It’s 1986, and you’re playing a brand-new game. (You’re in Japan in this scenario, by the way; the game in question, Metroid, won’t come to North America and Europe until later.) Anyway, this new game has you in its grip. You are a lone astronaut exploring a hostile alien planet full of ancient, mysterious structures. This astronaut looks human enough – but this distinctly alien place is full of objects that power up their spacesuit’s capabilities. Each new ability allows you to explore a new area, and as you do, you realise that the entirety of the planetary base you’re exploring is one, massive, interconnected maze. Whoa.

Hours later, you finally defeat Mother Brain and set off a timed self-destruct sequence. Upon your escape, you’re treated to an endgame screen: the little astronaut faces you as text on screen implores you to “pray for peace in space”.

But then, the astronaut’s suit starts flashing rapidly – pink, green, orange. Suddenly, the suit disappears. What remains is … a woman! And a hot one, at that. Her pixelated hourglass figure has been lovingly rendered; her low-cut red leotard matches the dot of red lipstick that denotes her mouth. She’s looking right at you, the player, and she’s waving, as if to say, Congratulations, big boy! And if you beat the game even faster, I’ll strip down to just a bikini.

This reveal lacked the consideration that a woman or girl might be the one playing the game. (The concept of a queer female player was also almost certainly not on any developer’s mind, either.) By 1986, video games were already “for boys”. As reporter Tracey Lien outlined in her extensive feature on how and when video game marketing shifted towards targeting boys, the video game crash of 1983 was followed by a marketing reset for several companies. The Nintendo Entertainment System, on which Metroid made its debut to non-Japanese audiences, “was targeted toward boys under 10. If you look at the Super NES five years later, it starts targeting boys ages 10-15,” Jesse Divnich, former vice president of insights and analysis for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, told Lien.

The reveal of Samus Aran’s red bikini demonstrated that, in 1986 at least, if a game was going to have a female protagonist, she needed to be presented as a sex object to be enjoyed by the (presumed male, straight) player. That trend continued … for decades, unfortunately. But Samus Aran herself complicated the narrative. Sure, she was wearing increasingly skimpy outfits underneath that battle suit, but she also had spent the entire game up to that point performing extraordinarily badass feats. Well, technically, you – the player! – had performed them, as her. You were her, after all. Metroid tried to make you forget that, right at the end, by having her present herself to you as an object. But prior to that moment; she had been you, and you had been her, with all the personhood that implies.

It’s hard not to project personality traits on to the largely blank slate that is Samus. She must be fearless, venturing into space completely alone. She must be intelligent; she’s mapping out this entire mazelike structure as she goes along. She must be devoted, determined, working for herself alone as a bounty hunter – a solitary job. The instruction booklet says that Samus “is the greatest of all the space hunters and has successfully completed numerous missions that everybody thought were absolutely impossible”. This is the hyper-competent hero whose space boots you’re stepping into, and yeah, once again, she’s a woman.

It’s for all of these reasons that I love the original Metroid so much. Its design and concept, iterated and improved upon in its sequels, would go on to inspire countless other games (and one of gaming’s most famous genre terms). I always enjoy environmental puzzles and exploration in games, but it’s Samus Aran herself that I truly love – the version of Samus I created in my own head, as I played these games and projected myself on to her.

Just like Samus Aran, I am 40 years old. My birthday is just one month prior to hers; I appreciate that I did not have to live in this world for very long without her. Because, like Samus, my journey has often been a lonely one. I didn’t start playing Metroid games until I was 21 and had just gone through a bad breakup; we had shared an apartment, and now suddenly, I was living alone. At that time, I was a college student and an unpaid intern at the Boston Phoenix, and I had yet to get any of my article pitches approved. I had been playing video games ever since getting a Game Boy as a young child, but I had mostly played games with male characters in them. After all, that’s what video games were, most of the time. But I always knew there were some exceptions, like Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider series, or Jade in Beyond Good and Evil. And of course, Samus Aran in Metroid.

In a post-breakup depressive fugue, I rented and played through a bunch of Metroid games, totally out of order. Like a baby bird seeking her mother – or more relevantly, like a baby Metroid – I glommed on to Samus Aran with a fervour that has yet to really end. I began to seek out other games with female characters, and spaces online where other female gamers and queer gamers hung out. Through these spaces, I learned what feminism actually was (turns out, it’s not “hating men,” as I had been assuming prior to that point). Starting out as a video games journalist, I clung on to this small community I found.

Writing about games as a queer woman in the 2000s and 2010s came with a lot of harassment and blowback. Often I felt very alone – but I would tell myself I was like Samus Aran, on a hostile planet. I kept on going, kept on exploring, kept on building up my abilities. After all, like Samus on Zebes, the hostile place I was exploring was also actually my home. I had a right to be there. Those space pirates – or the bigots sending me death threats, whatever – did not belong. The blank slate of Samus, especially in the earliest Metroid games, let me infuse as much of myself and my own personality into her journey as I wanted.

There have been many Metroid games since, some of which have depicted versions of Samus with a bit more personality. Most notoriously, Metroid: Other M serves up a fearful and traumatised Samus who refuses to question Galactic Federation orders, even when those orders make no sense and put her in danger. This version of the character clashed so heavily with many players’ perceptions of her that it has since become something like a shared trauma for the Metroid fandom. I thought the game was so bad that the only solution for Metroid going forward would be a full reboot.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, fully seven years after Other M, we got Samus Returns, MercurySteam’s 2017 remake of Metroid 2. It was a reminder of the power of the original Metroid games – Metroid, Metroid 2, and Super Metroid. (These games actually make up a trilogy, albeit with a minimalist narrative.) It was a reminder of the Samus I remembered and loved: fearless, intelligent, devoted, determined. And unlike in Other M, whose camera’s gaze was unafraid to slide slowly over Samus Aran’s clingy zero suit, Samus Returns was not objectifying Samus or distancing her from the player. It was much easier to remember, instead, that Samus is you.

You should want to be Samus Aran. You can’t even help it, right? She’s just so fucking cool! And that part at the end of the first few Metroid games where she performs for you as a sex object is not, really, the important part; it’s dissonant, actually, a fourth-wall breaking moment that doesn’t reflect the core of what Metroid is. The important part is the whole rest of the game, where you get to be Samus – who happens to be a woman. And a person, just like you.