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.