Metroid[Nintendo, 1986][related: Mother Brain, Samus Aran, Black Hole Information Paradox]

Groundbreaking 1986 single player game-based reality simulator (VPD) developed by the Nintendo Entertainment System for release on its original platform. Widely considered to figure heavily in the EHSPF series and manifestly central to the MetroidVania series of games. Directed by Satoru Okada and Masao Yamamoto (credited officially as simply "Yamamoto"), with music by Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka. The game was developed in a free associative environment and is remarkable for its open-world format and its ability to engender a sense of poignant loneliness and desperation in the player - a phenomenon supporting the "reality as simulation" hypothesis that has come to dominate modern cyber-metaphysics. In this model, pixels equate to Planck length bits (sub-microscopic non-divisible units of timespace that form the fabric of what consciousness perceives as "space"). By extension, reality can in fact be thought of as a two-dimensional information-based bit space that gives rise to complex illusory environs via cybernetic interaction with our perceptual network, thus skirting the so-called "black hole information paradox" . Within this mode of thinking, the game's formidable end boss Mother Brain can be seen as a malevolent omniscient figurehead pervading the simulation - a digital virus-like villian whose function is solely to ensure that the protagonist (Samus Aran/the player) remains locked into an endless loop-quest despite signs of its Brechtian artifice in the form of glitches [i.e. door jumps, wall climbing, and, in later Metroid platforms, phazon overload and shadow freezing]. Upon defeat of The Mother Brain, its protagonist is revealed to be female, despite the use of male pronouns in the game's silver handbook, with a reverse correlation between the success and speed of the player's successful campaign and the avatar's amount of clothing. A perfect campaign results in Samus being forced to re-complete her mission, defeating bosses Ridley, Kraig, and The Mother Brain clad in hot pink underwear . Samus Aran is suspended in a timeless oblivion, a space in which consequential movement or action is rendered impossible. And yet... the cycle continues.

"And when I finally won the game in the basement of my third grade teacher's house and found that Samus was, in fact, a woman, I was alone - and would stay alone from that day forward".