Zachary Small

Thank you for having me.

I am indeed the freak of nature at the newspaper.

Who's covering?

You know, if you can steal a Picasso, that's my job too.

If you're President Trump and you want another portrait in a national gallery, come to me as well.

So, quite excited to talk about this.

I have my own copy of the book, but it's the preview copy.

Because, fun fact, we actually, Kez and I share an editor, and I guess he was so trauma bonded by going over NFTs and crypto that he was like, you know, I want more world of tech and video games and play to win.

Yeah, you know, I mean, the New York Times is a place full of nerds.

Many of them are more so on the bookish side of nerds.

But thankfully, the timing was just right where, you know, it had been about a decade since we had regular video game coverage.

We had a video game critic on staff at one point.

But there was an editor that joined the culture desk.

I was just joining on staff after many years of freelancing.

And I was like, you know, we really need to do this.

And we got a team together and we created one of these super strange multimedia presentations that took six months to produce, which tells you about how slow and methodical we are.

You could almost make Majora's Mask in that time.

What took you so long?

In fact, you could.

But yeah, I feel like that really helps sort of justify the coverage of video games and show that if you actually go extreme nerd and into the lore and conspiracy theories around games like Zelda, that there's a very strong audience and to this day people bring up.