We know you watched a few videos this year, but did you watch a few Polygon videos this year? To celebrate another year in the can, the Polygon video team gave each producer the chance (…and assignment) to shout out their favorite work from 2024 to give you an idea of where to dive in.

The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft

This video is more like my favorite of the last three years, because my colleague Simone de Rochefort and I worked on it at least that long. The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft is a feature-length documentary about the titular video game Spycraft: The Great Game. That big-budget, full-motion 1996 video game featured both a former KGB major general, Oleg Kalugin, and a former CIA director, William Colby. The parallel stories of two titans of Cold War espionage, and the making of a technology-pushing game, became too fascinating to ignore.

Working on this video was unlike anything else I’ve done at Polygon. When I threw out the idea to have Jamelle Bouie — of New York Times op-ed, TikTok, Unclear and Present Danger podcast fame — narrate the documentary, I never dreamed it’d actually happen. We also had outside help for narration, graphics, and all the complicated production issues that full-length documentary creation entails, and it’s a testament to the whole team that it turned out as good as it did. If you spend the time to watch, I deeply appreciate it!

‘Guy talks About Starship Troopers for 25 minutes NOt clickbait’

I’m a big fan of Starship Troopers. Not only is it my favorite of Paul Verhoeven’s films, it’s one of my Letterboxd Four, and if my friends are any indication, it’s an R-rated feature our generation was exposed to at a very not R-rated age. Years later I learned and appreciated that it was a biting satire, perhaps the most biting in decades if the number of dissenting critics it fooled in 1997 is any indication. That’s a point that Pat’s video exquisitely illustrates. His video is actually a lot about Starship Troopers, both the movie and the book, as well as one of my favorite games of the year, Helldivers 2.

But that’s not why I think it’s important. Of course, I think all of our videos are important, but I think this video is important in a more… urgent way. Because… you know. (I’m gesturing around at everything. I realize now that this is much harder to convey in writing than in video.)

While Starship Troopers and Helldivers 2 take center stage, what the video is really about is that it’s important to think critically about satirical media in a world where “Get it? It’s fascist” isn’t a joke. That even incisive, penetrating satires like Starship Troopers and Helldivers 2 aren’t without their flaws and limitations. That sometimes it helps to dive deeper not just into the commentaries filmmakers make, or the books that inspire movies like Starship Troopers (well, especially not that one), but also the history that inspires a director to make a movie about how war makes fascists of us all (yes, even that war).

Christina ‘XTINA GG’ Gayton

‘Subtle nerd clothing recommendations’

My favorite video I did this year is this TikTok on subtle nerd clothing. It’s a sartorial interest I’ve had for a while and I’m glad so many people could relate to it. The video is about how geek apparel used to always be very bold and in-your-face, like Hot Topic T-shirts with the logo and name of the game on the front of a shirt in big, colorful lettering. These days you can find a myriad of clothing to express your interests in more subtle ways that would only be recognizable to other fans of the IP, such as the Unown pants from Atsuko (that I think might be out of stock now??).

‘Sonic the Hedgehog Interview 3: Into the Shadow Realm’

My favorite video from one of my co-workers is the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 interview Pat did with Ben Schwartz. I was impressed by their improvisational chemistry. I think it’s a testament to the creative possibility for interviews and how they can be fun and interesting. It felt like watching two friends rather than a professional interview. Also, I LOVED Sonic the Hedgehog 3. It was so good.

‘Tekken is still weird and that’s what makes it great’

I loved making this video because I got to dip into all of my little interests and tie them together: fighting games, animation, martial arts films, and weird wrestling history. But on a more personal level, I wanted to eulogize the spirit of martial naïveté.

Growing up in a pre-MMA world with limited internet access, it was entirely possible for kids like me to go to our strip-mall karate classes and practice throwing chambered punches from our deep horse stances, believing we were learning how to fight. When I saw schoolyard scraps devolve into clumsy, red-faced grappling, I could tell myself it was because neither one of them knew how to execute a well-targeted palm strike.

My sensei’s word was law, and my sensei said if an opponent grabbed my lapel like this, I could counter with a wrist lock like this. It was a comforting dream. Anyhoo! This is a video about how fighting affects fantasy and how fantasy affects fighting. I have a lot more to say on the topic and maybe, one day, I will!

‘Stop lying about Assassin’s Creed Unity’s Notre Dame’

Boy, do I love to see a myth busted. Take that, you stupid myth!

Sometimes, you hear something, and you believe it. Maybe you repeat it to someone else — perhaps because it confirms how you think about the world, or because it makes you mad, because it is just nice to think about. Did you know Rutger Hauer improvised that entire Blade Runner monologue on set? Wow!

It’s especially easy to do this on the internet, where I can overlay some text on a picture of Keanu Reeves and convince a not-insignificant number of people that he holds opinions on the topic of “fake friends.”

I love it when someone puts the time and effort into thoroughly correcting the record. But once is never enough. Simone has made this video a few times now in different forms. Misinformation can be genuinely harmful, or just seriously annoying, but it is always hard to kill.

It comforts me to know that each time this particular myth swells up from the roiling bogs of discourse, Simone will be there to fight the good fight.

‘I played Elden Ring wrong for two years’

This is maybe not my most substantial work, but I love when I am inspired to make something because shit is just happening to me. The anecdote at the core of this video is that I spent two years brute-forcing and cheesing my way through Elden Ring, only for my boyfriend to look at my build and go “your shit’s fucked.”

But also: It’s about how I was having fun anyway.

But also: The response to the video has been my favorite part. I was understandably a bit apprehensive about putting out a video basically saying “lol I’m bad at video games.” But there’s a ton of people in the comments being encouraging, or sharing their stories of sucking at Elden Ring, and it made me really happy! For me, having fun isn’t synonymous with being good at something, and it looks like I’m not alone!

‘Elden Ring does this better than anyone else’

The thing about this video is that I was going to make it. I like making videos about how game mechanics work, and the idea was to do one about how cloth is modeled. I turned to Gwen Frey, who I had interviewed about the Bread Boy in BioShock Infinite, because she had worked on video game cloth design before. We had a great interview, and then I sat down to write the video, and it just… didn’t work.

Separately, Pat had pitched a video about Elden Ring’s costuming and how it communicated character design. This also didn’t end up going anywhere.

Pat needed an idea for his next video, and I needed to stop lying to my boss about how I was making a video about cloth. The solution was clear: Pat was going to make a video about cloth.

And he knocked it out of the park. The great thing about Pat is that he’s incredibly skilled at observing and explaining tiny details in games. And there are so many tiny details in Elden Ring. He takes a huge topic (ALL OF THE CLOTH IN ELDEN RING???), and makes it funny and digestible and educational. He did a much better job with this than I would have, and I love it because he succeeded where I failed. And that’s why it’s so great to work on a team as talented as this one.