Check out that wear and tear. | Image: Andrew Webster

Back in November 2009, I was getting ready to attend the Montreal International Games Summit, and I panicked โ€” it was my first major event as a member of the press, and I had no way to record an interview. This was a problem because I was scheduled to talk with Yoichi Wada, then president of Square Enix, along with several other notable industry people. So I rushed to Radio Shack and picked the cheapest voice recorder I could find, a little grey rectangle made by RCA that was locked up in a glass display case. I have no idea what model it is, but it went on to follow me through my entire professional career to date โ€” now, nearly 13 years later, itโ€™s finally being retired.

I hung on to that gadget for one main reason: I trusted it. The RCA recorder didnโ€™t have any especially notable features; the sound quality was just OK, and it was actually pretty annoying having to keep a bunch of AAA batteries on deck. But Iโ€™ve always been paranoid about losing an interview and wasting both my time and โ€” even worse โ€” that of someone who agreed to talk to me for a story. So, as long as the recorder worked, I had no real reason to replace it. And it always worked. Even when the โ€œeraseโ€ button fell off, I stuck by it. But earlier this month, while attending Summer Game Fest, I came to a sad conclusion: the rewind button didnโ€™t function, which pushed the recorder past the point of usefulness.

But it lived a good life. In fact, itโ€™s been with me for the entirety of my career at The Verge thus far, which dates back to 2012. Every in-person interview Iโ€™ve done in that span was recorded on that machine. I took it with me when I flew to New York to hear Shigeru Miyamotoโ€™s grand plan for bringing Super Mario to the iPhone and when I was in Montreal to learn how the team at Ubisoft recreates an entire city like Paris. I had it with me when, just a day after filing my review, I sat down for a nice, long chat with the directors of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in San Francisco.

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Shigeru Miyamoto ahead of the launch of Super Mario Run in 2016

I took it with me to many iterations of E3 in Los Angeles in order to report on the state of the Japanese game industry, explore Nintendoโ€™s plans for the future, and try to understand Phil Spencerโ€™s philosophy for the Xbox. It was in my hands in 2019 as I tried to keep a straight face while asking Nintendo veterans what a gooey version of Luigi would taste like. It recorded Yoko Taro speaking without his iconic mask on. I was lucky enough to talk to the key minds behind almost all of my favorite games as a child, whether it was Super Mario, Metroid, God of War, Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest, or Final Fantasy. Any time I traveled to an event or studio or even just went for coffee with someone from the entertainment industry, I felt safe knowing I had that RCA recorder in my pocket, ready to go.

And in the time before Zoom dominated most of my professional communication, I even used it to record plenty of phone calls. It was awkward โ€” I would turn the phoneโ€™s speaker on and place the recorder right beside it โ€” but, again, it always worked. Thatโ€™s how I managed to track down the artists behind classic Atari box art and hear Sean Bean tell me what itโ€™s like being killed in a video game. In 2013, I locked myself in a bathroom to talk with David X. Cohen about the end of Futurama so that I wouldnโ€™t wake up my first kid from a nap.

With the proliferation of video calls and the lack of in-person events over the last few years, the recorder hasnโ€™t gotten much work. Itโ€™s spent around 36 months tucked into a desk drawer. But earlier this month, I had a chance to use it again when Summer Game Fest put on its first-ever in-person event in Los Angeles. And it was as reliable as always; I used it to record interviews with the directors of The Callisto Protocol and Street Fighter 6 and to capture my first hands-on experience with Peridot. But, without a rewind button, actually transcribing those conversations was far too time-consuming.

Itโ€™s not clear when Iโ€™ll be going back to another in-person event, so I have time to decide whatโ€™s next. Itโ€™s not easy replacing a steady companion of more than a decade. I know I wonโ€™t be using my phone to record interviews; again, Iโ€™m paranoid, and Iโ€™d much prefer something simple and straightforward so that a dead battery or software update doesnโ€™t mess up an interview. But I also love the idea of a single-purpose device. The RCA recorder is something I associate completely with the act of conducting an interview, a key part of my job, and as it turns out, that means that itโ€™s become an object imbued with memories. If Iโ€™m lucky, Iโ€™ll find something thatโ€™ll help me capture even more.

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