30 years ago, a new games company called Electronic Arts was founded on the slogan: "Can a computer make you cry?" To which their implicit belief was, of course: "yes".
Three decades later, it's fair to say EA has done 'quite well' for itself, but what of its original question?
Game makers have long been obsessed with the idea of reducing gamers to streaming, snotty tears. With each major step change in technology, giving creators an increasingly powerful set of audio-visual tools with which to stir the senses, the holy grail of 'the crying game' seemed tantalisingly within reach.
And where are we now? Well, I've heard lots of people admit to crying at a video game – BUT, there has yet to be one which universally prompts the torrents of tears that movies manage week in week out.
The reason I write about this now is that it finally happened to me last weekend. My very first gaming tears. And they came, gently but unstoppably, during the closing sequence of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword on Wii.
A little context here. When it comes to films, I'm a pathetic wet blanket of a man who will cry at pretty much anything if it pokes me in the appropriate manner. In the past few weeks alone I have blubbed over: The Descendants, Hugo, War Horse, The Help and The Artist. But nothing – and this should tell you all you need to know – produced such theatrically heaving sobs as, yes, Arthur Christmas.
To be clear, it's not like I've had a 'bad month' or anything. I've always been a big screen baby. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1? Starting bawling my eyes out when Dobby died – and I was still choking back the tears after I'd left the cinema and was wandering through London's Leicester Square. What a prat.
The point is, I'm hardly alone in this. Take Pixar's Up: a movie that will break the hardest of hearts, from nought-to-teary in ten minutes flat. And yet, prior to last Sunday, I had never come close with a game. Not a murmur.
Is this, then, because the artistry and storytelling ability of game makers just isn't up to scratch, the medium still cast as the cack-handed cousin of great and glorious Hollywood? I've banged on about bad game narrative on here before, but I don't think it's that simple.
More fundamentally, I think it's because gaming is an interactive form. In a movie, we are, self-evidently, passive viewers, and in that wide-eyed, slack-jawed repose, perfectly positioned to have our buttons pushed and heart strings pulled by the wily director.
It is, more often than not, shameless emotional manipulation – when I read War Horse was the work of notorious tear duct terrorists Stephen Spielberg and Richard Curtis, I knew I was done for – but I have no beef with that. It's easy to sneer at schmaltz and mawkishness, but if a film designed to make people cry does just that, well, it's done something right.
With a game, paradoxically, because I am more directly engaged in the action, I am not as moved in the same way (I have little trouble experiencing rage and frustration) by what is happening moment to moment. A game's main opportunity to take a pop at breaching my emotional defences, then, comes in cutscenes.
And yet, as I've explained, despite the rich, diverse, spectacular and thrilling spectrum of games I've played and loved over the years, it never happened. So why Zelda?
First, there's the Disney-esque sweetness and wholesome simplicity to the art of the world and the stories told within it. And familiar musical cues are deployed to devastating effect as the game reaches its entirely predictable but irresistibly satisfying conclusion.
More than that, though, is how long it took to get there. Having immersed myself utterly in the world, exploring every inch of it and carrying out every side quest, I reckon I racked up a good 80 hours before diving in to the final battle.
And in those 80 hours I'd formed (however one-dimensional) genuine emotional attachments to the quirky cast of characters, with their goofy voices and silly lines of dialogue: flirting with Peatrice, the item check girl; seeking out a new crystal ball for Sparrot, the fortune teller; encouraging Fledge to man the hell up and believe in himself. And don't get me started on the redemption of Groose.
Having spent weeks in their company, therefore, I shed a tear not just for Link's moment of triumph, but also for the end of an affair. They were, in short, the tears of goodbye.
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