5 Unexpectedly Moving Moments in Video Game History

Who knew video games could make you cry?

After all, they’re just a bundle of pixels and beeps and boops. They’re designed to get you to forget life for a few hours while exploring another world or getting lost in a puzzle or race, right?

And, sure. Game like Tetris, the original Super Mario Bros, or even recent gems like Geometry Dash (play this at your own peril!) accomplish gaming’s original goal: entertainment, distraction, and a chance to challenge oneself.

However, as the technology that allowd us to build games began to mature, so did the medium’s ability for story-telling and prompting an emotional response in gamers.

I can think, specifically, of five such moments from my gaming past that either brought a tear to my eye or sent shivers down my spine.

These are the five games I’ll be discussing in this article so feel free to skip those sections if you want to avoid spoilers:

• Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (PS4/Xbox one)
• Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360/Ps3)
• The Witness (Ps4/Xbox One/Steam)
• The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (Gamecube, Wii U)
• EverQuest (PC)

You have been officially warned — don’t come yelling at me if I spoil something— You’d be doing yourself a disservice anyways if you haven’t played any of these games yet.

So without further ado, here are my five favorite and most surprisingly-moving games from Video Game history.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag — the Parting Glass

I love the Assassin’s Creed series.

I’m a sucker for historical fiction, exploration/adventure games, and conspiracy theories. Every Assassin’s Creed game has those in spades. Spades, I tell you!

The AC series reached its high mark with Assasssin’s Creed II (Ezio ftw!), dropping slightly in quality for the two other Ezio games (Brotherhood and Revelations), and further down with Assassin’s Creed III (sigh, what a GREAT premise though).

Fortunately, the series returned to tiptop shape with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Combine everything I love about this series and mix in pirates, naval battles, and the Caribbean.

What’s not to love?

And thus, after 50+ hours of exploring every nook and cranny, upgrading my pirate ship and uncovering buried treasure everywhere, it was only fitting that the game ended with an incredibly touching scene that tied everything together. Our protagonist, Edward Kenway, meeting his young daughter for the first time, remembering all of his friends that he lost along his journey, and a befitting soundtrack that made me actually tear up.

As the game concludes, a solo acapella version of the traditional Scottish balad, “The Parting Glass,” begins as Edward looks around at your dead friends join in performing the song.

Its Ubisoft raising a parting glass for a multitude of reasons: a goodbye for Edward to his hideout (he’s returning to England), a goodbye for Edward to his fallen friends, and a goodbye for us, the player, as we have just completed a masterpiece:

Now, if the song sounds familiar for a reason you can’t put your finger on, you’re probably also a The Walking Dead fan. it’s the song Beth and Maggie sing at the Campfire in Season 3, episode 1!

Double nerd love for a Scottish song that has become famous again after being probably the most famous song of the 1600's! Apologies if you spend the rest of today walking around singing “Of allllll the moneyyyyy….”

Because that’s what I’m doing right now.

Red Dead Redemption — Crossing into Mexico

Admittedly, I’m very late to the party on Red Dead Redemption, as I didn’t have a PS3 or Xbox 360 at the time I was doing a bit of traveling.

Fortunately, thanks to the Xbox One and its backward compatibility, I recently picked up RDR after watching HBO’s Westworld and instantly fell in love with the (mis)adventures of John Marston.

Now, the following moment was as unexpected as it was special, as nobody had spoiled it for me — the benefits of playing a game 5 years late!

About a third of the way through my adventure, I floated down the Rio Grande (while winning a series of harrowing gun battles), and crossed over into Mexico for the first time. There, waiting for me was a horse beggin to be ridden. Once I saddled up, I began my first few minutes tenatively exploring a new country while overlooking the river I had just survived.

And then, out of nowhere, “Far Away” by Jose Gonzalez starts to play...

This was completely out of the blue. Up until this point all the music had been original orchestral — and mostly forgettable — music that played second fiddle (heyo) to what happened on screen.

I was already fan of Jose’s music before playing RDR, ever since this ad from Sony featuring his cover of “Heartbeats” by The Knife:

But now AFTER RDR? I’m an even bigger fan. I mean, after brutal fight for survival, to hop on a horse in a foreign land, and then to then have that solitary moment put to such a PERFECT song, out of nowhere, it hit me in the gut and almost brought me to tears.

I felt like I was watching myself in an old spaghetti western. Appropriate too, that one of the first places in Mexico I encountered as the song played was “Perdido,” which is Spanish for “Lost.”

How fitting!

I’m just glad I got on the horse. Apparently if you don’t ride the horse in front of you, the song never triggers and you don’t get to have this moment. Which, I suppose, makes it all the more special. Though I do feel bad for this poor guy!

The Witness — The Final Puzzles

If you haven’t played The Witness yet, go play it now.

Leave work. Call in sick. Skip school. Leave your fiancee at the altar (why are you reading this right now anyways!?) But drop whatever you’re doing and go play right now.

I imagine a small percentage of people who try it will shrug their shoulders and wonder what the heck the big deal is. The rest will be enamored, have their lives taken over, and will then consider it one of the most incredible gaming experiences they’ve had.

I fell firmly into the second camp.

The Witness is one of the greatest games I have ever played (Top #5 all-time), though I can’t explain why exactly. I could write 10,000 words about The Witness (and probably will at some point), but the few hundred here will have to do for now.

The Witness is a condundrum, wrapped in a riddle, lost in a maze. It’s kind of like Myst, with a dash of Portal, and combined with a Zelda-style world that has every “zone” type you‘re familiar with: caves, mountains, oceans, tree-tops, snow-covered peaks, deserts, and everything in between. As for the game itself, it succeeds and teaches you despite telling you nothing. There’s no instruction. There’s no tutorial. There’s only one button to press to run and one button to press to “interact” with the environment. Music and sound effects outside of your footprints are minimal.

Hell, when you win you can’t really tell that you’ve won or what happened.

And yet, this game is one of the most enjoyable and memorable 30–40 hours I’ve ever spent with a controller in my hand. Ever. I started playing early one Saturday morning and ended up doing nothing but eat/sleep/witness for five straight days until I had solved everything (or so I thought, to this day I’m still discovering new secrets).

I couldn’t stop myself, and I didn’t want to. My apartment looked like hoboville, and my walls resembled a scene from A Beautiful Mind — post-it notes with hand-drawn puzzles and notes about how I planned on solving different sections of the game. It consumed me, and I was more than okay with this.

Each secret revealed another, building upon itself, until I reached the final room and a GIANT smile spread across my face. After solving increasingly more complex puzzles — 700+ of them, I entered a final room. It’s a room I observed the outside over nearly 30 hours earlier, wondering what it was.

I entered, and this ethereal music started playing. And I was presented with a half-dozen puzzles that wind around the columns holding the room up.

Unlike most games where the finale is a crazy-complex or increasingly difficult boss, with climactic music and an epic battle designed to throw everything at you, The Witness instead gives you a relaxing ending that feels more like a celebration rather than a boss-battle.

This ending, if you can call it that, can be viewed here:

After solving those puzzles, you get to enter a glass elevator (What’s up Willy Wonka!) that takes you on a fly-by tour of the island in a funky trip down memory lane. Why? Why not.

The Witness is something special, and its finale perfectly tied together what made it that way. Even better, this ending isn’t actually the final room of the game. There were two other SERIOUSLY secret rooms (ohhhh, that challenge room…) that I only uncovered after more hours of exploration, reading message boards, and watching interviews with the game’s creator, Jonathan Blow.

I just hope his next game doesn’t take 7 years to develop, though if it comes out anything like the Witness, I will wait as long as it takes.

Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker — Frozen in Time

The Legend of Zelda series will always hold a special place in my heart.

As a small child, I remember going out into my backyard and making my own bow and arrows to pretend like I was Link. Unfortunately, I used poison ivy leaves to feather my arrows, and I couldn’t see for the next week due to a swollen face.

Anyways!

I feel like I grew up alongside Link. I was five when the first Legend of Zelda came out for the NES, and 9 when A Link to the Past hit the SNES and my friends and I took turns handing the controller back and forth trying to save Zelda and rescue Hyrule.

As I’ve been a fan of Nintendo forever, and hold such a special place in my heart for Zelda games, I vividly remember the outrage when Nintendo decided to “toon-shade” Link for the Game Cube instead of going ultra-realistic (that was a rough E3 on the Nintendo IGN message boards, I remember!).

And then I remember all of those fears disappearing within 5 minutes of playing the Wind Waker. What an absolute DELIGHT. This game holds up better than most, and I still enjoy going back and exploring this bright and colorful world whenever I can. It feels like A Link to the Past in 3D form, and playing it gives me nostalgia overload.

Now, of all the moments that stick out with Wind Waker, nothing will top that moment in the Tower of the Gods when I swung from the GIANT bell and let it ring true. A light shone on the ocean in the distance, and the music stopped. I sailed my boat (or what I THOUGHT was a boat) to that lit-up circle of ocean, and then desceneded to the bottom of the ocean.

Right away, I realized something isn’t right — everything was in a sepia-toned black and white! After an initial question of “did my TV screw up?” I realized that Link was the only thing in color while approaching an ancient castle residing somehow at the bottom of the sea.

Upon entering the castle, the surprises keep coming — not only is everything in black and white (signifying something from “back in the day”), but everything is frozen in TIME inside! Baddies and mobs are frozen in time too, and a light, faintly familiar tune plays in the background as you solve a simple puzzle.

I remember walking around thinking, “What the heck is happening!?” and “Holy &#$* THIS IS SO COOL.

Only then did I learn what happened. I was in Hyrule Castle! My pirate friend Tetra was none other than Princess Zelda! My boat is actually the King of Hyrule! Hoooooly crap. Pulling the Master Sword from its resting place kick-starts the world, and all of those menacing frozen bad guys I walked past are now alive and I have to go fight them.

I picked this moment, though there are dozens of other memories from this series I could have called upon:

• The Kokiri fiddle jam in Wind Waker!
• Riding Epona across Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time for the first time.
• Emerging from the sanctuary in A Link to the Past and starting my adventure.
• Getting through the Lost Woods in the original Zelda (north west south west!)

EverQuest — Crossing from Erudin to Qeynos

Ohhhhh, Everquest. What a rollercoaster of a relationship you and I have had — mostly good, some bad. But memorable.

I remember my first date with EverQuest as if it were yesterday.

It came with a massive instruction book, a map, and the need for a massive patch before playing. The download took so long on my 128k modem that I almost gave up and planned on returning the game before even playing it.

My brother convinced me to let the patch take place overnight, and the next day I sat down to play.

This would be a moment that literally changed my life’s path. EverQuest became my addiction through two years of high school, and its offspring, EverQuest 2, became my addiction a few years later. It was that addiction that ultimately led me to start Nerd Fitness (detailed in my book, Level Up Your Life).

But that’s a different story for a different time.

So I fired up EverQuest, and chose to play as an Erudite Wizard beginning in Erudin on the island of Odus. Having never played an MMO before, and due to the clunky and challenging interface, I spent the first few hours not having any clue what I was doing. I explored the island I was on, SHOCKED at how big it was and in awe of the fact that around every corner was another quest, another treasure, another bad guy. Falling into “The Hole” and encountering a mob that quickly kicked my ass only added to the awe and wonder I felt.

After exploring Odus for a few days, I heard from a friend (in real life, we talked at school) that he was over in a place called “The Plains of Karanas.” He told me I could a shuttle to a boat from Erudin’s docks, and that boat would take me to a place called Qeynos. What made this a powerful moment for me was how “REAL” it felt — I didn’t have an on-screen ridicule telling me what to do, or following an instruction book, but rather because I talked to a friend about visiting a foreign land and figured out how to get there.

And I did (shown here by the only video I could find on YouTube of somebody actually doing this)in all of it’s crappy-graphics glory:

I remember that moment seeing the portcullises of Qeynos Castle for the first time and having my jaw drop. Even with them slowly fading into view (or popping in, sometimes! this was a seriosuly taxing game on my old computer), the graphics were so jaw dropping to me at the time that it send chills down my spine.

When I landed in Qeynos, I took a quick look at the Map of Norrath (an actual map included with the game) and learned that this landmass was probably five times the size of the MONSTROUS island I was just exploring. It felt like I had just left the confines of my home; like Frodo leaving Hobbiton with Sam and realizing the world he knew was TINY compared to the world in which he now occupied. And my adventure had only just begun.

I’m sure i’ll write another 25,000 words soon on how EverQuest affected my life, but for now we’ll stick with that first time I crossed the narrow sea and explored Qeynos as the most memorable because it did two things:

• Showed me just how massive a video game can be, and creating your OWN stories in a massively-multiplayer online game is an amazing experience.
• Awoke a love of adventure and travel for me that eventually resulted in me starting my own “EverQuest” in real life. Which only happened after my computer exploded.

Your Turn

Hopefully I’m not alone in my love of gaming, nor alone in how some of them have profoundly moved me.

Honorable mentions: the baby metroid at the end of Super Metroid for SNES, the scene in Uncharted IV when driving around in the Jeep in Africa, the final moments of Journey for PS3, and all of Shadow of the Colossus.

I’d love to hear from you:

• What’s an unexpected moment in your gaming history that still stands out in your mind?
• Is there a video game soundtrack that instantly transports you back to a specific moment in a game you’ve played?
• Or, how about any of the games above - did they give you that same “goosebumps” feeling they gave me?

-Steve

Steve Kamb is the Rebel Leader and founder of NerdFitness.com, a worldwide community of average joes and jills looking to live healthier and happier and level up their lives.

He’s also the author of the best-selling book: Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story.

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