As is his wont, The CRPG Addict has written up a lengthy post offering his closing thoughts on the games of 1990, and serving up a preview of the games from 1991 that he will be playing through in the coming months. Toward the end of the post, he also names his pick for the Game of the Year out of all the 1990 releases he has played.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ultima 6 gets the nod:

It’s Ultima VI. I mean…come on. Seriously. Did any of you read that list of nominees above and think that any other game even had a shot? Did you actually buy my nonsense about “the top-rated game doesn’t necessarily win the prize”? That isn’t a lie; 1989’s GOTY was the third-highest rated game. But when the top rated game is 12 points higher than its competition…yeah, it gets the prize.

More important, it deserves it based on all my criteria. Ultima VItechnically ranks lower than Ultima V in my GIMLET, but they’re so close that the difference doesn’t really matter. I mentally think of VI as the better game. This is the first true “sandbox” game, with a wide-open world ready for exploration in any order you want, lots of side-dungeons and optional areas, NPCs and lore that aren’t strictly necessary to win the game, items that do nothing but provide realism to the world, and spells that are good for nothing but messing around.

In this, Ultima VI not only exceeds every game that came before but also every game that I know about that came after except for its own sequel. Games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 might offer bigger game worlds to explore, but they don’t equal Ultima VI in the depth of interactions with objects. As I wrote in my final post on the game:

As much as I love the last three Elder Scrolls games, do you know what I can’t do in any of them? Destroy a chair. Play an instrument. Batter down a door. Throw a wine bottle across the room and have it shatter on the floor. Row a boat. Start or douse a fire. Lock a door.

I say “every game that I know about that came after” because of course I haven’t played every game between 1990 and today. I will spend the rest of my CRPG career hoping for as much freedom to explore and mess around that I had in Ultima VI.

I’m pretty sure we can guess what his pick for 1992 will be.