I have beef with God of War: Ragnarök. I've been a fan of God of War for over 15 years, from way back when I sat in one of those curved GAMER chairs in a Best Buy and ripped Helios' head off in a demo for God of War III. I christened my seventeenth birthday by marching into a GameStop and purchasing three God of War games (and Animal Crossing: City Folk). I have an entire season of Chapter Select dedicated to the series.
So when I earned the Platinum trophy and wrapped up Ragnarök in December of '22, I was bummed to realize I had a major issue with the Norse "conclusion." Sure, the combat is crispy, crunchy; the acting is superb across the board—I'm a big fan of Toby's new role in this Norse administration—and I loved any part where I wasn't playing as Atreus. It was an absolute travesty of the mythical power fantasy to not let us wield Mjölnir, but that transgression is not the crux of my problem with Sony Santa Monica's PS5 debut.
My issue is that Kratos kept saying one thing, but doing another.
The whoooooooole game, Kratos is saying he doesn't want to kill the gods, that he doesn't want to lead. Kratos just wants to hide out and keep Atreus safe (frankly just like God of War in 2018). What Kratos does though is, well...wipe out most of the Norse pantheon and its creatures, and trigger the apocalyptic event known as Ragnarök.
Kratos is a hypocrite.
And that irked me.
The only time Kratos' words and actions line up with my desires as the player is at the end of the game when he realizes he can be a good god and serve the realms. He sets out with Freya and Mimir to bring peace to all nine of 'em. Except, when that alignment occurs, I had already completed most of the side quests that the realms had to offer. There was nothing left for Kratos to really do.
I replayed Ragnarök in early 2025 and decided to conduct a little experiment—I was going to skip all* the side quests and save them for the endgame.
John Gruber linked to a Q&A with Simon Willison about writing a blog from Cynthia Dunlop's "Write That Blog." How's all that for a little blog linking soup?
Links aside, I found the article and Gruber's commentary encouraging and timely. From Willison:
"My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.
Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else."
You have to ship. If you don't put it out in the world, then you won't get better at your craft. You won't learn. You won't get "Fireballed".
When I don't publish for a while I feel a pull build. I get antsy. Sometimes I have a big piece, I just keep polishing without publishing and that starts to aggravate me. "Get something out there!" my brain yells at me.
On a recent train ride, I decided to look at every draft in my essays folder. I wanted to remember why the idea was there in the first place: to re-familiarize myself with past Max's interests and infatuations. I also pruned ideas I didn't think had juice worth squeezing out anymore.
This experience was invigorating. I dug up two old, near-finished essays and have spruced them up. They'll be out very soon. But first, I wanted to clear the linked deck and this was a part of that. Here's Willison on starting a blog with Gruber's commentary:
Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers. If the only person who reads your blog is a hiring manager that you send a link to, and that gets you an interview, your blog has already paid itself off many times over.
That’s the hard part about getting started, or at least it was for me. When you already have an audience it’s easier to take it seriously, to concentrate, to focus, to strive for perfection even though you will fall short. If you’re playing music in an empty room it’s harder to do that, to play the same way you would with an audience of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in front of you.
But just imagine they’re there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.
This has been on my mind quite a bit lately and a topic of conversation amongst my family and friends about my writing. The timing of this could not be more spot on and is the impetus behind this very article.
I have been writing online since 2013.1 It all started from a piece of advice from Greg Miller to get out there and do The Thing™ to help get a job in the video game industry. That was seeded in the home goods stock room at Kmart while I listened on my iPod. It shaped my college degree and many early career ambitions.
The biggest problem I have had in all my years of creating online—whether that be writing, podcasting, or videos—is understanding my audience and a perceivable lack of feedback.
The silence is deafening.
That's a hard reality to surmount for me. I mean, my number one love language is "Words of Affirmation," for Pete's sake. I enjoy the conversation, the critique, the pat on the back, and more. It's probably why I was hooked on the likes of Twitter. It was a direct line to heroes and friends alike. I try not to think of all the blog posts I could have written if I wasn't tweeting so much in my teens and 20s.
But I write and publish anyway. Not in spite—that'd be a rotten foundation to build anything worthwhile atop. I write because if I don't that aforementioned antsy feeling would cause me to crack. If I didn't write, I'd probably podcast more or make more videos or talk my four-year-old daughter's ear off about the loss of physical video games.
When I stop and think about the feedback and audience though, when I quiet the dissenting voice in my head, I realize and know it's not actual silence out there. The signal back may not be frequent, but it is strong. You get the email from a reader. I have opportunities to speak to folks I admire on the show. I get the occasional reviewcode. I get "Fireballed" again.2
Friends and family ask me and offer ideas of how to get my work in front of more people because they think it is good and worth exposure. I promise it's not because they are my pals and kin. And that's the kind of feedback I should be tuned into.
"...what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers."
But just imagine they’re there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.
If I had any advice for new bloggers (or creatives in general), I'd echo Willison and Gruber's first, but if you'd like third piece, I'd say don't let gear or knowhow be the deterrent. You can write on a phone. You can record with that same phone. It is easier than ever to get started. The most important step is starting. The second is to keep going.
Let's keep going.
There was one other bit Willison said that I found personally timely. I have been struggling back and forth with it for the past month or so.
"Set up an email list as soon as you realize that your blog is going to be an ongoing thing. Way more people want to subscribe via email than via RSS readers. I didn’t realize this until 20 years into my blogging journey and I’ve been kicking myself for not getting email subscribers sooner than that! I use Substack and literally copy and paste my blog into it, which keeps my cost of sending email at zero."
A friend out of the blue asked me if I had considered Substack after I published my essay Moments. Then another friend brought up doing a Kickstarter. And then I heard a discussion about it on a podcast. And now this.
I am not a fan of Substack. But maybe the selfish artist in me is railing against business sense when I'm not really in a position to. When you don't have an audience of scale, how do you get in front of one? Platforms and algorithms that put your work in front of others might be the way to do it.
If I were to go the "replicate the blog in a newsletter" route, I'd prefer to use Buttondown. But that kind of work would require paying for a tier beyond 100 subscribers and probably wiping Memory Card from their servers. I'm not in a position to really pay that kind of money without a form of permission from a paying slice of the audience. There's this fine line between permission and validation I've been wrestling with the last few months. If I had 10 people paying me $10 a year, I'd use Buttondown. I don't know if financially I can make the move without the cash first, just given the current season.
So there's a little mental inside baseball. I'll flag Willison's comment as another blip on the mental radar. Takes me a long time to chew through this stuff.
A very encouraging piece of advice I found from Craig Mod is to keep a file of encouraging words from folks. Mine is called youdontsuck.md and is probably the most powerful 5KB on my computer. ↩
To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions, in several ways, but what I publish is my responsibility, and I apologize for the error.
This is how you do a retraction—explanation, preservation, ownership, and an apology.
I've written about Terry Godier before and his RSS app Current, same as Gruber. This whole situation has convicted me to move back to NetNewsWire and put a notice at the top of that article.
My disdain for astrology is so utter, and my esteem for Godier’s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he’d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology app. I showed him a draft of my post before publication, to make sure I had the story straight, and he offered not a word of caution, only gratitude for my drawing attention to the matter.
It gets messier...
Terry's character on display is not the kind I want to support.
John's character, on the other hand, is the right kind of character.
To tie it to video games (because of course I can), it reminds me a lot of when Filip Miucin was caught plagiarizing at IGN. It doesn't mean everything Filip did was stolen, but the character of the man was revealed, and you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
Casimir Liberski has produced two of the finest The Legend of Zelda inspired jazz albums I have ever heard—and I listen to a lot of Zelda jazz and lo-fi.
Louie Zong with this sublime concept album. Not a surprise either since Louie made another favorite concept album of mine—It's Black Friday, Charlie Brown. Louie clearly understands the feel and sound of his banger ideas. You can download them on Bandcamp, but I definitely recommend checking out the video for Nintenhogs.
Tomas Franzese returns to the show to chat about his newsletter Remastered, being the weekend editor at Polygon, and help determine if Xbox or PlayStation is going to win the battle for "Which Company Can Be the Worst?" throughout 2026.
Not even a week and we got them there updates and lessons.
Biggest lesson that I am sure all programmers learn in programmer school—Test your app on multiple machines.
Aka my 1.0.1 didn't even run on other Mac computers. Doh.
That was hastily fixed this morning with 1.02. And then the idea brain got thrumming again and I added a built-in way to check for updates and a proper and customizable title bar. I think this instantly makes DDDS look better.
Make sure you test at least one other machine kids.
You can download 1.0.3 and then you should be able to update within the app itself.
More importantly, this whole project got me thinking about my hyperfocus and patience with projects. Surely, if I took this slower, I would have not shipped a dead 1.0. If I took it slower, I would have had the title bar from the get-go, right?
At some point you have to ship though. I could tell how quickly and fully this app took over my creative time that I needed to ship soon to relieve myself of the obsession. It was almost if my brain was going to pop if I didn't get it out there. so I did. And that led to an app not working for anyone that may have downloaded it.
Thankfully, I don't think anyone did besides me, based off what metrics I can observe. It's better now. And I learned valuable lessons.
I think a big factor is my ADHD and this locked perspective I can develop when something captures my attention. It happens with any creative project and I think going fast and breaking things can be a powerful tool—for both teaching and creating.
I look forward to fleshing out DDDS even more in the coming however long. I should really use it in a production flow to really understand it and make it even better. Right now though, I am confident it is the best Mac app for leveraging the power of modded 3DS consoles. If you use it, I'd love to know what you think. .
In the first half of The Game UI Bible, Coates discusses the foundations of UI and UX design. This section begins in the earliest days of PC, console, and arcade gaming and travels through to the modern day to track continuity and change in the fields’ key tenets as luminary designers elaborated on – and sometimes challenged – them.
In The Game UI Bible’s second half, Coates speaks directly to those luminaries. Across a series of case studies, Coates is in conversation with the key UI and UX designers who brought benchmark games to life, from God of War and Half-Life: Alyx to Inscryption and Monument Valley. These interviews are surrounded by essays on topics ranging from Nintendo’s Switch branding to the relationship between game UI and meme culture, all of which illustrate just how significant and far-reaching these fields are.
The Video Game History Foundation has released a massive collection of E3 materials. It's remarkable and just the thing folks like me growing up longed to one day see in person. Now with E3 defunct, this is the closest we will ever get to that show floor magic.
As senior vice president of the IDSA, Rauch oversaw E3 for almost the entire run of the event. She kept a significant collection of promo material for the event itself, including flyers, brochures, press kits, guest passes, event photographs, panel transcripts, industry reports, and much more.
This collection—maybe one of the single largest collections of E3 ephemera—is an exhaustive snapshot of the public face of the event from 1996–2011. Reading through these materials, you can see the organizers trying to balance the intense public interest in video games with the professional demands of the event.
There's also 12 hours of footage preserved from the first four E3 events, including the legendary $299 price point for the original PlayStation. Can you imagine?
Anthony Parisi attended the first four E3 events, and each year, he brought his camcorder to film press conferences and game footage. If you’ve looked for videos of E3 before, you might have seen some of Parisi’s footage on YouTube.
We’re excited to share that Anthony Parisi has donated the copyrights for these videos to the Video Game History Foundation! We’ve redigitized nearly 12 hours of video from Parisi, documenting the foundational years of the event.
Last July I was rewatching old Nintendo E3 press conferences and I can't wait to dig into these. We have lost something with these pre-recorded, perfectly executed "directs" and "showcases." Having those first years preserved in some manner is remarkable.
We are back in Greece, but it’s not what you think! A surprise 2D adventure takes Max Roberts and Logan Moore back to Kratos’ youth to explore, battle, and learn about an untold story. Does Kratos and Deimos' origin bring glory to Sparta or is it unworthy of the God of War?
"Paper Plates is an unofficial, fan-made hardcover cookbook inspired by the fantastical world of Paper Mario, featuring 35 delicious, charming recipes and full-color art by Matthew Taranto, creator of Brawl in the Family."
This a seriously Max-coded product. I have vivid memories of printing off a 100% recipe guide for Zess T.'s cookbook in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as a kid. It's one of my first 100% obsessions in games.
You should give this project a look. Even though the Kickstarter itself is over, you can still pre-order the book.
My latest essay was not the one I envisioned writing or publishing next. I was in full swing on what you might think of as "mythical" Memento/TLOUPII essay and found out Abby and I were expecting a new baby. That turned into a miscarriage, right around when I was eager to distract myself from the essay and life. Marathon also came out and we all know how that went for me.
In that season of excitement and a new kiddo though, I got this idea about legacy and what we leave behind for our kids. I was writing things down like,
For those that come after. Sharing knowledge. Legacy.
Baby announcement style.
Tunic's "choice" of fight or share knowledge
Clair Obscur - We. Continue. For those that come after.
Uncharted 4 kinda has it with its ending
TLOUPII has Potato. Could be a good clip
I was very into the idea of manuals, journals, and legacy. I mean, it's the kind of stuff you think about when the next generation enters the picture.
The miscarriages made me kinda give up on the essay format though. I haven't felt this creatively low in a long time. But, that didn't stop my brain from seeing, hearing, and reading quotes that encouraged me. Eventually, I knew this legacy essay was turning into the one that was published.
But I also knew myself and the lack of motivation I was experiencing. I wrote about this, in a way, in Memory Card 76 – The Persona Gap:
"Tasks and goals do need to be accomplished, but I have realized my goals/tasks are too full. Same with this essay. The goal is "finish The Thing™." When I could be more broad with something like "work on a creative project." Maybe these looser and looser framings will just help me kick the can down the road. At some point, there does need to be forcing functions in place to make The Thing™. It's a tough balance to find and strike. Maybe next week will be better."
The projects were too big and too tall a mountain to climb. So I enlisted the help of one friend to be my accountability partner. Each week, I checked in with him and shared my progress, talked out loud ideas, flow, etc. I made tasks smaller. From the likes of "finish draft 1" to "write one new section." I gave myself a deadline of the end of June too. This process is the reason this essay came out at all.
Never underestimate the power of accountability. Combine that with a deadline and you ought to actually make make make.
I still think about the Memento and TLOUPII essay. I wonder if I can brave the timeline again. I do know what my next essay is about though. A combination of another striking moment in Journey and save files on my copy of A Link to the Past named "GRAMPS" and "FARTR." Real poetic stuff.
Max is the writer and producer behind Max Frequency, a place where he cultivates and curates curiosity—both for himself and for others—by delighting in the details and growing greatness from small beginnings.
Memory Card is a real-ish time, raw, drip feed newsletter of his creative process for telling these stories. It’s how The Thing™ gets made. You can sign up below. (Look down)
Nick "Woz" Wozniak of Yacht Club Games catches up with Max to share lessons from delays, restrictions, and new adventures hot off the heels of releasing Mina the Hollower.
I know it has been quite around these here newsletter parts. The reason why was I have been working through another pair of miscarriages with my wife and they drained my desire to create. Then I felt a call to write about them. And so I worked through a new essay called "Moments." I hope you go give it a read.
I'll share more about the process soon. I just wanted to poke my head up in your inbox and let you know I didn't stop, I just needed to make this one behind closed doors.
Max is the writer and producer behind Max Frequency, a place where he cultivates and curates curiosity—both for himself and for others—by delighting in the details and growing greatness from small beginnings.
Memory Card is a real-ish time, raw, drip feed newsletter of his creative process for telling these stories. It’s how The Thing™ gets made. You can sign up below. (Look down)
"To those who wrote that we might read, to those who fell so we might walk, to those who came before so we might come after, gratitude."
There's a moment in Journey—okay, there are many moments in thatgamecompany's seminal title—but there is this scene before the endgame. You've surfed the sun-soaked sands. You've skirted around mechanical dragons. Your scarf has grown. Perhaps you have even met fellow Journey-ers.
Now you are ascending a tower in floaty bliss uncovering murals that lay out everything you've done, as if it was all foretold by one of those big white prophets countless ages ago. As the pictorial canvas meets up with the current moment, the camera pans around to what lies ahead—the challenge; the cold; the wind; the isolation. Your journey is not over. It's about to get harder and you cannot see the promised light from when you set out so long ago.
That is what seeing another ultrasound of a baby that's stopped growing feels like.
I always wanted just one kid. My relationship with my younger brother is in a state of estrangement. A long time ago, I decided that having one kid would prevent the no doubt inevitable anguish siblings have. It took me a long time to realize that train of thought was both selfish and self-preserving (those often together like horseshoes and hand grenades). I was projecting a scenario about kids that didn't exist yet. I wasn't even giving them a chance to even breathe their first breath before imagining a world where their relationships could mirror my own.
I wrestled with this early in our marriage. I chewed on the revelation while we set out to expand our family in 2021. The outset of that journey led to twomiscarriages. It wouldn't be until the fall of 2022 that our daughter Eloise would be born. And sometime in the last 3~4 years, I finished chewing and decided I'd like another kid. My wife Abby always wanted more than one.
After saving a smidge to get the financial ball rolling, we set out to conceive and much to our delight that little test turned positive the first month—a result I know many do not find at the start of their own journey. A positive test is never something I take for granted.
We were elated. Around seven or so weeks we went to the doctor due to some slight bleeding—this is about two weeks into December 2025—and the ultrasound then showed an appropriately sized baby and a heartbeat. Given the timetable, of course we turned this baby into a Christmas announcement for our friends and family. The joy was a bright light on the mountain top. But the bleeding never fully stopped. At some point between ultrasounds, the baby stopped growing and its heart stopped beating. Given how it measured, this happened around Christmas.
Just because we are no strangers to miscarriage did not make this one any easier. How do you explain to your toddler she isn't going to be a big sister quite yet? All the family calls and texts to say it's not happening anymore, please forget the announcement from a couple weeks ago. How do I help with the physical and emotional anguish that Abby is going through? How do I help myself?
The Saturday after the loss, I decided to replay Journey. I hadn't done a full playthrough since it came out on the PlayStation 3 in March 2012. I had to play it on my CRT, because I didn't even have an HD television yet. Gosh, how has it already been 14 years? I've had the itch to play it and knew it could be done in one sitting. The perfect little game to absorb my evening and my mind.
It was the game I needed to play that night. I wanted to be alone and contemplative. I wanted to wander. The servers obliged and I only encountered one other player who, despite my attempted teachings, did not understand how to fly over a wall. Austin Wintory's score was as sublime as ever. The visuals at 4K were a definite step up over the embers of 480i in my mind's eye. It reminded me of how sand was a big graphics pusher at the time. If you had good sand, you had a good game back in the twenty-teens.
Despite the near 15 years, I remember the game's beats. The sand surfing scene still hits. The dragons strike fear. The remains of this civilization stir up curiosity and an unnamed grief. This time though, when I get to the aforementioned ascension, the wind is sucked out of me. This little wanderer has no clue what lies ahead, but I do. Abby's and my pregnancy journey has happened before. The murals sync up. What lies ahead is bitter, cold, and isolating. In the moment, I don't see the light at the top of the mountain. I see the situation freezing us in place, stuck in time waiting for the grief of the past to rip away what little scarf of hope we had managed to knit together for this journey back up the mountain of pregnancy and becoming parents once more.
I can't stop in the game. I can't stop in life. I press forward. The cold awaits.
There's a moment in Outer Wilds—okay, there are many moments in Mobius Digital's seminal title—but there is this tiny comet called the Interloper that flies through the solar system. Throughout your adventure, you've banged your head against this frozen rock time and time again. There is more beneath its obstinate surface, you know it, but you can't figure out the space rock's secret. You happen to be standing on it—contemplating—as its orbit nears the sun.
There's elation with a healthy dose of "no duh." You rush inside knowing the timeloop's clock is winding down and that the answers you have been searching for lie inside this icy cavern. You slip and slide, dodging Ghost Matter like a spooky sci-fi version of Super Mario 64's penguin slide.
At the core of the comet, the ghostly rocks are everywhere and then—you see the corpses. Their logs explain that there is no answer here except what happened to the Nomai and why your species survived. It was a misunderstanding...an accident...a diversion from repeated failure...Dread and grief fill you as the End Times begins to swell beneath. There's no time to leave the comet's core. The grief is both for the characters and the fact you have no new answer for progress. You're exactly where you were moments ago; frustrated, unsure of where the next answer lies, surrounded by ice, only now, sadder. The sun explodes. You die. Another loop begins.
That's what seeing an empty ultrasound after waiting 10 weeks feels like.
After the December miscarriage, we waited the advised amount of time and tried again. Another positive test faded in to life in our sole, crammed bathroom. Given how expensive this initial miscarriage was, we decided to wait for an ultrasound this time.1 We chose 10 weeks as a nice, round number where everything should be healthy and visible.
That didn't stop the bleeding. It was less than before and even subsided for almost all of April. We thought we were in the clear. The weeks to ten were both longer and shorter. You feel stuck, just waiting for the time to pass and an answer to come. The truth is beneath the surface, behind the veil of flesh and blood. There is more inside, we knew it, but we could not see our way inside.
The first ultrasound was at a free clinic. It was an empty and long procedure, as if the technician wasn't prepared to deliver the bad news. We were advised to see our OB/GYN and seek medical advisement for a miscarriage.
The next day, the doctor saw evidence that something was happening and tracked the size around 6~7 weeks, not 10 like we thought. She saw some of the necessary bits and bobs for life. Perhaps we tracked wrong. Perhaps she ovulated late. We just wouldn't know until more time passed—two more weeks. We came out of that appointment with hope and a mission to wait even longer.
Twelve days later—on Mother's Day—Abby's body miscarried. I held her in the shower as her body expelled the life we had hoped and prayed for, unable to do anything except hold her and let the water rain down. We were back to five months ago, frustrated, unsure of where the answer lies, surrounded by pain, sadder. Somehow, the day ends. We sleep. Another loop begins.
Once you play Outer Wilds, you don't really ever stop thinking about it. A few notes from the soundtrack alone are enough to stir a desire for another loop. I have been listening to the Outer Wilds soundtrack a lot during the writing process of this essay. I feel a somber longing, like a tether to a space ship, drifting out of my chest with each note. This cord of melancholy becomes a tangled mess, filling the space in front of me, looming over the keyboard. I wish I could go back before these plucks of the guitar meant something. Back when the solar system was new to me. Back when the stars had possibility. Back when my biggest fear was a blind fish and not a supernova.
I was protected in that loop of Outer Wilds. I couldn't fail. I suppose my only concession of failure was if I turned to a guide. I could solve and save the solar system. If I just thought about it long enough, the answer would come. I could be the hero.
The game is filled with remnants of tragedy and I turned them into a playground. On paper, Outer Wilds is dark, melancholic, fear-inducing. As a game, it takes on a lighter air as you hop around in zero g. As you play, you get grounded by a planetary mass of grief along the way. Recorded messages before air loss. Corpses floating on the edge of safety. A buried civilization. A comet harboring destruction. And there are just two options: Stay in the loop or end it and brave the unknown.
I feel the same with these miscarriages. I wrote an essay about numbing grief with games the first time. As we move further from these miscarriages and look toward a third attempt with tests and doctors along the way, I recognize my initial, inherent fear. I hear of another friend going through a miscarriage. I see other friends having babies. I can hide in the safety of the loop.
While not the particular example I chose, in the Echoes of the Eye expansion for Outer Wilds the owl creatures invented dream worlds to hide inside and avoid the reality of their situation so far from their home. Heads are buried in dreamy sand as their bodies and world crumble. I get that.
Then this compulsion to write bubbles up inside me. At times I wonder, "Am I turning my grief into a literary playground?" Do I take my grief and bury it? Do its secrets lie frozen at a core for someone to maybe dig up some day in my journal? Do I enter a dreamy loop? Am I coping? Am I ignoring?
I am somewhere new. I am back where I started. Where do I go from here?
There's a moment in Tunic—okay, there are many moments in Isometricorp Games's seminal title—but upon defeating the final boss, you don't get the ending you were expecting.
It's a grueling battle. You've already faced her before and she turned you into a weak little ghost. You followed the Hero's path and got all your powers back. You returned from the brink, stronger than before. You have the knowledge, the strength, and the determination. It's your destiny to win this battle.
After you defeat the giant Fox Lady along and her legally distinct Buster Sword, she fades away. Instead of freeing her and a foxy people, you become the next prisoner, locked away inside this mysterious vault. The credits roll and you are awarded a "Game Over" screen prompting you to "return and seek another path."
That's what it feels like to do the "right things" and not get the ending you anticipated.
There is a war being waged inside me. Even now as I write this paragraph, do I keep on going or just close the document and give up? Just looking back at how this essay evolved, I can see the tide of battle ebb and flow.
1/7/26 - Another miscarriage. While I don't think I need another essay about that, it certainly means this won't be an announcement essay. Not that it can't be someday.
My original idea for this essay was a way to announce my next kid. I wanted to explore legacy and passing knowledge on. I shelved it, but collected nuggets along the way. Ammo, if you will, to chip away at the enemy known as Silence.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
"But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on."
or this dead on quote from Lyria in Light Bringer,
Pierce Brown, Light Bringer
“What I learn here will help someone who needs it later.”
I even found some, I kid you not, in Karate Kid: Legends,
Mr. Han, Karate Kid: Legends
“Do you think Kung Fu can help your friend? I think so. Anything that helps others and benefits yourself is a good thing. Sharing your knowledge is a good thing.”
I'd read or hear a line that struck a chord. I'd pull out my phone and add it to the document that kept growing, despite my utter lack of resolve when it came to sitting down at the keyboard and writing.
That "other path" the Game Over screen mentioned is completing the in-game user manual, which includes solving one of the trickiest puzzles. I did not do so and instead looked up the solution after giving up on the last two pages. Take my Metroid-brainia membership card now if you must.
Toward the back of the manual, pages 45 and 46 depict "Clearing the Game or Seeking an End" where you may either "Take Your Rightful Place" in combat or "Share Your Wisdom." Despite being vague as ever, it clicked for me after completing the booklet and returning to the Fox Lady.
She summons her sword, ready to fight as she always has against the previous prisoner and those daring enough to challenge her. Surprised by the lack of slashing, she gazes down to your tiny self holding a book and offering another path...a new ending is forged and the credits roll once more.
Perhaps, it wasn't ammunition I was collecting at all, but bits of knowledge to complete a proverbial instruction manual...
Matt describes a conversation with Dwayne Johnson about a scene in The Smashing Machine, which is a 7/10 movie that I think about far too often. The scene has Dwayne's portrayal of Mark Kerr in the hospital after an overdose. Dwayne dances around and then breaks down. This behemoth of a man with thighs that could crush my skull crumbles and cowers behind a hospital sheet. Dwayne brought this performance to life by fusing his experience with his addicted father and his mother's reaction to a stage three cancer diagnosis.
"Like, so that, right, is two traumatic events from this guy's life, right? From his life experience and the actor in him, right, sees this scene, goes into his memory, pulls these two things out, understands that they're appropriate for this scene, and he can marry them together in the scene and then he goes and performs it that way...That is a completely human – that is an art. That is an artist. That's a piece of art that comes out of a lived human experience."
With that, my manual was complete. I still had to wrestle and wrangle my thoughts, feelings, and emotions into substance, but I knew I could not keep the story a secret and shoulder its weight alone.
2/2/26 - And so maybe I am supposed to share it and share it with the world and others in my life. Maybe I can help just one person
And who am I to stop that?
It seems like I came to the same conclusion as last time. And I have. But if I don’t write and share to try and become a part of the solution, then I am just giving in to the selfish, self-serving fear that has dictated parts of my life for far too long. If I don’t share my wins and my losses, I would trap myself in a prison of my own design. I’d enter the core just to be encased in icy fear. I don't want to climb this mountain alone. I don't want that fate for my wife or my daughter or any other children we may end up having. I don't want that for you.
There's a moment in Journey. You trudge through the snow. Slow. Slower. Done. Frozen. And then, light, air, water. You are restored not just to your state of being before the climb, but more than you ever were. Flight is infinite as you reach the promised peak. You have climbed the mountain and then...it begins again. Go back and help the next travelers.
There's a moment in Outer Wilds. The puzzle is solved. You know what must be done. You take all the knowledge, the memories, and the pain powering the timeloop and pull the core to end the loop. One more shot. You face the known and unknown simultaneously—confidence and fear propel you forward. A new world awaits and your experience is at its heart.
There's a moment in Tunic. You've collected the pages of the world's manual and instead of fighting for power, you share knowledge gained to forge a new path. Instead of slashing, the Fox Lady cries. The pages and your invitation remind her that there is more than one way through pain and imprisonment. You remind her of something once known, but forgotten in the prison pain trapped her in. She transforms back into herself. Renewed and restored.
We are meant to share. Sharing doesn't always have a happy ending. There isn't always an ultrasound at the end of an essay. But in writing and sharing, there is a chance to relearn what you have forgotten over time and through pain.
I remember now.
I write so others may read. I have fallen so others may walk. I have come before, so others may come after.
This is for you and for those that may come after. We continue.
Footnotes
Abby and I don't have traditional health insurance. We are a part of Samaritan Ministries. We have an initial amount to pay for and then the rest is provided for by other Christians around the country. ↩
This morning Sony decided to keep up with the Joneses over at Xbox and announce a double whammy of bad news—the PS3 and Vita PSN stores are shutting down for realthis time and there will be no more physical games produced for PlayStation consoles starting in January 2028. Here's Sid Shuman on the PlayStation Blog:
After nearly two decades of supporting the PS3 console generation, we wanted to let you know we will be closing the PlayStation Store on PS3, as well as on PS Vita...
...As a result, we will need to close PlayStation Store on these devices in the timeframes as follows:
Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua – PlayStation Store on PS3 will close starting August 2026.
Additional Latin American and Middle Eastern countries – PlayStation Store on PS3 will close starting late 2026.
In all other countries, PlayStation Store on PS3 and PS Vita will close in July 2027.
We know this news may be disappointing to PS3 and PS Vita players who hold a special place in their hearts for this generation of gaming. PS3 and PS Vita represent an important era in our PlayStation history, so this was not an easy decision for us to make.
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.
This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.
Like a friend said to me, awfully big balls over there at Sony to announce no more physical games alongside the announcement of digital storefront closures.
This is a major blow to folks like myself, still buying and playing new physical games. The collector in me is gutted by the reality that my shelves will be potentially lined with PlayStation 6 boxes that are empty shells—if there are even PS6 boxes to buy. Besides my selfish preferences, this is detrimental to boutique publishers, mom & pop shops, preservation, access, and consumer costs.
Stephen Totilo at Game File seems to have been the only outlet briefed of the news before announcement. He had a free article go live upon announcement.
Sony has been reporting to investors in recent years that PlayStation games have been increasingly purchased as downloads, not as discs. The most recent figuresshow nearly four in five purchases of full games for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were purchased digitally in the past year.
It's hard to ignore an eighty percent figure like that. The writing has been on the wall, right? The fate of disc-based games has had The Cloud™ looming over it since the PS4 and Xbox One generation. Although, at the time, you wouldn't think that PlayStation would be the first to announce its final days.
The end of physical games has come much sooner than I anticipated. I figured the PS6 would be a final generation, while companies figure out messaging for breaking backward compatibility. It's worse than I feared though. Back to Totilo, emphasis added:
New games sold for PlayStation consoles will only be available digitally and won’t be sold on discs effective January 2028, Sony has announced.
The move applies to all PlayStation games released from that point on, including those made by Sony and those released by third parties.
This is a killing blow to any boutique publisher that prints a disc. The likes of Limited Run Games, Lost in Cult, iam8bit, and many more now have a clock for striking deals and making physical PlayStation games.1 I suspect Xbox isn't far behind and Nintendo will remain the last player in the space for now. Physical indie games will vanish. Mom and pop game shops, which I am quite fortunate to live near quite a few, now have a cut off for new games and future console generations. These new games will never enter the used market impact the retro scene in a major way.
You might think, "Well, this is what happened to movies, television, music, and books years ago. Games are just behind the times." The key difference is physical media for all of those is still produced, manufactured, and sold by many different companies while also being accessible on a wide variety of devices. Companies can license new physical copies of films, often alongside restorations or simple re-prints. It seems like every musician releases their albums on not just vinyl records, but cassette tapes and CD too as collector's editions. The film and music exist in physical space grooves and pips on an object you can hold and appreciate and use with no need for internet or services or subscriptions.
For instance a new favorite film of mine, The Dirties, is not available anywhere on streaming. The original print was some 100~ physical copies. Last year, Umbrella was able to produce a Blu-Ray run. It has since sold out, but there's a copy sitting in my cabinet and I can watch it whenever, despite it being unavailable for so long.
If the PlayStation 6 does not have any means to read a mythical PS6 disc, that market can never come to fruition, no matter how far down the line. There can never be a Criterion Collection equivalent business for masterpieces that are yet to come.
Last year, I praised Nintendo's approach to game codes in a box with the Game-Key Card.
I'm sorry, but Game-Key Cards are genius, both pro-consumer and pro-business as we inch toward an all-digital future. A major trend over the last generation was physical boxes in stores, but with a piece of paper and a code inside to download the game. Once the code is used, the game is tied to the redeemer's account. No way to sell or share—one and done. The Game-Key card is a solution to this problem. Pop the cartridge in your console and you will be able to download the game. Then you just have to insert the card whenever you want to play. Done with the game and want to sell it? Go for it. Want a friend to borrow the game? Hand it over! This gives value back to the consumer who purchases a "physical" version of a digital game.
I saw people immediately assume this was all Switch games. Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition is going to be all on the cartridge. If CD Projekt is putting that monster of a game all on the cart, I think we will be fine. As someone with a massive physical collection, am I thrilled at the idea of fewer games really and truly being physical? No. But I am thrilled to see a physical, reusable solution to the code on a piece of paper that publishers have been using since the PS3 and 360. This is a compromise I am more than willing to accept.
I stand by that. In the face of an all-digital future, at least the Game-Key card gives a semblance of ownership back to the consumer. Digital games offer no way to lend or resell a title. It's an all or nothing approach. And when the manufacturer controls the storefront, the prices may not drop as the market has come to expect. Dustin Furman points this out by sharing images of prices of physical Sony games compared to their digital counterparts. You don't even need to guess which copy Sony wants you to buy. For those adverse to Twitter and for posterity, here's a table of the examples shown.
Game
Physical
Digital
Astro Bot
$39.00
$59.99
God of War Ragnarök
$32.75
$69.99
Gran Turismo 7
$38.99
$69.99
The Last of Us Part I
$34.38
$69.99
This isn't to say that digital games never go on sale (they definitely do), but Sony dictates the amount and when. It's a very Nintendo approach and I understand the financial appeal. Don't get me wrong, these games are worth full price. I bought them all at launch—and three of them at a higher priced edition. But I also understand the value of waiting for a deal or just being fiscally responsible and buying less, like I wrote about my collecting habit earlier this year. Waiting for deals or borrowing a game is an important part of the consumer experience that will be dying.
The video game community and experience is losing the ability to lend a game when you are done, the chance to borrow that game from a pal down the street, or finding a gem at the local shop for a great price (or an expensive one). In the world of where the hobby is more expensive than ever, consumers will lose any leverage they had in selling their games for new ones. We are borrowing licenses that can be taken away or deleted at a legal moments notice.
With the PS3 and Vita stores finally being inaccessible by next summer, you have to ask yourself about investing your digital library in the future of PlayStation. In 2033, will the PS4 store and library be inaccessible? Will the PS5 store go offline in 2040? Perhaps Ubisoft will remake Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag again and you won't even be able to buy the original or the current remake. Perhaps Sony will just increase prices of old versions to make you buy the new ones like they did with Horizon Zero Dawn.
As I have sat here this morning (in mourning), I think the biggest impact will be one Sony may not realize for years to come. They are priming themselves to lose a generation. Without the likes of physical games, you lose the excitement of a midnight launch save once a generation when the hardware itself hits the scene. And then, folks will be walking out with a console and the promise of hundreds of gigabytes to download at home. A community will have to be formed around watching streamers to convince you to buy a game instead of just lending your friend a copy. I can't help but pair this idea with the years long development cycles these games have now and how iconic franchises are losing younger gamers to them. How can you draw in newer, younger fans when your prices won't change and there's no affordable way into the market? When the classics talked about amongst tier lists and forums and old heads like me are digital dust behind shuttered stores?
Perhaps I am just scared and concerned for myself? Perhaps my way of gaming is ancient. The kids already watch streamers to decide what to download. In a sea of free-to-play and Fortnite and Roblox, all of which have no form of permanence, perhaps the world of single-player experiences is fading.
Except that isn't true at all, right? Single player exclusives drive console sales. I can't help but associate those games physicality with their single player nature. Yet, the biggest game of the generation is single player and digital-only. Perhaps the only thing that is true is that I am apart of the first and last generation to play games on discs.
We are going back to Raccoon City! So pack your zombie survival kits and uncover the mysteries with Max Roberts and Logan Moore alongside special guests Michael Ruiz and Ricky Frech! Can action and horror be perfectly balanced or are those ambitions better off buried like RC was nearly 30 years ago?
