How old games offer a snapshot of our former selves

digitaltrends.com:

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.

• The Legend of Zelda’s first Lego set is even cooler than it looks
• 2023 set an incredibly high bar for video game sequels
• Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom isn’t our Game of the Year, but it’s the strongest No. 2 ever

Instead, it’s