I remember exactly where I was when I read my first video game review. If I close my eyes, I can easily teleport back to that fourth-grade classroom with its impractical, square seating arrangement. I was sitting at the end of a row of desks, my back to a blackboard, when that week’s student paper was delivered to my desk. I hastily scanned its front page to trick my teacher into thinking that I was reading — she had once threatened to shoot one of my friends with a shotgun, so she wasn’t really someone I wanted to cross.
It was when I flipped the pages open that my eyes locked on to a tiny blurb crammed into the bottom-right corner of page 3. It was a review for a brand new Nintendo 64 game written by my friend Andrew Thomas. It was for a game with a very strange name that I’d never heard of, and it was called The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In only a few short sentences, Andrew painted a picture of a grand fantasy epic about a hero vanquishing giant monsters and saving the world from the forces of darkness. As a kid who had only experienced 2D platformers at that point in life, it was beyond my imagination. It sounded like a sprawling and awe-inspiring journey even just in black-and-white print. The words rose off the page like a pop-up book. I wouldn’t actually play it myself for over a decade, but when I finally did, it was exactly as Andrew described. I was connected to him through the same adventure, 10 years apart.
When Andrew was killed in 2022, I thought my memories of him would be haunted. I expected to fixate on the car accident that took his life, my mind visualizing the gruesome details of his death that I’d only read about on a Queens blog, in a blurb not that much longer than his Zelda review.
Instead, it’s those small moments where our interests in video games intersected that keep coming back to me. It’s the time he told me about a cool game he was playing called Fallout, which I rolled my eyes at for no reason. Or it’s the time that we got into a debate about whether or not Guitar Hero could actually be characterized as a music simulation — a tense argument that ended in a mutual laugh when he tried to argue that one could drive a car after playing a round of Gran Turismo. And most of all, it’s that damn review that keeps coming back to me. I can’t even remember what it said anymore, but when I think of it, I feel exactly what he felt.
It’s tempting to write video games off as simple playthings or distractions. Some people refer to them as acts of escapism meant to transport us away from the real world. In my experience, it’s the opposite. Media is a memory. Whenever I start a save file in a new game, I begin packing a time capsule. Every aspect of my life at that moment goes inside. Who I am, where I live, what I’m struggling with, who I love — they’re all instantly captured like a Polaroid picture.
Another childhood memory comes to mind. It’s August 2002 and I’ve now firmly become a “Nintendo kid,” a transformation subconsciously set into motion by Andrew’s review years prior. There is nothing in the world that means more to me at that moment than Super Mario Sunshine. I have it preordered from a local GameStop, but my undiagnosed anxiety at the time flares up. What if I don’t get my copy exactly on August 26? Should I camp out to make sure? It eats at me for days before the launch. But on the big day, I wake up and find a note from my mother on the kitchen table. It reassures me that I will get it. In an instant, a relief washes over me. She believes in me, and I believe her. I’m first in line to get my copy that day.
Now, it’s 2020. My partner of five years and I are sitting in our bedroom. The tension of being stuck together for a year during a deadly pandemic has reached a boiling point, and they’re ready to break things off. It’s a quietly somber evening that ends with them abruptly packing a bag and leaving in the dead of night. I’m too shocked by the speed at which it all goes down to process how I feel about it all. All I know is that I need to calm myself down. I pop in Super Mario Sunshine for the first time in nearly two decades. Everything comes flooding back. I feel that moment again, the one where my mother talked me down from childhood panic with a few simple words. I remember the relief of the cashier putting my copy in my hand, the same copy that now sits on a shelf in front of me. I spend the entire night revisiting Delfino Island, and by the end, my nerves are calmed, my uncertainty gone. I know everything can and will be alright.
In a Zelda game, there’s always Link. He’s the brave hero who’s always there to save the day. He’s vanquished foes like Gannon dozens of times and he’ll do it a dozen more. You might assume he’s immortal, but that’s not exactly the case. In Zelda’s penciled-in lore, the Link that we see from game to game isn’t always the same person. Rather, he is born anew each time the Hero of Time is needed. Each adventure is a rebirth for a hero whose lineage can never die so long as someone begins that new save file.
Whenever I play a new Zelda game now, Andrew is reborn too. That fourth-grade memory springs from the time capsule. I’m reading that school newspaper and seeing his words for the first time again. I see him a few desks next to me doodling in his notebook. I look at my TV and he’s there in Hyrule field slashing Moblins, all clad in green.
Last summer, I visited Andrew’s grave. His death is still so fresh that the grass still hasn’t fully grown over the dirt, like the Earth still senses something unnatural about his body being buried there too soon. He still doesn’t have a proper headstone, so his plot is instead decorated in wildflowers, bird feathers, and loose stones. When I approached this time, I noticed one rock at the foot of the dirt with a faint yellow pattern lightly painted on it. I thought it was an abstract design at first, but then I looked closer: It was a simple drawing of Navi, Link’s fairy companion in Ocarina of Time. It was unmistakably something Andrew had painted when he was alive, as if he knew back in fourth grade what I know now: that he is the Hero of Time.
