Elden Ring has scored a win at the Nebula awards this week, netting the Best Game Writing award for George R.R. Martin, Hidetaka Miyazaki, and FromSoftware. The Nebulas are awarded by the Science Fictions & Fantasy Writers Association, known as the SFWA, and are one of the highest profile awards in English-language speculative fiction writing.
It’s the third prestigious Nebula win for Martin, but the first for Miyazaki and FromSoftware. Martin has been nominated for the awards more than a dozen times over his decades-long career, for the first time in 1973, while he won in 1979 and 1985 for novelettes. Martin’s contribution to Elden Ring has been a bit confusing for some. See What did George R.R. Martin do for Elden Ring anyway? for details on why, yes, his name deserves to be on the award.
Also nominated for 2022 were manuscript adventure Pentiment, cat adventure Stray, robot adventure Horizon Forbidden West, dead people adventure Vampire: The Masquerade – Sins of the Sires, and tabletop adventure book Journeys through the Radiant Citadel.
The Nebulas have only had an award for Best Game Writing since 2018. Elden Ring is preceded in videogame winners by Supergiant’s Hades in 2020, Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds in 2019, and House of Tomorrow/Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch for the inaugural award in 2018. The 2021 winner was tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
Elden Ring has racked up a pretty significant set of wins over the past year, including PC Gamer’s Game of the Year 2022, but also raking in the wins from places as diverse as the British Academy Game Awards, the DICE Awards, Famitsu Dengeki Game Awards, The Steam Awards—the list goes on, it’s a lot. Suffice to say that everyone who likes Elden Ring, well, really likes Elden Ring.
You can find a complete list of the 2022 Nebula Awards winners on the SFWA’s Nebulas website.