When a Colorado man’s one-year-old was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2010, he decided to create a video game that would both honor his son’s life and give others a peek into the family’s reality of living with a child who would die too young.
Ryan Green told TODAY that his game, called That Dragon, Cancer and set in the family’s house and with hospital scenes, would help his family remember Joel and prompt a larger discussion about death and mourning. The game’s website states it allows players to”relive memories, share heartache, and discover the overwhelming hope that can be found in the face of death.” Poems and spiritual messages appear throughout the game, Green said, and it even includes Joel’s laugh.
See The 15 Best Video Game Graphics of 2014
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics.
Sledgehammer Games/ActivisionFar Cry 4. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3.
UbisoftThe Last of Us: Remastered. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure Uncharted series.
The graphics are so impressive,
TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game.Ashley Gilbertson for TIMEAlien: Isolation
Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work.
The Creative AssemblyAssassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution.
UbisoftChild of Light
Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts.
UbisoftDestiny
Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio.
BungieMario Kart 8
Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world.
NintendoInfamous Second Son
Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink.
Sucker Punch Productions Monument Valley
Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's The Fall.
UstwoGrand Theft Auto V
Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis.
RockstarTitanfallRespawn EntertainmentForza Horizon 2
Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere.
Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios80 Days
Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl 80 Days' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout.
InkleTomb Raider
Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006.
Square Enix
Joel died in March 2014 at age 5, but Green continues to spread his message. The documentary Thank You for Playing, which screened this month at the Tribeca Film Festival, chronicles the making of the game, which is due to be released later this year.
“Life moves on,” Green, who lives with his wife and four other children, said. “The game has given me a way to grieve and mourn. We have been open with the kids and when grief strikes, we can talk about it.”
