Gaming's greatest quotes

There's a power to video game quotes that can't be quantified. A combat bark can be immortalized as a meme. A monologue can land with the force of a thousand meteors, knowing the journey you've had to go through to hear it. A throwaway line in a journal can tell a story by itself; as can a line of graffiti scratched into the side of a level. And sometimes, a video game will speak directly to you — we all know those lines hit the hardest.

Over the past few months, the Polygon team has spent a lot of time considering the best video game quotes from the past 50 years. What makes a good video game quote? Why do certain lines enter the cultural lexicon? Is it meme status? Is it poignancy? Prescience? Humor? A recognition, implicit or not, that we're all here to have fun?

Assassin’s Creed has had no shortage of quotable lines from the past two decades. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” “We work in the dark to serve the light.” Even Ezio’s “requiescat in pace” refrain, simply Latin for “rest in peace,” has been canonized by fans over the years. But one of the series’ most enduring quotes comes from a single character: Blackbeard’s final words.

Edward Thatch, better known as the pirate Blackbeard, is a supporting character in 2013’s Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, which sent the historical fiction series to the Golden Age of Piracy (the early 1700s). Thatch is a comrade of protagonist Edward Kenway, and instrumental in the mission of establishing a pirate utopia in the Caribbean. At one point, while the duo fight aboard a galleon against overwhelming odds of British redcoats, Thatch shouts to Kenway, “In a world without gold, we might’ve been heroes!” A soldier strikes him down. Cue the slow-motion and dramatic music.

This week, Polygon released its list of the 100 greatest video game quotes. If you read it, I’m positive you’ll walk away wondering why a specific line you loved didn’t make the cut because we had the same arguments behind the scenes. There were weeks of debating to make a list that was representative of a wide array of games that accomplish different things with their writing. Sometimes that meant having to limit ourselves to only one or two lines from one series that had the same flavor. That made the task of picking the very best Resident Evil quotes nearly impossible.

More than any series aside from Final Fantasy, Resident Evil is a wealth of memorable lines. Originally pulled from a horror game loaded with strange translations and laughable voice acting, Capcom has leaned into the corniness over the years to great effect. One-liners have now become a back-of-the-box feature, and players are just as eager to hear the next Jill Valentine zinger as they are to see how the ongoing zombie saga unfolds.

Mass Effect is beloved for so many reasons, especially for its memorable and moving writing. There are so many great lines in the series, from the meme-worthy (“Can it wait for a bit? I'm in the middle of some calibrations.”) to the sincere (“There's no Shepard without Vakarian.”).

Jennifer Hale knows a thing or two about Mass Effect’s most enduring dialogue. She voiced Shepard in the original trilogy, giving the Commander both sincerity and abrasiveness, depending on what the moment (and the player) called for. “Such a phenomenal thing to be part of this universe. Grateful every day,” she tells Polygon over email about her time spent on the Normandy."

It was never a question that Final Fantasy 7 would have a place in Polygon’s celebration of the 100 greatest video game quotes of all time. But there was some pretty spirited debate about which FF7 quotes were worthy of inclusion. Barrett’s simple yet memorable “Planet’s dyin’, Cloud” made the cut, while the localization error “This guy are sick” did not. But the quote that most bears closer inspection is not pithy, hilarious, or badass. It is frantic, disjointed, and terribly sad.

Aerith’s death elevates Final Fantasy 7 from a merely excellent game to an all-timer, and this quote is Cloud’s reaction to that:

Had the video game Zero Wing been as big as its most famous quote, the Sega Genesis might have won the 1990s console wars and changed the course of video game history.

Alas, it was a minor success at best.

It's impossible to play a 10-year-old game and be online without spoilers, so I thought I knew what to expect about Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward's big death long before I experienced it. It would be sad, I thought, but surely not as meaningful as folks made it out to be. After all, character deaths aren't a big deal for me in most stories. I often find them annoying — shallow emotional ploys that work too hard to make you feel A Thing without providing much reason for why you should feel it. A single death couldn’t elevate Final Fantasy XIV’s story that much, right? How wrong I was.

[Ed note: This piece contains spoilers for the finale of FFXIV: Heavensward.]

Video games are full of great quotes. Some are iconic and emotional, others meme-worthy. Polygon recently ranked the 100 best video game quotes and, despite it still being relatively new compared to other heavyweights on the list, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 showed up twice. (Unfortunately, Maelle’s “PARRY IT!” didn’t make the cut.) One entry was for the expeditioners' most notable motto, “For those who come after,” and it perfectly reflects the spirit of the game and its themes.

While Expedition 33 is a metatextual narrative heavily about grief and the creation of art, it’s also about perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds, and that theme is so often reflected in its dialogue. Expeditioners are constantly saying “tomorrow comes” and “we continue” like they’re motivational sayings spotted on signs hung up at your local gym. They need to be continually reminded to persevere because no expedition has ever succeeded in its battle against The Paintress. Dozens of expeditions have left Lumière and never returned.

“In the name of Hades, Olympus, I accept this message!”

If you’ve played Hades, Supergiant’s seminal 2020 roguelike, you’ve likely heard that phrase hundreds of times. On his mission to escape the underworld, protagonist Zagreus says the line (or some variation of it) when accepting Boons, missives from the Olympian gods that grant powerful abilities. You'll encounter it dozens of times on a typical run. Yet it never gets old.

I was seven when I first played The Secret of Monkey Island. I have fond memories sitting with my dad at the family computer, as I clicked around the screen, exploring Melee Island with Guybrush Threepwood, trying my hardest to solve the puzzles, but ultimately deferring to the adult in the room every time I got stuck. Which happened pretty often. "Back in the day, we completed it without the internet," he loves to remind me whenever the game comes up in conversation. "We'd go to the pub once a week and talk about how much progress we'd made."

Heartwarming tales of old aside, one of my favorite mechanics was always the game's satirical take on combat. You're a pirate, so of course you have a cutlass, but Monkey Island is a family-friendly game that doesn't take itself too seriously. Rather than swinging a sharp blade towards your foe, you instead try to draw blood from their ego via clever comebacks to their insults.