Game: Pokémon Red and Blue (1998)

Character: Youngster Ben

You could read an entire essay on this line and learn what the writers likely meant before it was mistranslated from Japanese. But if the mistake has never been fixed, it’s because the existing line is better at capturing the nostalgic innocence of the original Pokemon games. Only a universe steeped in childlike wonder could make a line like this feel right. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)

Character: Esquie

Sometimes the most iconic bits of writing come from the most unexpected of places. That’s what happened with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s incredibly relatable wheee/whooo scene. “I knew what I wanted to say, where it’s talking about something heavy and sad and how you can feel the joy and the grief. And I was so tired. I didn’t have any words. So I was just like, ‘wheeeeee!’” writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen told Polygon. Esquie is the wholesome emotional rock at the heart of Expedition 33, and that’s never more apparent than when he’s comforting his friend Verso. —Austin Manchester

Game: Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001)

Character: Chucky Poo

Developed by Rare, the creators of Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie, this N64 platformer centered around a rude squirrel dude with a major ‘tude. Coming at the tail-end of the console’s lifespan and as the fad for sassy mascot platformers was waning, Conker’s Bad Fur Day wasn’t a commercial success. It did, however, give the world a boss fight with an opera-singing pile of feces, and we can all be grateful for that. —Jen Glennon

Game: God of War Ragnarök (2022)

Character: Kratos

You know how Hulk appeared in the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War and then, when the scene appeared in the film, Hulk was nowhere in sight? “Death can have me when it earns me” is like that but for hyped-up Kratos dialogue. In one trailer for God of War Ragnarök, Kratos says this line, set to orchestral music and a montage of him kicking all kinds of ass. Then, in the actual game, he says it… in an otherwise pretty even-tempered conversation with Freya. The line is still metal as Hel! But the moment is notably chiller than the carnage teased in pre-release footage. This one makes the cut here purely on the basis of being an unforgettable misdirection. —Ari Notis

Game: Chrono Trigger (1995)

Character: Robo

Sometimes a throwaway line in a fantasy video game can hit closer to home than you expect. That’s the case in Chrono Trigger. Robo’s depressive observation on humanity cuts deep, diagnosing an emotional crisis that still feels very real decades later. As gloomy as it is, something about seeing it written out so plainly in robot speak is bound to put a spark in you. No, we can’t let despair win. We must stand up and fight, just as the heroes of Chrono Trigger do to overcome a fate that seems inevitable. Humanity’s demise only becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you lay down and wait to die. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Street Fighter 2 (1991)

Character: Ryu

Capcom’s Street Fighter series is full of memorable quotes, from “Go home and be a family man” to “What strength! But don’t forget there are many guys like you all over the world.” But none have had the impact of a mistranslated quote from Ryu. In Street Fighter 2, Ryu’s victory quote was mistranslated and misunderstood to suggest that there was a character named Sheng Long somewhere out there in the world. Gaming magazine EGM ran with that idea, publishing an April Fools’ Day joke about how to unlock Sheng Long in arcades. It was all a hoax, but may have ultimately been responsible for Capcom creating Akuma, a shotokan-type fighter who bears a strong resemblance to EGM’s joke character. (The original quote’s correct translation is, by the way, “If you cannot overcome the Shoryuken, you cannot win!”) —Michael McWhertor

Game: Psychonauts 2 (2021)

Character: Helmut Fullbear

It’s a special feeling when a video game hits you with a line that makes you put the controller down and really think for a bit. Psychonauts 2 is full of poignant vignettes about mental health and the mercurial nature of our inner lives, but this short set of words encapsulates it all. Good or bad, what happens in our heads isn’t real life. It’s what we do with it that matters. —Josh Broadwell

Game: Diablo (series)

Character: Deckard Cain

Deckard Cain is a scholarly old Horadrim magician and lore dispensary who helps the player in the first three Diablo games, identifying items for them and doling out exposition. “Stay awhile, and listen” is his catchphrase. It’s beautifully economical fantasy writing, framing the functional purpose of the NPC but also evocatively suggesting a fireside chat, a lingering respite from all the monster slaughter and leveling grind. But what really sells it is Michael Gough’s gorgeously fruity line reading as the kindly old coot. (The line enjoys a second life as a pervasive prompt in World of Warcraft to hang out and listen to what characters have to say to each other, rather than racing on with your adventure.) —Oli Welsh

Game: Disco Elysium (2019)

Character: Joyce Messier

As it recognizes the pervasive, inescapable impact of capitalism, it can feel like Disco Elysium is placing a gravestone over the dreams of revolution and social change. But disco never dies. And behind the game’s outwardly cynical perspective lies the hope that, for change to happen, it must take place at a level beyond the obvious critique of capital. Maybe we need an absurd and otherworldly idea — one as extraordinary as the cryptid our protagonist Harry finds at the end of the game. Despite Disco Elysium‘s melancholy vision of the world, it never stops hoping for a different reality. —Paulo Kawanishi

Game: Forspoken (2023)

Character: Frey Holland

Nope, not a bit! Early in Forspoken, while grappling with her isekai fate, protagonist Frey Holland shouts the line “I’m talking to a cuff” amid a longer conversation with, well, a talking cuff. The line was stripped of context, passed around the internet, meme-ified, and partly credited with Forspoken‘s tepid reception. Frankly, in context, the line feels like a totally natural thing to say in such a situation. But even out of context, it has some serious staying power. To this day, you can recite “I’m talking to a cuff!” to anyone who’s versed in modern gaming and they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. If that’s not proof of an immortalized quote, nothing is. —Ari Notis

Game: Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023)

Character: Hope

Hope’s final monologue is partly a well-deserved, final middle finger to Raphael. After he trapped her in hell and tortured her for years, she’s still here, in his house, and he’s not because he’s dead. But it’s a poignant reflection on one of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s main themes, too: enduring for a better tomorrow. Hope goes on to list all the things she hopes for — reconciliation with her sister, seeing you once more, being herself again after years of abuse. None of it will happen, and she knows this, but hope for something better is what lets her persevere. How can any of us ever think about enduring the hell of living without hope? —Josh Broadwell

Game: 1000xResist (2024)

Character: Iris

There are a handful of phrases in 1000xResist that sound like gibberish at first: “hair to hair,” “six to one,” “sphere to square.” They’re repeated between sisters, and are mostly left up to interpretation; every player will take something different away from them. In a way, they reflect the interpretive nature of the game’s narrative, and take on different meanings the more the player digs into 1000xResist’s story and lore. They all originate from Iris, the allmother, becoming a quasi-religious doctrine for the sisters. —Austin Manchester

Game: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001)

Character: Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney

The first entry in Capcom’s visual novel adventure series goes out on a high note, with defense attorney Phoenix Wright representing his courtroom rival Miles Edgeworth on a murder charge. Just when things look hopeless for Edgeworth, a witness reveals that he heard a single gunshot as a radio DJ said “it’s almost Christmas” late at night on Dec. 24, contradicting earlier testimony that the murder occurred after midnight. It’s due to this lucky turnabout that Phoenix and Edgeworth emerge victorious, and a meme that would be emblazoned on countless T-shirts and coffee mugs was born. —Jen Glennon

Game: Planescape: Torment (1999)

Character: Dak’kon

You can expect a game made famous by its dialogue to deliver some unforgettable quotes, and Planescape: Torment does not disappoint. This seminal CRPG, still celebrated today as one of the best in the genre’s history, is ripe with philosophical debates, questions about life and existence, and dirty jokes delivered by a floating skull. This particular quote by the companion character Dak’kon proved to be, well, enduring. It’s not surprising that a member of the Ghitzerai race, essentially D&D’s ascetic monks, has some of the most profound dialogue in the game. This quote speaks of the millennia-long struggle of the Ghitzerai, who freed themselves from the shackles of Illithid slavery. It’s resonated with players for decades, including Henry Cavill, who recently used it as a caption for his recovery journey after an injury. If it’s good enough for Superman… —Francesco Cacciatore

Game: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (2011)

Character: Roughly every third town guard

Let’s face it: memes aside, little is impressive about the arrow to the knee line. But Skyrim is one of those forever games that people revisit over and over again — which allows an otherwise banal line to feel like a warm embrace. Nowadays, a random Tuesday will see a Roblox game sustain a fourth of Skyrim‘s lifetime sales as active concurrents. Culture has become so fragmented that this line is one of the last remaining examples of a moment defining an entire generation of gamers. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

Character: Arthur Morgan

Arthur Morgan and the other members of Dutch van der Linde’s gang are a bit like the cast of The Sopranos — they got into the outlaw life long after the golden era had ended. As the game draws to a close, Arthur knows his days are numbered. But it’s not too late for John Marston, who he views as a younger brother. Arthur urges John not to be blinded by his past loyalty, and to instead prioritize his family and build a real future, far away from Dutch’s crumbling empire of two-bit schemes. —Jen Glennon

Game: Balatro (2024)

Character: Jimbo

To love Balatro is to lose at Balatro, audaciously and often. The 2024 poker roguelike is all about experimentation, taking big swings, and hoping your hare-brained strategy pays off somehow. It is, emphatically, not a story-driven experience. Yet Jimbo, the game’s mascot and resident tutorial-giver, is always there to offer hokey insults and labored puns whenever you fail, which will be often. Like an annoying kid brother, his taunts are just galling enough to convince you to try one more round. —Jen Glennon

Game: The Stanley Parable (2013)

Character: Narrator

Stanley, the paper-pushing star of 2013’s The Stanley Parable, isn’t supposed to have control of his destiny. He’s simply a pawn on a chessboard, getting dragged around his office by a narrator who has carefully plotted out his every move. The game’s first line sets that stage perfectly, throwing you into the first page of a children’s storybook. The sooner you realize that the pages can’t turn without you, the sooner you can fight to regain control of Stanley’s narrative. Though none of that really helps the poor guy with his own free will problem, does it? —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: The Sims (2000)

Character: Sims

When Maxis decided to create The Sims, an epic life-sim to rule all the other life-sims out there, it meant including everything that involves, well, life. Which includes sex. But since this was a game meant for all ages, how could you repackage that to be more family-friendly? Enter the term “Woohoo.” Has there ever been a more tantalizing word in the history of video games? We think not. —Aimee Hart

Game: EarthBound (1994)

Character: Stoic Club poser

In Earthbound, you control Ness and his friends as you set out to save the world, and along the way you discover most of the adults in this world are either morons or sleazebags. Once you reach the seaside resort town of Summers, though, you realize adults can also be pretentious idiots. At the members-only Stoic Club, patrons pay absurdly high prices to drink tap water and stare at a rock on a stage while “philosophizing” about it. One of the customers asks Ness this patronizing question, seemingly to flex his intellectual muscle in front of a bunch of 12-year-olds. We’ve all met this guy, and he’s exhausting. —Jen Glennon

Game: Suikoden 2 (1998)

Character: Luca Blight

Konami’s Suikoden games are best known for letting you recruit 108 party members and build awesome castles, but Suikoden 2 also boasts one of the most loathsome and terrifying villains of all time: the “mad prince” Luca Blight. As her village burns, a woman falls to her knees and begs for her life. With a sneering smile, Luca tells her to act like a pig if she wants to live. She falls to all fours and starts oinking, as soldiers look on and a corpse leaks blood nearby. He cackles in amusement and slices her throat. At this point in the story, we’ve largely heard about his evil deeds — it’s here that we witness firsthand just how truly vile he is. —Jen Glennon

Game: Dark Souls (2011)

Character: Solaire of Astora

Unlike many of the other quotes on this list, no in-game character actually says “Praise the Sun” in Dark Souls, despite its ubiquity and enduring popularity among fans. The quote is most closely associated with the knight Solaire of Astora, a cheerful and rare spot of brightness in Dark Souls‘ world. “Praise the Sun” is simply the name of a frequently used in-game gesture, and one of the baked-in phrases that players can scrawl like graffiti for other players to read. “Praise the Sun” remains a powerful affirmation in the Dark Souls universe, but the closest thing that Solaire says to it in game is much more poetic: “The sun is a wondrous body, like a magnificent father! If only I could be so grossly incandescent!” —Michael McWhertor

Game: Half-Life 2 (2004)

Character: G-Man

Before you can control Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2, you have to go through G-Man. The series’ mysterious villain begins the game by staring a hole into your soul, one of his glassy eyeballs shown in extreme close-up. Like a one-man Greek chorus, he sets the stage for the journey to come with an eccentric monologue delivered in his unmistakably strange cadence. This foreboding one-liner comes near the end of that surreal sequence, leaving you terrified of what exactly he means by “wrong place.” You find out soon enough, but not until G-Man leaves you with one last command: “Wake up and smell the ashes.” —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Persona 4 (2008)

Character: Tohru Adachi

A lot of stories try to make the villain seem sympathetic by shoehorning in reasons they aren’t so different from you, and it usually feels forced and falls short. Persona 4 isn’t one of those stories. After all the horrible things that happen in the sleepy little town of Inaba — all of the death, hurt, fear, and anger — you find out the reason it all happened: It’s because someone thought the world owed them more. That’s it. Persona 4‘s protagonist, plucked from the city and dropped into a life that’s “beneath” him, could’ve followed a similar path, had he not set his ego aside and cared about other people instead. He could’ve turned out the same. So could I. So could you. —Josh Broadwell

Game: Yakuza 0 (2015)

Character: Kazuma Kiryu

Sure, Kazuma Kiryu was talking about a guy who gets off by sniffing used underwear, but the point he’s making is rock solid. If someone’s behavior isn’t harming you — and no, disagreeing with another person doesn’t count as being harmed — shut up and sit down. We stan a compassionate, open-minded king. It’s a character type that’s still a comparative rarity in modern video games, hence why this quote so often pops up when people talk about why they love Kiryu and the Yakuza series. —Josh Broadwell

Game: Animal Crossing (2002)

Character: Katrina

In the GameCube Animal Crossing, Katrina says this every time time she tells your fortune. Superficially, it feels like a nice way to remind you that you won’t fall flat on your face forever after she predicts something bad. But increasingly, it feels more like an essential mantra, a reminder that this — whatever this is — isn’t permanent, and better things are possible. Thanks for pulling us out of our existential crises, Katrina! —Josh Broadwell

Game: Mortal Kombat (1992)

Character: Scorpion

In the early 1990s, video games were obsessed with shouting from the rooftops that they were not mere toys for children, but violent technological marvels for the manliest of men. With its gory fatalities and disembowelment, Midway’s influential fighting game was quite literally at the cutting edge of conversations around video game violence throughout the 1990s, which eventually resulted in televised congressional hearings and the creation of the ESRB. Whether you liked fighting games or not, Mortal Kombat demanded your attention and took it by force — like the ninja Scorpion whipping a spear into your jugular and yanking you across the room. —Jen Glennon

Game: BioShock Infinite (2013)

Character: Elizabeth

Each BioShock game starts at a lighthouse and puts a problematic visionary at the head of its doomed utopia, but where the first two entries were set in the same underwater failed metropolis of Rapture, BioShock Infinite takes to the skies in the patriotic floating city of Columbia. At first it just feels like thematic resonance with some reimagined vibes. Rapture is dark, gloomy, and claustrophobic. Columbia is bright, sinister, and incites acrophobia. Throughout Infinite, Elizabeth wields rifts that warp objects between realities, but it isn’t until the game’s conclusion that it distills one haunting idea: across infinite realities, certain patterns never change. The first game compromises the mirage of free will, but Infinite makes the claim that across the multiverse, some things always remain constant. —Corey Plante

Game: Marathon (1994, 2026)

Character: Durandal

The 2026 iteration of Marathon has only begun to scratch the surface of its enigmatic story. Relatively early in its marketing, it touted a chilling line from Bungie’s original Marathon trilogy: “Escape will make me God.” We know for sure that Ben Starr voices the artificial intelligence Durandal in the new game. In the trilogy, Durandal longed to transcend beyond the constraints of his limited programming to enter a state of rampancy. The ideas are all rather abstract here, but in Durandal’s original lengthy message, he ruminates on Darwinism and points out that mankind is limited by its mortality and the need to compete for survival. The only thing that can destroy Durandal is the end of the universe — and he believes there is enough time for him to create and escape from that cycle so he might transcend into some kind of god. Is that god the one leading Runners to investigate the ruins of Tau Ceti IV? —Corey Plante

Game: Death Stranding (2019)

Character: Sam “Porter” Bridges

Like a lot of quotes on this list, this line from Death Stranding could comfortably land on a roundup of the best or worst video game quotes of all time. An emotional moment between Sam “Porter” Bridges and Amelie is punctuated by a bizarre pun that’s nevertheless delivered with the utmost sincerity. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Hideo Kojima as an artist, a writer who is more than happy to blur the line between high and low art in every scene. Moments like this are what make his work occasionally polarizing, but that’s where he thrives as the world’s most serious goofball. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Outer Wilds (2019)

Character: Nomai mantra

Outer Wilds is full of gut-punch lines pondering the absurd, comedic indifference of the universe. But the exploration game’s most impactful — and most enduring — line is also its simplest. There’s a reason “Be curious on your journey” has appeared in research papers and on personal blogs, is blazoned on T-shirts and posters and Etsy mugs. If not for curiosity, if not for the neverending pursuit of knowledge, what is the point of all this? —Ari Notis

Game: Mass Effect

Character: Garrus Vakarian

Throughout the course of the Mass Effect games, you learn a lot about the biology and traumatic history of the Krogan, indisputably the most intimidating of the alien species you interact with. Many of the details are drip-fed through various tidbits of conversation. Among them is the confirmation that, in addition to all sorts of other redundant organs to help with survival, male Krogans have four testicles.

After they were uplifted by the Salarians to fight in a brutal war against the Rachni, the Krogan population exploded (perhaps because of their gonadal abundance). As a warmongering, borderline savage society, this was bad news for the Milky Way, ultimately leading the Salarians to develop a biological weapon that devastated Krogan fertility. This particular confirmation comes during a random conversation with Garrus Vakarian in the first Mass Effect, as he chatters on about how some Krogans think a testicle transplant can help counter the effects of the genophage. That explains why some Krogans will say things like “Grow a quad!” or that Shepard “has a quad.” —Corey Plante

Game: Divinity: Original Sin (2014)

Character: Cheese vendor

Video game barks are often simple and forgettable — meant to fade into the background. Not those from Larian Studios, however, a studio that has mastered bringing characters to life, including those who otherwise bear no importance to the story. That includes the cheese vendor in Cyseal Market, who, in the original release of Divinity: Original Sin, was a trove of hilarious quotes. (He was unfortunately replaced in the Enhanced Edition.) While “no one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses!” is the most famous, he’d also blurt out lines like “Not in the mood for cheese? That excuse has more holes than a slice of this fine gorgombert!” and “Be the big cheese on your block with a wheel of the good stuff!” To make it even funnier (or not, depending on your tolerance), he’d only wait a few seconds between lines before saying the next. If you were AFK or hanging around nearby, his yapping would be incessant. —Ford James

Game: X-Men (1992)

Character: Magneto

A staple of early ‘90s arcades, Konami’s X-Men was the gold standard of side-scrolling beat-’em-ups, with impressive sprite art that captured the aesthetic of both the comics and the American animated series. After you punch your way through hordes of Sentinels, bosses, and mutant crocodiles, the villainous Magneto descends from on high to deliver… a warning? A greeting? Sure, the clumsy localization takes a bit of the grandeur out of the subsequent boss fight, but it’s helped the game endure in players’ imaginations for decades since. —Jen Glennon

Game: Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017)

Character: Ryuji Goda

There are a lot of shadowy operators in the Yakuza series, but Ryuji Goda isn’t one of them. Kiryu’s rival in Osaka’s Omi Allliance is a man of action, who prefers to settle things with his fists instead of pulling strings behind the scenes. It’s only when Ryuji betrays his former superior at the end of Yakuza 2, dismissing him as a “scheming fuck” who “could never stand on top,” that we realize just how similar Kiryu and Ryuji truly are. (Except for the fact that Kiryu, like Batman, has never killed anyone. Of course!) —Jen Glennon

Game: Destiny (2014)

Character: Ghost

In the original alpha test for Bungie’s Destiny, Peter Dinklage — as the player’s robotic companion, the Ghost — spoke this immortal line with such a flat affect that it became a meme. Were we mocking Dinklage phoning it in, or the way the line’s cringe factor popped the bubble of Destiny‘s epic scale and self-serious import? Both, probably. Bungie pretended to be cool with it, even made T-shirts, but the line was eventually scrubbed from the game, and Dinklage was eventually replaced by a more chipper Nolan North. The line was later reinserted as a joke, but by then it was too late. Bungie should have fully owned it. Only in video games does an iconic line get patched out of history because it’s not the ‘right kind’ of iconic. For shame. —Oli Welsh

Game: The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)

Character: Guybrush Threepwood

The Secret of Monkey Island is often regarded (and correctly so) as one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time, thanks to its charming world, clever puzzles, and hilarious writing. You are Guybrush Threepwood, a happy-go-lucky pirate wannabe, but rather than duelling with cutlasses, combat happens in the form of back-and-forth insults. The most famous of these is the correct response to “You fight like a dairy farmer!”, which is “How appropriate, you fight like a cow!” As Captain Smirk says, “Swordfighting is a little like making love. It’s not always what you do, but what you say.” —Ford James

Game: Nier (2010)

Character: Kaine

It’s a shame that Nier Automata has so thoroughly overshadowed Nier Replicant, if only because fewer people have had the privilege of experiencing the live wire that is Kaine. However you describe her — raw, tragic, powerful — the throughline is that Kaine is undeniable. Square Enix must have thought so, too: Despite its foul-mouthed detonation, this legendary monologue is the first thing players hear when they boot the game. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Resident Evil (1996)

Character: Unknown

The Resident Evil series isn’t just a masterclass in good one-liners. It also models how memorable lore documents can build a world as well as any spoken line. The best example of that in the survival horror series is in its very first game, where players stumble upon a diary written over 10 days. It slowly documents a person slowly turning into a zombie. Their writing devolves day after day until the last entry, which simply says “Itchy. Tasty.” It’s both a funny bit and a smart way of illustrating the mechanics of the Resident Evil world, without showing the horror outright. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag (2013)

Character: Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch

Edward Thatch, also known as the pirate Blackbeard, was not a hero — not in IRL history nor in his depiction in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. But Thatch vocally held fast to his ideals of a better, fairer world for all. Through Thatch, Black Flag raised the question: Do we blame the criminal, or the world that forged the criminal? Despite his career of rampant thievery, there was still something good underneath that impressive black beard. Society just wasn’t built to let it out. —Ari Notis

Game: Celeste (2018)

Character: Madeline

Celeste is a game about a woman climbing a mountain, but as the pixelated protagonist makes her way through abandoned cities and haunted hotels on her journey to the top, it becomes clear that it’s also about so much more. Celeste is really a game about self-doubt and perseverance, emphasized by brutal platforming challenges that require both memorization and the mastery of some surprisingly complex jump mechanics. Looking back down from the top of the mountain, you finally understand why Celeste had to climb it in the first place, and why that was never such a crazy idea after all. —Jake Kleinman

Game: The Last of Us Part 2 (2020)

Character: Abby Anderson

Naughty Dog’s sequel to The Last of Us throws players for a loop halfway through, as the consequences of Ellie’s revenge tour through Seattle finally catch up to her in the lobby of an abandoned theater. However reluctantly, we’ve been alongside Ellie as she dispatched all of Abby’s friends, one by one. Now, as Ellie’s fate hangs in the balance, The Last of Us Part 2 shifts to Abby’s perspective, leading players to question what makes life worth living in a broken world. —Jen Glennon

Game: Fire Emblem Awakening (2012)

Character: Frederick

Fire Emblem games often ease the sting of permadeath by giving you a character who is an army unto themselves. In Awakening, that unit is Frederick. Imagine this line being the last thing you hear before perishing. That pure, unvarnished badassery is made all the more impressive when you consider it was meant to be a throwaway bark. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Destiny (2014)

Character: Elsie Bray (The Exo Stranger)

There are a lot of reasons that Destiny was able to capture players’ attention in 2014 even with a half-cooked story. You can chalk it all up to the best-in-class gunplay, but a lot of its initial charm is owed to writing that embraced its own silliness. This Elsie Bray classic one-liner is a great example. Whether ironic or not, “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” became a fan favorite. Bungie responded by playing ball with its community, introducing the exotic weapon No Time To Explain in its honor. That playful dialog between dev and player is why Bungie’s MMO series still lives on today. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Mortal Kombat series

Character: Narrator

1992’s arcade fighting sensation was beloved and reviled for its over-the-top depictions of violence. At the end of a best-of-three matchup between two fighters, the winner gets a few precious moments to execute a Fatality: your window starts when the narrator snarls the words “finish him” in a voice that sounds like gravel in a garbage disposal. If done correctly, this stream of timed button inputs will result in a spectacularly gory finisher. In the original arcade game, there were only seven of these moves — Scorpion breathes fire to reduce his foe to a smoking skeleton, while Sub-Zero rips his opponent’s head off, leaving the spine dangling in the air. Subsequent Mortal Kombat games added dozens of riffs on the formula, like Animalities and Babalities, where you turn into a fearsome beast and eat your opponent, or transform the loser into an infant. —Jen Glennon

Game: Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward (2015)

Character: Haurchefant Greystone

This moment isn’t about a character dying. It’s a memorial of Haurchefant’s life and a testament to the power of conviction, that word so frequently used in RPGs and anime that it tends to feel meaningless. He believed so firmly in the need for change and the Warrior of Light’s potential to make it happen that he fought against his peers and the gods of his youth, and ultimately died. But he’s not sorry, and nor, he thinks, should you be. It’s easily one of the single best moments in Final Fantasy, and it sets the stage for some of FFXIV‘s later, even more significant moments. —Josh Broadwell

Game: Far Cry 3 (2012)

Character: Vaas Montenegro

Though often misattributed to Albert Einstein, Far Cry 3 actor Michael Mando really deserves the credit for making this quote legendary. His live-wire performance cemented Mando’s Vaas Montenegro — a pirate who aims to kidnap the player character and his friends — as a compelling villain well beyond video game canon, and the “definition of insanity” speech is the high-water mark. To this day, the Far Cry series is still blindly grasping for the high that was Vaas Montenegro. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Fallout (1997)

Character: Narrator (series refrain)

Fallout’s tagline hasn’t survived the age of drones and AI-powered warfare because it poignantly distills an ongoing political reality. Ron Pearlman’s thick, raspy narration still has a way of enveloping the player in a smoky haze. Like a vault dweller ascending against the sunlight for the first time, these four iconic words will immediately transport the listener into the world of Fallout — going on 30 years now. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Character: Old Snake (Solid Snake)

Hideo Kojima never made a point he didn’t repeat another dozen times in clunky monologues and absurdly on-the-nose metaphors. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots might be his most waffly and overloaded game, which is really saying something. (I reviewed it in a hotel in Paris and was checking emails on my phone during one of its interminable cutscenes when I noticed Kojima and his entourage standing behind me. Embarrassing!) Yet you can’t argue with his sincerity or his grasp of the way societies eat themselves. This monologue, growled by David Hayter’s aging Solid Snake (or as Kojima dubbed him with typical subtlety, Old Snake) at the start of MGS4, is a resounding epitaph for the flimsy justifications and rampant commercialization of the War on Terror era of the 2000s — and a prophecy of the information wars we live in now. —Oli Welsh

Game: Mass Effect 2 (2010)

Character: Garrus Vakarian

Oh, Garrus. Always in the middle of calibrating something. All fans wanted was for the surly Turian to let himself get a bit vulnerable, to let Commander Shepard in with some Real Talk after a brutal mission. But if Garrus had nothing to say, he’d shoot the convo down with a line that went on to achieve meme immortality and serve as the basis of a thousand compilation videos. —Ari Notis

Game: Star Fox 64 (1997)

Character: Peppy

You don’t need to look any farther than The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to confirm the staying power of Peppy Hare’s “Do a barrel roll!” from Star Fox 64. Framed as the solution to all of one’s problems, and long part of the internet’s meme pantheon, the suggestion that Fox McCloud do a barrel roll wasn’t part of the original Star Fox for Super NES. It was introduced in its N64 sequel, and later repeated by Slippy in 2016’s Star Fox Zero. For further validation of the phrase’s place in pop culture, Google made its whole search engine rotate when you search for “Do a barrel roll.” —Michael McWhertor

Game: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)

Character: Expedition motto

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is full of complimentary themes, one of them being perseverance in the face of tragedy. The recurring lines “When one falls, we continue” and “Tomorrow comes” capture this theme well. (Simon kick your butt? “We continue.”) But “For those who come after” takes the cake as the most notable mantra. It’s a mindset that propels the expeditioners forward on their suicide mission. Gustave, Lune, and the rest aren’t the first to set out to defeat The Paintress; they’re just the latest in a long line of Lumière’s citizens putting their lives on the line in hopes their friends and families get a chance at a better future. They set off knowing whatever progress they make will be not necessarily to help themselves, but to help “those who come after.” —Austin Manchester

Game: Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja (1988)

Character: Unnamed Secret Service agent

Is there anything more ‘80s than Bad Dudes? Swiping the premise from Escape from New York — the president has been kidnapped, and street-smart expendables are sent in to rescue him — and pitting players against the ultimate genre bad guy of the era, ninjas, Data East’s Bad Dudes is an arcade game for the times. According to the game’s setup, “rampant ninja-related crimes these days” are widespread, and even the White House is not immune. Players are then tasked by a Schwarzennegger-coded Secret Service agent to rescue Ronnie, a thinly veiled version of actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan. Bad Dudes thus presented a challenge of the utmost importance: throwing on your best white parachute pants and fingerless gloves, recovering a U.S. president with a 50% approval rating, and then grabbing a burger with him. You’ll even throw back a few Coca-Cola Classics along the way. Dudes, it was the ‘80s! —Michael McWhertor

Game: Final Fantasy 10 (2001)

Character: Tidus

Relatively early in Yuna’s pilgrimage, Final Fantasy 10’s party encounters Crusaders (a militia sworn to protect Spira) and the Al Bhed (who use machina forbidden by mainstream society) who plan an operation to fight the kaiju Sin directly. This defies Yu Yevon’s teachings, which tell people to rely on Summoners to defeat Sin. It’s devastating to see this large-scale operation fail miserably, only for Yuna to stand tall and perform the Sending dance necessary to send the souls of the dead to the Farplane. After nearly dying after trying to confront Sin — who is actually a distorted version of his father — Tidus wakes to see Yuna quietly performing the sending. In his solemn voiceover, Tidus wonders how many dozens or hundreds of people his father killed that day. It marks a turning point for Tidus that repositions his focus on wanting to protect Yuna and put a stop to her suffering, no matter the cost. —Corey Plante

Game: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

Character: Captain MacMillan

“All Ghillied Up” might be the most iconic Call of Duty mission of all time. Set in the distant aftermath of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, it marked the second mission in Act 2. Up to that point, the campaign had been fast, frantic, and full of energy. Captain MacMillan’s quote comes during the opening title sequence for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, then he repeats it mid-mission as you make your way through a dilapidated office block. His words hang in the air, the heavy implication of them helping to make the player realize the game isn’t about glorifying war. —Ford James

Game: Sonic Adventure 2 (2001)

Character: Shadow the Hedgehog

For years, Sonic thought he was the only bipedal hedgehog who could sprint at the speed of sound. Then he met Shadow. During one confrontation in a Sonic Adventure 2 forest level, Sonic calls Shadow a “faker” — the epitome of peak late-’90s insult. Shadow retorts with the ultimate Uno Reverse of burns: “Faker? I think you’re the fake hedgehog around here. You’re comparing yourself to me? Ha! You’re not even good enough to be my fake.” Sorry, Sonic. No matter how many times you beat Shadow in a race, there’s no coming back from that. —Ari Notis

Game: Final Fantasy 16 (2023)

Character: Clive Rosfield

Like so much of the bombastic spectacle that is Final Fantasy 16, a line as self-referential as this should not work. And yet the game’s epic animations, astounding musical score, and lovably complex characters earn Final Fantasy 16 the right to basically say “final fantasy!” in a convoluted way. At the very end of his final confrontation against the big bad godly alien Ultimate, Clive drops this bombshell of a line after his foe says, “The world you seek is but a fantasy!” Clive’s response hits so hard because, in Final Fantasy 16, the fantasy Clive believes in isn’t a classic Final Fantasy realm defined by magic and full of chocobos. It’s a dream of a world where humans aren’t exploited or doomed by magic. The “we” here does some heavy lifting as he calls upon the powers of the many Dominants he’s fused with up until this point. —Corey Plante

Game: Assassin’s Creed (2007)

Characters: Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad

It’s the “creed” in “Assassin’s Creed.” Many characters have recited this line, in one form or another, over two decades of games. And its expectations are of course weighted with literal millennia of fictionalized history. But players first heard it in the 2007 original, a refrain of protagonist Altaïr and his cohort of Assassins, teasing a world without rules — and thus without limits. How far the series has come. —Ari Notis

Game: Dragon Age: Origins (2009)

Characters: The Grey Wardens

BioWare has always excelled when it comes to games that make you feel part of something bigger, and they struck gold when creating Dragon Age’s biggest — and arguably its most popular — faction, the Grey Wardens. This quote is the Grey Warden motto, and the first use of it appears in the Warden’s Calling trailer, but it also appears in several codex entries throughout Dragon Age: Origins. The litany perfectly sums up exactly what it means to be part of this ancient order: a constant sacrifice of self to stand against the darkness of an evil that threatens to spread across Thedas and plunge its people into doom. Beautiful, poetic, and tragic all at the same time. —Aimee Hart

Game: Dragon Quest (series)

Character: Puff-puff girl

Eroticism and comedy are part of Dragon Quest’s DNA, just as much as Slimes. Nothing captures this as clearly as the ambiguous concept of “puff-puff.” Since the first game, female NPCs in bunny attire will occasionally offer to give the main character a “puff-puff.” While in most cases the screen fades out, leaving players to imagine what’s happening based on, um, audio cues, in others we watch some of the funniest moments in the games. In Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age, the secretive act of puff-puff reaches a new level when the Luminary, after setting up a meeting with a bunny girl in the most unexpected place, finds himself tied up and thrown from a cliff, only to lose himself in a unique experience: a “puff-puff” from the clouds.—Paulo Kawanishi

Game: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

Character: Geralt of Rivia

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is chock-full of iconic voice lines, and most famous of them all is also the simplest. Every now and then, the dry-witted yet eloquent Geralt of Rivia will absentmindedly utter a two-word phrase: “Wind’s howling.” Does it mean anything within the context of the game? Probably not. He’s just commenting on the weather. He’ll also come out with “looks like rain” frequently… which is stating the obvious even more so than commenting on the wind. Honorable mention to Geralt’s recurring line, “Medallion’s humming. Place of Power, it’s gotta be.” He will usually only say this when he’s practically on top of the Place of Power, so the voice line serves no practical purpose. Geralt is truly a master of stating the obvious. —Ford James

Game: Life Is Strange (2015)

Character: The god of notifications

Despite underwhelming later entries in the series, the first two Life Is Strange games from Don’t Nod perfectly captured the above quote through the presentation of meaningful narrative choices. No matter if you decided to open a window to let a bird escape or lied to protect your brother, there was always going to be a result that would change the plot — and the lives of the characters you meet along the way. No two journeys are the same. It’s what made the Life Is Strange series so monumental and personal for each player. Every action had a consequence. —Aimee Hart

Game: Uncharted (2007)

Character: Nathan Drake (motto)

“Greatness from small beginnings.” Or at least that’s how Nathan Drake translates this line, which is inscribed on a ring he wears on a necklace and which he attributes to Sir Francis Drake, a famous 16th-century explorer he claims was his ancestor. The ring and its inscription play many roles throughout the four mainline Uncharted games — plot device, cipher key, sentimental value — but ultimately endure as a motto for the man himself. —Ari Notis

Game: Resident Evil 4 (2004)

Character: Leon S. Kennedy

If there’s one precise moment Leon S. Kennedy became a certifiable himbo, it’s this. As he’s facing down an onslaught of mumbling, murderous peasants, a bell rings. The crowd disperses. Does Leon breathe a sigh of relief? Wonder what the heck’s happening now? Nope. He just quips. And in so doing, he sets the tone for the next 20 years of Resident Evil. —Josh Broadwell

Game: Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)

Character: Premier Anatoly Cherdenko

Look, a lot of video game lines are pretty ridiculous. If you take them out of context of their playful worlds, they might sound totally alien. That’s what makes Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3’s most absurd line so wonderful. Emmy-winning actor Tim Curry has the honor of trying to deliver the line with a straight face. He fails. He lets out a smirk before he can hit the punchline, giving the moment the comedic joy of watching a Saturday Night Live actor breaking during a sketch. It’s a rare moment of self-awareness that captures just how delightfully silly games writing can be when it’s not taking itself too seriously. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Paper Mario: The Origami King (2020)

Character: Bobby

Like every Paper Mario game, The Origami King is full of quips and clever one-liners. But Bobby’s final lines are nothing short of devastating. Bobby is a bob-omb without a fuse, meaning he can’t do the one thing bob-ombs are known for. At one point, Olivia, a fellow party member, ends up trapped under a boulder. Bobby eventually finds a fuse — left behind by his dead best friend, no less — and uses to finally explode, freeing Olivia but sacrificing himself in the process. Bobby, good sir, you’ve made your impact. —Ari Notis

Game: StarCraft (1998)

Character: StarCraft

There are some video game lines you hear in your sleep. Starcraft’s most foundational command is one of those lines. It’s no more than a simple gameplay nudge designed to keep your strategizing on track, but you hear it so often during a session that it’s bound to become part of your own lexicon even when you’re not playing. It’s one of those great examples of gaming’s unique ability to pull us into an alien world, leaving us fluent in language that sounds like nonsense to anyone who isn’t in the know. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)

Character: Sergeant Avery Johnson

Some barks are throwaway lines meant to fill space. Others become load-bearing for the series. Sergeant Johnson’s out-of-pocket “I would have been your daddy” insult from Halo: Combat Evolved is the latter. Abbreviated as “IWHBYD” throughout the Halo games, it’s been a running joke throughout the series. Most commonly, IWHBYD is the name of a combat skull — elusive collectibles that allow you to modify gameplay — in every subsequent game since Combat Evolved. What does this skull do? When activated, enemies are more likely to say “rare dialogue lines” in combat. Like the guy whose one-liner it’s named after. —Ari Notis

Game: Mass Effect 3 (2012)

Character: Commander Shepard

While saving the galaxy from death-by-Reapers is the main goal of the original Mass Effect trilogy, what makes these games so enduring are the relationships built along the way. One of the best is with Garrus Vakarian, the stalwart Turian who stands by Shepard’s side through all three games. Both BroShep and FemShep get the line “There’s no Shepard without Vakarian” while the characters say their goodbyes before the final clash against Reaper forces, and rightfully so. For BroShep, it’s a commentary on how much of a friend and loyal companion Garrus has been. For a FemShep who has romanced Garrus, it hits different. —Austin Manchester

Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)

Character: Navi

The polarizing Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time never knew just how impactful she’d be. With her frequent interruptions of “Hey! Listen!” when dispensing advice to Link in his first 3D adventure, Nintendo’s fairy guide-mother drew ire from many fans. Navi was the primordial cell that ultimately grew into a monster for the Zelda series; in Ocarina of Time, she helped players navigate the then-new 3D version of Hyrule, and in subsequent games was replaced by ever-lengthening tutorials that bogged down the franchise. After Skyward Sword, a game bashed for its excessive hand-holding, Nintendo reinvented Zelda with Breath of the Wild. Hate Navi all you want, but she ultimately led us to the best Zelda games in the franchise. —Michael McWhertor

Game: Hades (2020)

Character: Zagreus

Repetition is the nature of roguelikes. It’s not just that you do the same things over and over — you see and hear them, too. Throughout Zagreus’s quest to escape Hades, you’ll accept many, many boons from the Olympian gods. Supergiant Games nailed his summoning phrase in one go. No matter how many times you fight your way from the brooding corridors of Tartarus to the labyrinthine Temple of Styx, this line never gets old. —Ari Notis

Game: The Last of Us (2013)

Character: Fireflies motto

At face value, a quote like “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light” reads as pretty generic, but within the game’s wider context, it takes on a much deeper meaning. Things are pretty bleak for everybody. How do you find hope in such a world? For the Fireflies, the “light” is the hope of a cure for the parasitic zombie virus, and Ellie becomes a necessary sacrifice to achieve that goal. On the flip side, there’s Joel, who lost his daughter in the initial outbreak. For him, the only light he’s able to find is his growing love for Ellie. The Last of Us asks a profound question: Is it better to make a personal sacrifice for the sake of humanity, or protect that which we hold dear to save our own humanity? When we’re lost in the darkness, which do we look to? —Corey Plante

Game: Transistor (2014)

Character: The Transistor

As far as cold opens go, the intro to Transistor might be the coldest. Supergiant’s 2014 genre-defying tactical game instantly draws you in. It starts off by showing a woman with hair as red as flames, bent over a dead man impaled by a sword so big it’d make Cloud Strife blush. The sword glows, and you hear a voice. The camera pans up to show a futuristic city awash in blue and orange light, while the woman pulls the sword out of the man’s gut and makes her way down the street. For what? To where? And why? There’s only one way to find out. —Ari Notis

Game: BioShock (2007)

Character: Atlas

“Would you kindly?” is the phrase that turns BioShock inside out, delivering one of gaming’s biggest twists in the late 2000s. Throughout much of the game, your only friend is a guy called Atlas, who speaks to you over a shortwave radio. Supposedly, he’s working with you to escape the dangerous underwater dystopian city of Rapture with his family. Atlas’ habit of saying “Would you kindly…? usually reads as a quirk or affectation, but it’s eventually revealed to be a form of mind control. Turns out, Atlas is actually the mobster kingpin, Frank Fontaine. He fabricated this working-class persona to manipulate the people of Rapture into overthrowing its de facto king Andrew Ryan — and now he’s been manipulating you into finishing the job. The big reveal doesn’t just recontextualize everything we know about Atlas, Jack, and Ryan — but it implicates the player in the illusion of choice. In Rapture, it’s possible that free will never existed to begin with. —Corey Plante

Game: Doom (2016)

Character: The Demonic Voice

Yes, it originated as a throwaway line from an infamous mid-’90s Doom comic, and saw life in the years after as a meme. But the 2016 reboot of Doom aimed to reimagine every aspect of the series, right down to its cheesiest parts. “Rip and tear,” which appears in the game’s introductory monologue, could’ve been laughed off but was back-stopped by some of the best action ever seen in a game video and a truly metal background song of the same name. Doom (2016) pulled off one of the rarest feats in gaming: de-meme-ifying a once-laughable quote. —Ari Notis

Game: Final Fantasy 7 (1997)

Character: Barret Wallace

The opening sequence of Squaresoft’s iconic PS1 RPG makes no bones about its ambitions. Shortly after the elaborate opening cutscene, we meet Barret, a brick shithouse of a man with a gun for an arm. He’s hellbent on taking down Shinra, the corporation that’s harvesting Mako energy — quite literally the lifeblood of the planet. Barret repeats variations on this line to the point where it becomes a running gag, but as the story of Final Fantasy 7 unfolds, we soon learn that he’s 100% right. The planet IS dying, and quickly — and Cloud and his friends are the only ones who can stop it. —Jen Glennon

Game: Halo 2 (2004)

Character: Master Chief John-117

“Finishing this fight” is arguably the Halo 2 line that gets discussed the most, but this quote is the most badass. It comes as part of a larger conversation between Master Chief and his commander, Fleet Admiral Lord Terrance Hood, as Chief finds a nuclear bomb on a human vessel in the middle of a space battle. (“Sir, permission to leave the station,” Master Chief asks. “For what purpose, Master Chief?,” Hood responds. “To give the Covenant back their bomb.” “…Permission granted.”) Then Master Chief rides said nuclear-grade explosive through space, blowing up a Covenant ship and escaping to safety. “Finishing this fight,” which comes at the end of the game, only carries the weight it does because of this moment: Master Chief never makes a promise he can’t keep. —Ari Notis

Game: Pentiment (2022)

Character: Sister Illuminata

Early on in Act 1 of Pentiment, Andreas is tasked with collecting an assortment of books and returning them to the monastery’s librarian, Sister Illuminata. One of those books is Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas drives his lover Dido to suicide because the gods have convinced him that his destiny lies elsewhere. The tome prompts Andreas and Illuminata to chat about the extremely limited roles women have in culture and society: they can only be maidens, seducers, or crones. It’s a brief but memorable exchange that highlights Pentiment’s nuanced portrayal of women — and the complex intersections of faith and intellect among the inhabitants of this small Bavarian town. —Jen Glennon

Game: Hollow Knight (2017)

Character: Hornet

In the original Hollow Knight, Hornet spoke a lot during fights; the line “Shaw!” in particular helped elevate the character to become a fan favorite. Then, in 2025, Hollow Knight Silksong finally came out, and Hornet was noticably more silent than her previous showing. But “Shaw!” is so critical to the character that, shortly after the 2025 release of Hollow Knight Silksong, fans openly lamented its absence so vocally that one player modded the line back into the game. Balance restored. —Ari Notis

Game: Kingdom Hearts (2002)

Character: Sora

When Sora shares his feelings in the final battle, he articulates how much he has grown during his journey — and sums up the ethos of the series forevermore. Kingdom Hearts is not afraid of sounding cheesy or espousing naive ideals. It trusts a kid with spiky hair, clownish yellow shoes, and a big key-shaped sword to save the world, with the help of Disney characters. But it’s through these unconventional elements that Kingdom Hearts makes a convincing argument about the value of hope and friendship. Standing your ground and opening your heart requires true courage. Kingdom Hearts strips itself of any cynicism and champions a hopeful, beautifully childlike vision of the world. —Paulo Kawanishi

Game: Various Super Mario games

Character: C’mon now

You hear these three syllables, you know exactly who said them. Even people who’ve never played a video game know exactly who said them. For three decades, Charles Martinet lent his voice to one of the most iconic characters (gaming or not) in history, “wahoo!”-ing his way through platforming challenges since the days of Super Mario 64. But starting with 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Mario changed forever. It’s still a-me, but it’s not a-him. What a legendary run. —Ari Notis

Game: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)

Character: Infamous text prompt

Early on in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, protagonist Jack Mitchell attends the funeral of a fallen comrade. While at the foot of the casket, the prompt to “press F to pay respects” appears on-screen. Mitchell places his hand on the casket, solemnly looks down, then walks away. It was immediately mocked for, ironically, being disrespectful. According to Advanced Warfare level designer Steve Bianchi, however, that scene originally had the player hammering a pin into the casket, but it was changed when a military advisor pointed out that that is a Navy SEAL tradition, and not a US Marine one, and Mitchell is the latter in-game. These days, it’s an iconic meme, and it’s come full circle because “F” is now typically used as a way to express sympathy to others online. —Ford James

Game: Alan Wake (2010)

Character: Alan Wake

This bold, final line from 2010’s Alan Wake recontextualizes the entire game up to this point by confirming that Cauldron Lake is a lot more than just a body of water formed by a dormant volcano long ago. An otherworldly darkness corrupts the people in the town of Bright Falls, and it’s indicated that some kind of otherworldly cosmic power originating from the lake can transform anything imagined into reality through literature. By the game’s final act, we learn that things go much deeper: the lake itself functions as a portal to an alternate dimension called the Dark Place, a dreamlike and fluid space where narrative determines existence. Alan ultimately has to surrender himself to the Dark Place to save his wife — and the world — and in the game’s final moments, he comes to truly understand the vast depths he has plunged into. —Corey Plante

Game: What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)

Character: Edith Finch

Death is unavoidable in What Remains of Edith Finch. No matter how you play it, each vignette about a doomed family member will end in their untimely demise. It’s a series of funerals, so it’s only right that it ends with one big sermon to leave us with some solace. Speaking to an unborn son that she will never meet, Edith Finch Jr. laments the fact that human life is so finite. But rather than wallowing over it, she embraces the beauty of an ephemeral existence: “I think the best we can try to do is open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is.” —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Street Fighter series

Character: Various

Here is a line that is so iconic, people will repeat it despite never playing a single Street Fighter game. To say it is to feel powerful. There’s a tender side to this aura, too. Picture children on a playground, palms outstretched toward the sky. These are kids who wholeheartedly believe that, if they exclaim “Haduoken!” with enough conviction, magic will follow. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Zero Wing (1989)

Character: CATS

As far as Sega Genesis games go, Zero Wing was nothing special. The Japanese arcade port was a horizontal side-scroller where you pilot a fighter jet holding off an invasion of alien cyborgs named CATS. It was, at best, a minor success. Yet in the early days of the internet, the introductory cutscenes of the game’s European port made their way online and became a viral phenomenon because of the awkward translations, most famously the phrase “All your base are belong to us,” uttered by the CATS commander. In the pre-social media era, the “All your base” meme changed the way memes are spread and digested, making the phrase far more significant than Zero Wing could ever be. —Brian VanHooker

Game: Portal (2007)

Character: Graffiti throughout

There are famous quotes and iconic quotes, and then there are quotes that have passed into popular idiom and taken on a life far beyond their original source. Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek entered this Shakespearean canon with a throwaway bit of environmental storytelling from Valve’s 2007 masterpiece Portal. Scrawled on the walls by a previous test subject in the game’s hellish, AI-ruled lab — where the human lab rats are promised cake as a reward – the phrase potently breaks the lab’s smoothly finished surfaces with a conspiratorial, but also amusingly relatable, slogan. Everybody loves cake, right? But what if the promised cake never existed? “The cake is a lie” virally infected the internet as a way to skeptically skewer the self-defeating rat runs of late-stage capitalism. Not everyone who uses it knows that it’s a perfect, pithy echo of a magnificent game about that very subject. But that only makes it more powerful. —Oli Welsh

Game: Elden Ring (2022)

Character: Narrator

This Elden Ring quote, said during the opening cinematic, works as a call-to-arms for players preparing to set off in The Lands Between. A dragon? A variety of knights? Creepy-ass hand-spider monsters? Arise now to face them all. Playing as the “dead who yet live” lands on a meta level, as players are surely going to die (a lot). But above all else, these words conjure a sense of curiosity; they’re an invitation to explore and seek out the path to becoming the Elden Lord. —Austin Manchester

Game: Various Souls games

Character: The screen

Video games kill us all the time, but only FromSoftware can wring anyone through the entire gamut of human emotion with two simple words. “You died” can be a provocation, a thwarting, a meditation. For some, it’s a pathway to ascension. Deciding what happens after witnessing this phrase blackening the screen is to stand before a mirror. What lingers isn’t defeat; that’s temporary. But a reflection can become unbearable when you countenance complacency. —Patricia Hernandez

Game: Oregon Trail (1985)

Character: Nameless omniscient narrator

The archetypal edutainment game makes you the leader of a wagon train journeying from Missouri to Oregon in 1848. After naming your four party members (ideally one of them after your classroom crush) and buying supplies, you set off on your perilous journey across America’s untamed west, slaughtering more buffalo than you could ever hope to eat and haggling at trading posts along the way. Ostensibly meant to teach youngsters about the grit and sacrifice of America’s pioneers, it’s where most of us learned that “dysentery” actually means shitting yourself to death. Oof. —Jen Glennon

Game: Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Character: Toad

It’s perhaps gaming’s greatest running joke: After defeating Bowser, Mario is continually met not by a beautiful princess, but by a pipsqueak there to give him some bad news. She’s not here, bub. It’s an iconic joke, but the line doesn’t get enough credit as an effective piece of world-building. When you played Super Mario Bros. for the first time in 1985, you had no idea how big the adventure was. That simple refrain was enough to keep you wondering. You mean to tell me there’s more!? Not knowing where a warp pipe leads next is key to the Mario series’ unstoppable joy, and every “but” in Super Mario Bros. is an excuse to jump down another and see where it leads. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Silent Hill 2 (2001)

Character: Angela

Near the end of his journey through the hellish Silent Hill, James Sunderland enters a burning room. Inside, he finds Angela, one of the tortured souls struggling to unpack her personal trauma in a town that brings fears to life. As she ascends a blazing staircase, she turns to James, surprised that he can see the fire too. “For me, it’s always like this,” she says before marching into the flames. It’s a powerful, haunting moment that visualizes a character’s pain like no other game. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: God of War (2018)

Character: Kratos

2018’s God of War hinges on a strained father-son relationship. Kratos, once a ruthless and uncaring killer of pantheons, struggles to soften up on his own son, Atreus. He’s combative with him just as he is with any demon, constantly shouting him down with a stern “boy!” That approach to parenting reaches a climax when Kratos offers this genuine nugget of wisdom. And though it’s addressed to Atreus, it’s really the advice Kratos himself needs to hear. It’s the line that comes to define him as he searches for a healthier way to connect with his son beneath his eternally angry facade. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)

Character: Carl “CJ” Johnson

GTA: San Andreas opens with Carl “CJ” Johnson returning from Liberty City to his hometown of Los Santos. It’s not exactly a warm welcome: CJ’s pulled over by Samuel L. Jackson’s corrupt Officer Tenpenny in his taxi from the airport. After dangling the threat of being set up as a cop killer, Tenpenny ditches CJ in a seriously sketchy neighborhood: “Rollin Heights Balla country.” The quote itself — and Los Angeles rapper Young Maylay’s world-weary line reading — has become a meme with a life of its own, used to invoke all-too-familiar and exasperating situations. It tends to pop up whenever a game is delayed multiple times… like GTA 6. —Jen Glennon

Game: Undertale (2015)

Character: Frisk

If there’s a single quote that’s guaranteed to make me crawl into a ball and sob, it’s this heartbreaking quote from Frisk, the protagonist of Undertale. During the early stages of the game, you can interact with a mirror in your house. The description when you do so is brief: “It’s you.” However, if you look into the same mirror during the endgame stages of Undertale, you see the quote above. After all the grief and trauma Frisk has experienced, the reminder that they are still here, that they still exist, even if changed somewhat, hits as hard as a truck. —Aimee Hart

Game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)

Character: Dracula

A few years back, I was talking to a friend and invoked Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s most memorable line. He knew it, but couldn’t recall where it was from. “That’s The Tempest, right?” he asked (referring to Shakespeare’s play, yes). I still rib him about it to this day, but I honestly can’t blame him for mixing up Konami and Shakespeare. Dracula’s best quote crosses the line between video game silliness and theatrical poetry, becoming a sort of timeless soundbite that you’d swear first showed up in a foundational play. Is it melodramatic? Absolutely, but so was the Bard. —Giovanni Colantonio

Game: Metal Gear Solid (1998)

Character: Hal “Otacon” Emmerich

Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear franchise is a meditation on how war and capitalism corrupt everything they touch. But while a streak of cynicism runs through the games, the best Metal Gear Solid quote reveals the soft and chewy center at the heart of Kojima’s story. While the romantic simplicity of Metal Gear REX creator Otacon’s words helped turn them into a meme, it’s franchise mascot Solid Snake’s response that confirms Kojima and his co-writer Motoyuki Yoshioka’s true talent. “Yeah. I do,” Snake replies. “I think at any time, any place, people can fall in love with each other.” For a game about soldiers, terrorists, and nuke-equipped giant robots, the emotional core of Metal Gear Solid is surprisingly tender. —Jake Kleinman

Game: The Legend of Zelda (1986)

Character: Mysterious nameless elder

Perhaps the most effective and efficient tutorial of all time comes from The Legend of Zelda. When Link enters the first cave he sees, he’s met by an old man who insists that he pick up a sword before exploring. That’s all the game needs to tell you to set up what comes next. All the storytelling spills out of that interaction, as Link’s heroic travels through Hyrule are the type of story that can only be told through the experience of playing a game. There’s a whole world out there to explore. It’s full of danger. Protect yourself and see what’s out there. —Giovanni Colantonio