The article marks the 40th anniversary of Metroid, celebrating Samus Aran as one of gaming's earliest and most enduring female protagonists. The writer reflects on how the 1986 game's now-famous ending twist – revealing the seemingly genderless astronaut hero to be a woman, who then poses in a bikini – initially undercut its progressive potential by reducing Samus to a sex object, even as the gameplay itself had positioned players as her, embodying her competence and courage throughout.

The piece situates this tension within the era's marketing shift towards boys following the 1983 video game crash, citing reporting on how Nintendo increasingly targeted young male audiences. Despite the objectifying reveal and Samus's increasingly revealing outfits in later games, the author argues the character's core traits – fearlessness, intelligence and solitary determination – made her a genuine heroine, and one the writer, as a woman who has often felt like an outsider in gaming, has personally identified with across four decades.