This was inspired by going to the best place in the world, GameFAQs, and seeing how few people got what was happening, the direct lines drawn.

There will be spoilers here, but I trust you gathered that from, you know, the fact that I'm talking about what I think Braid is about. I'm also not going to touch upon the more overarching themes of the game, such as Regret. No, I'm going to specifically be talking about Tim.

Tim is just a man. He was a smart man, a clever man, a man who stood in contrary to the ways of society: A scientist. Tim was a scientist, who was looking for the princess, who would make everything better, who would validate everything he's done. The princess symbolizes the meaning of life.

He was on his way to save the princess, fighting over obstacle after obstacle. They had gotten more intense, and more challenging. But slowly, Tim began to realize everything was backwards. Something was very wrong about what he was doing. Everything seemed like it was... backwards. Like the last levels of the game. As things got their most tense, he reached the goal of his work, of everything he had done until now: The princess.

In a flash of light, he had realized what he was doing. Setting foot on the platform, staring right at the princess. Nothing had ever felt more wrong than looking the result of his work face to face, the culmination.

So he ran. He tried to forget everything, but his mind went through the deeds he had done, the things he had accomplished in the name of saving... that. With horror, patterns clarified: Were he and the princess working together, or were the princesses attempts to help actions with darker intentions? At the time, she looked like she was helping, like they were helping each other. Reliving it caused Tim to see what had been happening: he had been set up. He was told "this is what you're looking for, here is your princess", and in one flash, he realized how wrong, how very very wrong he was.,

One flash.

The epilogue is where the largest, most telling characteristic of Tim's one mistake was, and it gives detail into how he copes with it. Throughout the game, the green books had been telling stories of this glorious princess, who would change everything and fix everything, who had the power to do all these things, even though she had turned his back on him. Arriving at the epilogue, the first thing that is apparent is that the green books say nothing. The red books, however, tell the whole story, the real story of what had taken place with Tim. Describing events worthy of despair and worry, of development and construction. One of the last red books that can be read details Tim raising darkened glass to his eyes, and then a blinding flash, and the moment time stood still. What were the things that Tim heard after that flash,  that moment?

"It worked."
"Now we are all sons of bitches."

That second line is a quote from one J. Robert Oppenheimer, after the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

Tim was a part of the team that developed the atomic bomb.

The guilt of what he had done, what he had made, achieving this goal he had set for himself, had turned his entire life upside down. No, not upside down... backwards. Everything he knew was wrong, thanks to the detonation of this... thing, this man made apocalyptic device. It was traumatizing. Most people deal with trauma poorly. Tim sank into deep, deep denial over what he had done, over what seeking the princess had really created, that in order to keep his will to live, he had to lie to himself. He had to lie about what the princess was, about what he had done. And that is when the green books begin to make sense, when he has lost all other means of coping aside from madness. But his madness is self sustaining, it's protecting him. It keeps him alive. So he finds the cornerstone of what he must do. He will build this world for his mind to live in, of puzzles, castles, princesses, and the ability to undo every mistake you've ever made.

Go look at the pictures constructed again: They are of an empty man. The eyes hold a void, a decided un-life inside this very real, very capable body. They also detail the other ways that Tim had coped with this crushing regret; Women. Wine. Family. Travelling. Wandering. He did not do these because he wanted do: He did them because they were all he could think of to bring himself peace, or at least something he could fool himself into thinking was peace. And he observes these things he did from a distance, as if they are pictures in an art gallery. They bring him great comfort, but seeing them all, reminds him of why they are there; it builds the ladder for him to go and relive what he had done, why those images were there. And by the time he is out of this explination, this loop that keeps his mind in check, if he steps out the door, he is confronted with the same thing he fled from at the start of the game. At any point, in getting lost inside these worlds of his own creation, his attempts to escape responsibility, he can just step outside and face the calamity, the image of his regret.

A great, everlasting fire.

And that's what I think Braid is about.

So I like this Giant Bomb place. I had a little bit of faith in it since Jeff Gerstmann was involved- I enjoyed his tenure at "that other place"- but once more and more came out, and when the site actually launched, I was vaguely astounded. My sleep schedule was off track, and I was just staring at the ceiling at about five in the morning before I decided to get out of bed and check the RSS feeds. I had noticed that the feed for Giant Bomb had sort of... exploded, pardon the pun.

Cut to hours later, and on sleepless energy, I get to typing on the Fire Pro article. I'm sort of a writer on the side, for fun. I started writing creatively in roleplay communities (dude shut -up-) and in wrestling counter parts. It was actually my enjoyment of those that led me to Fire Pro Wrestling. Back in... lord alive, 2002 or so, I was linked by someone to this place called C-CWA. It was an e-fed (electronic wrestling federation (DUDE, shut up!)) where people would write wrestling "promos", but instead of the matches being written by greatly unproductive bumpkins, they were played out through Fire Pro Wrestling for the GBA, the first one to make it to the US, recapped, and then put up. It churned out shows on a pretty regular basis. While I started there because I liked wrestling a really abnormal amount, eventually a few people nudged me towards the Dreamcast version, Fire ProWrestling D, which actually hadn't made it to America.

Figuring it out took huge dedication, since I was having to bypass Japanese menus and figure out how they had laid everything out in edit mode. The people on GameFAQs back then were tremendously helpful, as were the weirdos in my little community. They were the ones that hook-in-mouth lead me through creating wrestlers, and everything that actually entails in order to make better and better wrestlers. The goal was to make something that, barring the usual problems with the Fire Pro engine like a lack of hot tags- so dramatic moments in dag matches usually ended with one guy just standing up and backing up into a corner, tagging, and then hopping outside the ring-, felt like this was someone you could see in a wrestling ring. And once it clicked to me that my endless stream of ideas could be implimented in game form, that every half brained thing I would've liked to see in a wrestling ring could happen if I gave it enough time, I burst with joyous energy and created more and more.

The peak of the community was this thing called Evolution-01, where just bunches of these communities got together, all sharing Fire Pro as a mindset, and put together a big wrestling show that was streamed over Windows Media Player while as many people as possible got in and commented on it. This is important because this is why I love Fire Pro. It's not because I love wrestling games, because I think there are better games with wrestling in them. It's not because I love wrestling, because otherwise I could just watch wrestling. It's because it let me participate in wrestling. In many ways, those wrestlers were more real to me than others, because I could actually talk to them. Some of them had multiple characters, but they were still people. While other people will hail Ric Flair, The Road Warriors, or Bret Hart's glory years, I can look back and say I loved guys like Twinky McLanahan and SPUNK, that I was terrified of the thought of crossing Lord Vermin, that I hated The Sharpshooters to death and wished poxes on all men named "Tonga", now and forever. Without that exposure to what wrestling could be, that I could mold wrestling to be what I wanted, I would never have shown the interest in writing despite what talents I may have with it.

This last monday, as I was writing, all of it flashed back bit by bit. When I was reading the combat section, I remember being dragged with a hook in my cheek through how to play from six people a hundred miles away. I recalled reading about Lord Vermin's postulations on affinities and attributes before we had any sort of definitive answers. When I was writing the write up for landmine death matches, I remembered all of the great ones I had seen- and later wrote- for C-CWA. When I was writing CPU logic, I remembered my eternal work in progress and my magnum opus as far as the game goes, a man named T-Bone, and the five or six years it's taken to get him to what he is today, someone I am genuinely proud of being responsible for. Writing all of that, and in a way, all of this, was a way of showing people "this is something I've done with my life. I invested all of this energy and time, and I've thought and thought and thought, and this is what I know about this game I love."

And I got recognized for it.

So, uh, thanks for that. I feel awesome. And I'll add pictures soon, as soon as my typo fixes get approved, don't worry. I'm just a man with priorities.

The last thing I want to say is that I think it's statistically impossible for me to be the only person that has this sort of intricate knowledge for games they love, that beyond "which one pins" they know about the infastructure of the game like the back of their hand. The fact that I had a venue to express that crazed love for one game that people passed up and that a close circle of people were completely insane about pales in comparison to the thought that there's too many games out there for me to be the only person that has this kind of enjoyment of games, that runs deeper than most people care to think about, but that they're unashamed of. So the real thanks goes to Giant Bomb, for giving all of us nutters platforms to stand on and tell people things like "this game has sixteen damage stats and you can't see most of them."