Anyone who was hitting their gaming stride in the first decade of the 2000s will remember just how popular achievement hunting was with the launch of the Xbox 360 in 2005, and when Sony added trophies to PlayStation in 2008. My own mind drifts back to watching IGN’s achievement videos hosted by Jessica Chobot on the Xbox online dashboard, or the peak of Rooster Teeth’s Achievement Hunter on YouTube.

Anecdotally, the practice appears to have become less popular as the years have passed. I sat down with YouTuber and dedicated achievement hunter Jazzy to pick his brain about the hobby and explore his experience with grinding achievements.

Jazzy has always been an achievement hunter, “Ever since I first had the 360, I remember booting up Banjo-Kazooie and getting an achievement, the second it popped, I got a rush of serotonin. I enjoyed that.” While he’s always pursued achievements casually, it’s only recently that Jazzy has started doing 100% achievement grinds for content’s sake. One game, in particular, inspired him to begin pursuing more dedicated grinds — Dishonored. Appreciation for the attention that Arkane pays to its achievement lists was a common thread during our conversation.

READ MORE: Have You Ever Been Too Obsessed With A Trophy/Achievement?

Despite my observation that achievement hunting is a declining passion, Jazzy wholeheartedly disagrees. “I think achievement hunting is more popular now than it’s ever been,” he began. “If you looked at achievement hunting [on YouTube] a year ago, you would have found nothing. But now there’s a lot of content out there with the premise of getting achievements or the hardest achievements in games. So I think it’s more popular than it’s ever been.

“I’d say in the last six months it’s become mainstream. I didn’t expect to get anywhere near as big as I did, because I thought achievement hunting was such a niche thing, but there’s actually a huge audience for it, there’s been a massive surge of content for it as a result. They’ve fed into each other nicely,” Jazzy continued.

Deathloop Kicking Enemy in Face

Of course, not all achievements are created equally. For those of us who actively read achievement lists, there is a clear gap in quality between developers who actively try and incorporate creative achievements into their games and those who don’t. “I think it depends on the company and I think it depends on the game, some games and some companies, they look at achievements like a chore,” he told me.

“Collectible achievements are ones that show me the developers don’t really care about achievements. They say ‘We’ll throw 250 collectibles in there, all of the achievements will be collectible-based, you’ll get one for finishing the game and one for finishing every chapter and that’s it’. Sony isn’t good at achievements, that’s something I’ve recently learned. They don’t put any thought into achievements, which sucks because it makes the grind a little bit boring. A really good achievement list can make a game so much better. Some companies do a really good job with the achievements while some companies don’t put any thought or effort into it whatsoever,” Jazzy lamented.

In contrast to Sony, Jazzy highlighted Arkane as a developer that puts together really creative achievement lists, saying “Arkane just know what they’re doing when it comes to achievements. They are my favourite company for them. With Deathloop, the game itself is so wacky that the achievements themselves are really over the top while also being completely achievable. Like there’s one where you have to kill three people on one map with one bullet and not be seen. There are loads of specific ones like that, that sound intense but are actually really fun.”

He continued, “There’s killing the visionaries in particular ways, there’s doing stuff with your weapons and gears. It has the variety in an achievement list that I love where you have to do everything you can do. There’s an achievement where you have to die in every way possible — getting blown up, depressurisation, shot, stabbed, ‘mulched’ up; it didn’t need to be an achievement, but it’s fun.”

Jazzy using the word ‘achievable’ was of interest to me. I was curious to know his thoughts on how hard achievements should ideally be. “Hard to a degree,” he began. “Evil Within’s AKUMU mod is the limit of what a hard achievement should be. Any more difficult than that and you risk alienating those who really want to do the achievements but might not be physically able to. I know that’s a bit weird to say because obviously, that’s the point of achievements. I think all achievements should be doable for pretty much anyone, while you have games like Shovel Knight, Jump King, Super Meat Boy, where their reputation is how impossible the achievements are.”

The aforementioned AKUMU mod from Evil Within is essentially a playthrough on the hardest difficulty, but any damage taken will instantly kill the player. However, Jazzy’s most frustrating grind was actually the ‘90 Stars’ achievement in Mirror’s Edge, “In Mirror’s Edge there are time trials where you basically have to get from point to point, as fast as you can. You have to get 90 out of 99 available stars, which is basically 3 stars on every level. I’ve never played a game that made me so angry and hateful."

He continued, "I feel like they got speedrunners to do their very best and then just subtracted 2 minutes from their times to decide the 3 star times. All the achievements in that game sucked in a challenging way. Even though it was hard and it sucked, it was the best I ever felt about getting an achievement. That being said, fuck Mirror’s Edge.”

For those looking to re-immerse themselves into the world of achievement hunting, Jazzy recommends starting with your favourite games, “A lot of people ask me, ‘I want to get into achievement hunting but I have no idea which game to start with’. I always say just pick your favourite. If you pick a game like Fallout and you go for all the achievements, you’re going to do as much as you can in that game. If you do an achievement that takes you off the beaten track, you might fall in love with your favourite game even more.”

NEXT: With Redfall Done, Can We Have Dishonored 3 Now?