberately playful. I am not legislating time. I am giving a long-running thought a title. Maybe next year I will write about the actual September through December of 2026 from the other side. That would be the natural companion piece. Did the embers become what I hoped? What did New York Comic Con actually reveal? How did Xbox mark the anniversary? What appeared at The Game Awards? Which wishes were absurd? Which surprises were better than the wishes? That kind of retrospective would preserve another part of anticipation that is easy to lose: the difference between what we imagined and what happened. The internet tends to erase that gap because predictions are quickly replaced by results. We forget what uncertainty felt like once the answer exists. Writing before the events fixes the uncertainty in place. That is useful. Our past selves deserve documentation too.
The Final Ember
A year ending can create melancholy because time becomes visible. Another birthday has happened or is approaching. Another set of plans has succeeded, failed or changed. People have entered and left our lives. Work has accumulated. Objects have broken. Children have grown. Games we waited for have released and become memories. The future has become the past without asking permission. The embers of the year give me a gentler way to think about that movement. A fire burning down is not only loss. It is warmth concentrating. The final months can carry an intensity precisely because there are fewer of them left. September glows with Tokyo. October glows with New York, and in my ideal version of it, a stone figure opening its eyes above Manhattan. November glows green with twenty-five years of Xbox, and in my ideal version of it, the sound of a banjo before a bear and bird walk back onto the stage. December glows brightest, the Game Awards turning the final stretch of the year into a window toward everything that might exist next. Then the fire goes out. Except it does not. January arrives. That is the final reason I like the metaphor. Embers are endings that still contain beginnings. A new year does not materialise from nothing. It is lit by whatever heat survives the old one: unfinished work, memories, relationships, ideas, art, disappointment, anticipation and the things we still want to make. I still believe in games enough to let them be part of that light. I believe in the person who spends years designing a creature's movement. I believe in the writer finding the line that makes a fictional person feel suddenly alive. I believe in the artist deciding how a ruined city should look at dusk. I believe in the programmer making a system respond to an action nobody will notice consciously. I believe in the composer writing music that will become inseparable from a place that does not physically exist. I believe in the player sitting down, taking the controller and completing the circuit. Interactive art is the closest art form we have to the structure of life because it asks us to participate in time. We are not merely shown what happened. We are asked what we will do next.
That is why a reveal matters to me. It is a question about the future. What will we do next? In October, perhaps we will wake the gargoyles. In November, perhaps a bear and bird will finally return. In December, perhaps a title we have waited years to see will appear in white letters against black, or perhaps something completely new will make all of our lists irrelevant. I do not need every ember to become a bonfire. One cool thing a month is enough. One project that feels alive. One reminder that the calendar still has room for surprise. The year is burning down. I can still see the light.
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