Control Resonant won Best Visual Design at the Golden Joystick Awards, and its post-win moment came with a little extra mystery for Remedy fans: an Altered Item reference. Ceremony scriptwriter Jordan Oloman says he slipped the joke into the show to see who would notice.
In a November 12 post, Oloman called it “merely a cheeky post-win nod” for fans of the Remedy Connected Universe. He was responding to a viewer’s clip celebrating the reference, so at least one viewer caught exactly the sort of reference he intended.
The reference suits Control, whose world invites you to look at an ordinary object and wonder what dreadful thing it might do. A trophy is already a strangely important object: people compete for it, give speeches about it, and put it somewhere prominent. Add the right vocabulary, and it starts sounding like something that needs a containment procedure.
Remedy has used that ordinary-object idea in very literal ways. The original Control’s AWE expansion introduced arcade cabinets as special Altered Items, letting Jesse revisit encounters and enter arcade modes. Familiar objects become part of the game’s paranormal machinery, so the terminology carries a lot of meaning in very few words.
The Golden Joystick winners list confirms Control Resonant’s Best Visual Design win at the November 11 ceremony. Oloman’s explanation gives the moment a pleasingly human origin: a writer who likes Remedy put something in the script for other people who like Remedy.
He ended his explanation with “Mission accomplished, I guess!” The reference gives an ordinary award presentation the same small invitation as one of Control’s strange props: look a little closer.
Official Control Resonant artwork: Remedy Entertainment.
