It’s been a long-standing dream of mine to serve on a jury. At one time, I aspired to a career in law, and though I ultimately chose a different path, I’ve always found real-life courtroom drama to be oddly alluring. For most of my adult life, though, the judicial stars have never seemed to align in my favor. I had a narrow miss back in college where I responded to a summons and didn’t get drawn for a pool to potentially be seated, and that’s about it. But that all changed in 2022, when I was called to appear at the California Superior Court, County of San Diego on September 13th. While most people would probably be annoyed by the inconvenience, I was genuinely excited about the opportunity.
Or at least I was, until Nintendo announced a Direct presentation for the very same day.
In that split second, I went from very excited to very irate. What were the odds?! With the Direct slated to begin at 7:00 AM, a half-hour before my appointment in court, I would be right in the middle of navigating an unfamiliar part of the downtown area just as the action was getting started. I knew I could potentially be stuck at the courthouse all day, so I decided to plan ahead and bring my laptop and an external power bank with me.
Once at the courthouse, I made my way to a huge room stuffed with a few hundred potential jurors, splitting my attention between the instructional video and the muted Direct presentation (thanks, municipal WiFi!). The struggle felt very real in that moment. Eventually we turned in our paperwork and arrived at the “sit around and wait for someone to mispronounce your name” portion of the event, where I could finally focus on what remained of the Direct.
Luckily, all that remained was the exact news we’d been waiting to hear for over three years — Breath of the Wild 2 finally had a proper teaser, and it would henceforth be known as Tears of the Kingdom. I vividly remember looking at the name and thinking to myself: “This sounds stilted and unfamiliar now, but by the time the game arrives, I’ll have said, thought, and read it so many times that it will feel perfectly natural.” That certainly proved to be true, but to be cognizant of that right from the very first moment was a strange sensation. Then the endless barrage of questions immediately followed. What happened to Link’s arm? Who were the folks with the extra pointy ears? Were they the Zonai? What happened to the Master Sword? Link flies now?
These were the early days, when terms like “Ultrahand” and “Mushroom Shield” were yet unknown to us. It was a special time, when everyone was thrilled to finally have something real and tangible after all that time spent waiting for news. I must have rewatched the clip at least 10 times in quick succession, trying to fully soak it in. The Tears of the Kingdom hype cycle had officially begun.
Meanwhile, off in the distance, someone is calling my name through a crackly P.A. system. Snapping out of my Zelda trance, I hurriedly gathered my things. I’d actually been selected for a jury pool! After a trip up the elevator to an unassuming hallway with lots of places to sit and a pretty impressive view of downtown San Diego, I and around 50 other people waited for the bailiff to open the courtroom doors. When she arrived, she read our names in a random order, and mine came up rather quickly.
The gears of justice that seemed to turn so slowly that morning while I’d been distracted by the Direct were suddenly spinning much faster. After a brief interview with the judge, I was selected as one of the 12 people seated to the jury. Suddenly I was very nervous — something that had seemed curious and interesting in the abstract felt too solemn, too important, when experienced up close. Surely there had been a mistake and they did not really expect me, a mild-mannered video game nerd, to mete out judgement to a fellow citizen.
on that fateful day.
Of course, there was no mistake. We sat for three days hearing the details of a case which, as it turned out, was nearly as dramatic as it was sad — for everyone involved. I’m proud of the thoughtful, considerate work we did as a jurors, but I can think of far more fun ways to spend three days away from my job than that.
With so many of those pressing (non-legal) questions raised by that trailer about to be answered, the “early days” of Tears of the Kingdom are coming to end. For the moment, I am still very much looking forward to the game. With any luck, it’ll be so good that I’ll still be playing it the next time I’m compelled to return to those halls of justice.
To celebrate the upcoming launch of Tears of the Kingdom, we are dedicating two weeks of columns articles to its groundbreaking predecessor, Breath of the Wild! Check out our Countdown to TOTK page.
