Back in November 2009, I was preparing to attend the Montreal International Games summit and I panicked – this was my first big event as a spokesman and I had no way to record an interview. This was a problem because I had to talk to Yoichi Wada, then president of Square Enix, along with several other notable people in the industry. So I rushed to Radio Shack and chose the cheapest voice recorder I could find, a small gray rectangle made by RCA that was locked in a glass case. I have no idea what model she is, but he has followed me throughout my professional career so far – now, almost 13 years later, he is finally retiring.
I stuck to this widget for one main reason: I trusted it. The RCA recorder didn’t have any remarkable features; the sound quality was fine and it was actually quite annoying to have to keep a bunch of AAA batteries on deck. But I’ve always been paranoid about wasting an interview and wasting my time and – even worse – that of someone who agreed to talk to me about history. So while the recorder was working, I had no real reason to change it. And it always worked. Even when the delete button fell, I stuck to it. But earlier this month, while attending Summer Game Fest, I came to a sad conclusion: the rewind button didn’t work, which pushed the recorder above the utility point.
But he lived a good life. In fact, it’s been with me throughout my career at The Verge so far, dating back to 2012. Every personal interview I’ve done during that period has been recorded on this machine. I took it with me when I flew to New York to hear Shigeru Miyamoto’s grand plan for bringing Super Mario to the iPhone and when I was in Montreal to learn how the Ubisoft team recreates an entire city like Paris. I had it with me when, just a day after submitting my review, I sat down for a pleasant, long conversation with the directors of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in San Francisco.
Shigeru Miyamoto before the start of the Super Mario Run in 2016. Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
I took it with me on many iterations of E3 in Los Angeles to report on the state of the Japanese gaming industry, study Nintendo’s plans for the future, and try to understand Phil Spencer’s philosophy for the Xbox. It was in my hands in 2019 as I tried to keep my face up, as I asked Nintendo veterans what the taste of a sticky version of Luigi would taste like. He recorded Yoko Taro speaking without his iconic mask. I was lucky enough to talk to the key minds behind almost all of my favorite games as a kid, whether it was Super Mario, Metroid, God of War, Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. Every time I traveled to an event or studio or even just went for a coffee with someone from the entertainment industry, I felt safe knowing that I had this RCA recorder in my pocket, ready to work.
And in the time before Zoom dominated most of my professional communication, I even used it to record a lot of phone calls. It was awkward – I turned on the phone’s speaker and placed the recorder right next to it – but it always worked again. So I was able to find the artists behind Atari’s classic boxing art and hear Sean Bean tell me what it’s like to be killed in a video game. In 2013, I locked myself in the bathroom to talk to David X. Cohen about the end of Futurama so as not to wake my first child from a nap.
With the proliferation of video calls and the lack of personal events in the last few years, the recorder has not gotten much work done. He spent about 36 months tucked away in a desk drawer. But earlier this month, I had the opportunity to use it again when Summer Game Fest held its first personal event in Los Angeles. And he was as reliable as ever; I used it to record interviews with the directors of The Callisto Protocol and Street Fighter 6 and to film my first hands-on experience with Peridot. But without a scroll key, it actually took too long to transcribe these conversations.
It is not clear when I will return to another personal event, so I have time to decide what comes next. It has not been easy to replace a permanent satellite for more than a decade. I know I won’t use my phone to record interviews; again, I’m paranoid and I would very much prefer something simple and clear so that a low battery or a software update doesn’t confuse the interview. But I also like the idea of a single function device. The RCA recorder is something I associate entirely with the act of conducting an interview, a key part of my job, and as it turns out, it means that it has become an object steeped in memories. If I’m lucky, I’ll find something that will help me shoot even more.
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