The First Annual Toys For Games Awards!

Welcome everyone, to the home of the first annual Toys For Games Awards! This award show was originally conceived to commemorate and celebrate the one-year anniversary of Toys For Games, as the very first podcast episode was recorded and released on January 19th, 2015. However, as plans started to come together for the Award Show, it became obvious that this wasn’t and shouldn’t be a self-serving ceremony for our brand, but rather a giant celebration of the toys-to-life genre and the communities that love the franchises, as well as general collectors as well.

This celebration is designed to honor the four main toys-to-life franchises within the video game industry – Skylanders, Disney Infinity, Nintendo’s amiibo, and LEGO Dimensions. In the year that we’ve been covering these franchises, the entire genre has seemingly transformed from niche to mainstream, almost unexpectedly and quicker than anyone could have predicted. To cap off the biggest and most exciting year of toys-to-life, an award show seemed more than appropriate to give the proper recognition and spotlight to the games we love and the silly plastic figures we adore.

Tentatively scheduled to take place on Tuesday, January 19th, the Toys For Games Awards will be recorded in lieu of the normal podcast for that week. If you’ve ever seen an award show, the basic format will be fairly similar – we’ll announce the categories and the nominees for each, and announce winners. What else happens throughout the show is anyone’s guess, but it’s probably safe to assume that plenty of fun will be had by all.

As anyone should know by now, everything we do here at Toys For Games is for the community that we are building, as well as the communities we are part of. Because of this, it seemed unfair to not include the community in the Awards in a major way, which is why we are reaching out and allowing everyone to participate and help determine the Award Winners. Below you will find polls for every single category, with all of the nominees listed. Vote for one category, or vote for all, but we encourage your voices to be heard! The voting will end on January 17th, and the final poll results will make up 1/3 of the final votes. Jason and Josh’s votes will make up the other 2/3 of the final votes for each category. We may completely agree with the community votes, but we may vote totally different as well, meaning the only way to truly know who will win each Award is to listen to the show!

Also, we only selected figures and games that were released within the calendar year of 2015. While many upcoming figures look extremely great and could easily be nominated for these awards, we chose to only select stuff that was released in the year for which the awards are meant for.

So, without further adieu … The categories and the nominees!

The four major games that released in 2015 for the toys-to-life franchises were LEGO Dimensions, Skylanders SuperChargers, Disney Infinity 3.0 and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival. While there were plenty of Nintendo games to feature amiibo functionality, Amiibo Festival was the only game that was dependent on the use of amiibo figures. Since Nintendo has yet to release that “must-have” amiibo game, this was the best (and only) option. 

 

From Skylanders SuperChargers, the five figures nominated for this award are Nightfall, Splat, Spitfire, Super Shot Stealth Elf, and Hammer Slam Bowser. While we considered adding vehicles into the mix, it didn’t quite seem fair and would throw off the balance within the nominees. 

 

From Disney Infinity 3.0, the five figures that were nominated for Figure of the Year are Kylo Ren, Spot, Hulkbuster, Mulan, and Boba Fett. We tried to have a nice mix of characters from all three Disney Infinity franchises, but let’s be real here; All five nominees could have easily come from Star Wars. 

 

From the newest entry into the toys-to-life genre, LEGO Dimensions, the five nominees are Batman, Chell from Portal, Wyldstyle, Unikitty, and The Doctor from Doctor Who. We decided not to include any of the vehicles or gadgets, which was incredibly hard considering how much we love the sandwich from the Scooby Doo set. 

 

Nintendo’s amiibo were the hardest to select nominees from, as so many awesome figures were released in 2015. However, the five nominees are 30th Anniversary 8-bit Mario, Mega Yarn Yoshi, Toad, K.K. Slider, and the Inkling Squid. With amiibo ranging from plastic figures, to yarn plushies, to cards, the field was wide open and proof that amiibo had a significant impact on the industry this past year. 

 

For Variant of the year, the number to choose from wasn’t a lot, but these seemed to be hot-button issues within the community. The nominees are Patina Highvolt from Skylanders, Gold Mario amiibo from the Super Mario Bros. line, Light FX Darth Vader from Disney Infinity, Chris Pratt from LEGO Dimensions, and Snow-Brite Stormblade from Skylanders. If you’re wondering about the Chris Pratt variant, it was the only choice from Dimensions since they have yet to try releasing variant figures. However, since Pratt voiced BOTH characters of Owen Grady from Jurassic World and Emmet from The LEGO Movie, it seemed like the closest variant we’ll see from the game. 

 

There were COUNTLESS news stories in 2015 revolving around the four toys-to-life franchises, but we narrowed it down to five of the biggest stories we reported on throughout the year. First off was the E3 announcement of the amiibo/Skylanders partnership that rocked both communities. There was also the final reveal of LEGO Dimensions as an actual game after quite a bit of speculation. The most obvious story of the year was Star Wars coming to Disney Infinity 3.0. We also had the mind blowing news of amiibo being made out of yarn in the form of Yoshis. And finally, news that we broke first on Toys For Games, was the inclusion of Portal 2 in LEGO Dimensions. 

For this category, we wanted to recognize the franchise that has produced the best looking figures in 2015. While the graphic shows four specific characters, this award is meant for the franchises as a whole and the quality and care that they put into each plastic figure sold. 

Community is huge for us. While we have encompassed several different communities and groups over the last year, we still believe there is a true #BestCommunityEver.

A good community is only as great as its leaders, and that’s why we had to recognize the fantastic leaders we’ve encountered throughout the year. Deciding on leaders was tougher than it seems, but we feel like all of these people represent the franchises they love perfectly, and we certainly wouldn’t be where we are without them. The nominees are: Jason Ganos from AmiiboNews, Matt Sonnenberg from Skylanders Character List, Lloyd Hannesson & Will Kelley from Inside-Dimensions, Allison Petrek from Toy Box TV, and Lauren Musni from Nintendo Inquirer!

Ambassadors are different from Community Leaders, as these folks don’t necessarily run fan sites or report on breaking news within the toys-to-life franchises, but rather they are popular and well-known faces and names on the Internet that also happen to be advocates for particular toys-to-life franchises. The nominees are Brian Altano from IGN for amiibo, Robert Welkner from Coin-OP TV  for Skylanders, Brandon Jones from GameTrailers for Disney Infinity, and Greg Miller from Kinda Funny for LEGO Dimensions. 

While we, and everyone else involved in the toys-to-life communities, love to use Twitter to communicate with others quickly and efficiently, the Twitter accounts of the major players in the genre are definitely worth a follow as well. The five nominees are @SkylandersGames, @DisneyInfinity, @LEGODimensions, @NintendoAmerica, @ToysRUs.

Without the retailers selling us all the toys-to-life collectibles, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Everyone seems to have their favorite retailers to visit, whether it be because of prices of figures, stocks of figures, convenience, or just because they like pleasant surprises. The five nominees we settled on are Target, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, Amazon, and Walgreens. We realize that this list doesn’t reflect international retailers or many of the online retailers that many collectors have relied upon for importing, but we feel these best reflect the shopping experiences of a majority of the community. 

Along with the toys-to-life explosion we saw in 2015, we also saw the rise of talented artists who took to customizing figures in breathtaking ways. There are MANY artists out there we would have loved to include in this list, as narrowing it down to five was nearly impossible, but please understand that we love and admire all those working hard out there to take things we already love and make them even better. However, the five nominees are Evilos, GandaKris, Amiiglows, Kiick_Ash, and The Game Changers.

While a majority of what we cover is toys-to-life related, we also have a spinoff podcast called The Collector’s Edition, where talk all about the random things we like to collect that have nothing to do with toys-to-life at all. Oddly enough, we discovered that a lot of people collected a bunch of other things as well. So, our five nominees that reflect the best things to collect outside the genre are Disney Tsum Tsums, Funko Pop! Vinyls, World of Nintendo figures, LEGO Minifigures, and Shopkins. 

While we occasionally chat about other things we collect, we are also big advocates of Subscription Boxes. Here we compiled our favorites of 2015. The nominees are Loot Crate, Marvel Collector Corps, Star Wars Smuggler’s Bounty, Wizard World Comic Con Box, and Geek Fuel.

As decided upon by our Patrons, the First Annual Toys For Games Awards wouldn’t be complete without deciding which Inquirer website was the best in 2015. While Nintendo Inquirer was in the running to be nominated, it wouldn’t have become what it did without help of another Inquirer site. The nominees are Infinity Inquirer, Skylanders Inquirer, Brick Inquirer, Jason Inquires, and the now defunct Amiibo Inquirer. 

Rounding out the Awards, we will have a Superstar of the Year award that we will hand out without taking any votes. Think of this award as like a Lifetime Achievement Award. We won’t reveal the winner until the show, so be sure to tune in and see who we honor as the first recipient of this prestigious award!

Thank you all in advance for your participation in the First Annual Toys For Games Awards, and we look forward to delivering a fun and entertaining show while doing our very best to celebrate and honor every aspect of the toys-to-life genre, the franchises and the communities involved with all of them. Thank you for allowing us to do this for a year, and we look forward to many more of these Award Shows in the future!