And the Peabody Goes to 1000xRESIST: An Interview with sunset visitor

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #189. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Thoughts about being something else.

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At a year old, sci-fi indie 1000xRESIST has been nominated for several awards – the Game Developers Choice Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the Independent Games Festival, even for a Hugo and a Nebula. While it hasn’t been given many of the wins on the awards circuit, 1000xRESIST has been critically acclaimed, receiving high scores from Game Informer, Edge, Eurogamer and more. It also ranked high on video essayist Jacob Geller’s list of top 11 games from 2024, earning second place. And for The Short Game podcast, it was their Game of the Year. Part of 1000xRESIST’s impact lies with the COVID-19 parallels embedded in the game’s narrative, pointing to its origins as first conceived by Canada-based developer sunset visitor during the pandemic. In an email with Unwinnable, sunset visitor emphasized that many of the team’s members come from the experimental performing arts, many have a background outside of videogames and all strive to tell diverse stories through the lens of speculative fiction. Their website details that most of them are Asian-Canadian diaspora creators experienced in fields ranging from dance to theatre.

But one of the nominations for 1000xRESIST did lead to awards recognition, and with a big name – the Peabody Award. In its interactive and immersive category, to be precise. Honoring this type of media has been a new development for the Peabody, with retroactively giving Journey and Papers, Please legacy awards and recognizing more contemporary games like Life Is Strange: True Colors. Developer sunset visitor spoke as a collective to Unwinnable about their Peabody win and other forms of recognition for their sci-fi mind-twister.

Unwinnable: How do you feel about winning a Peabody, especially after receiving multiple nominations in other awards events?

sunset visitor: It’s a pretty wild and surreal thing to have occurred. The whole award season has been surreal, in that we didn’t consider such a response to the game during development. Many of the awards we were nominated for, we didn’t even know existed, since we were not from the industry. The Peabody Award, however, is something we knew existed. And the Nebula and Hugo Awards were something we knew existed. To have actually won the Peabody award, especially after being nominated for so many industry awards but not winning in a majority of them, was a shock to the system.

Unwinnable: Before 1000xRESIST, do you happen to remember when the Peabody Awards first left an impression on you?

s.v.: Some of us at the studio are huge Star Trek fans, or have become Star Trek fans. I remember the year before, Star Trek won an institutional award. I also saw Pentiment win last year, and I LOVE that game. We Are OFK is also a great narrative game and was a winner that year.

Unwinnable: What qualities in 1000xRESIST do you think made it a good fit for the Peabody Awards? Was it the writing, the themes, a mix of both or other things too?

s.v.: I think, to a degree – and mostly in retrospect – we didn’t really work or think of 1000xRESIST in a way that was hugely different from our previous artist projects, before the company was founded. We saw it as another artistic endeavor, a place to continue exploring our artistic practices. It was definitely conceptualized that way too. We brought a lot of our thinking from the experimental performing arts over to 1000xRESIST, and I think that is reflected in a lot of ways – from the writing, to the lighting, to the way it is organized as a story, and more.

Maybe this is something that the Peabody Jury could feel, and responded to?

Unwinnable: Do you have additional hopes for the Peabody win, like in terms of the future for 1000xRESIST, sunset visitor and creators from the Asian diaspora? Have you thought about what it could mean for the interactive and immersive category for the Peabody Awards?

s.v.: I hope that, at least from an artistic perspective, that Asian diaspora creators feel inspired to lean into the specificities of their lived experience. I hope the award shows that people respond to that kind of specificity. Venba was nominated this year too, for example!

For what it would mean for the category – that’s difficult to know. I just love narrative games. I hope that the Peabody’s can be a space where narrative games that take a chance on something can be recognized. Even if they don’t have the biggest budgets, marketing muscle, or the largest staff headcounts.

Unwinnable: Along with being recognized by the Peabody Awards, 1000xRESIST has also enjoyed recognition from the fans. There’s now Blue Communion, the 1000xRESIST anniversary fanzine. It’s nice to see it featured on sunset visitor’s Bluesky account. Was there any direct involvement between you and the zine too? The itch.io page lists that the studio contributed a foreword.

s.v.: We did not have any direct involvement with it beyond writing a foreword and hosting the fanzine team on our Discord in their own little private corner!

All of the fan work within the zine is completely devised and managed by the fanzine team! Sometimes I would poke my head in to see some of the drafts, and was always amazed by what they were doing. We would never comment though!

We did link them up with Very Ok Vinyl for a print edition, but that was Scott from VOV coming up with the idea to do so.

Unwinnable: Do you happen to have any favorite entries from the fanzine?

s.v.: This is kind of impossible for me to say, hahahah. The whole thing is just a wild thing to exist and we’re so grateful for it.

Unwinnable: Have you checked out the micro-TTRPG based on 1000xRESIST in the fanzine? What’s it like seeing your videogame adapted into a tabletop game by fans?

s.v.: I have! It’s amazing to see. It’s a real “pinch me” moment, but also, so fun to see fans lean in and express their creativity through the lens of the game!

Unwinnable: Thanks again for your time and congratulations on the Peabody win. To wrap things up, if the ALLMOTHER from 1000xRESIST had to send out one of the Shapen Sisters to give an acceptance speech for receiving an award, who would she pick and why?

s.v.: Oh, hahaha. Probably Knower. If there was room for two, probably Knower and Healer together!

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Alyssa Wejebe is a writer and editor specializing in the wide world of arts and entertainment. Her work has included proofreading manga, editing light novels, and writing pop culture journalism. You can find her on Bluesky and Mastodon under @alyssawejebe.