Supposedly, Kingdom Hearts 3 officially comes out today (in Japan, but will be released stateside on Tuesday; thanks a lot, misleading Google search results!!) For the first time in 14 years, fans will get to delve into a brand-new, whole number-numbered installment of Disney and Square Enix’s ultimate team-up video game series. But it’s been almost two decades since the release of the original Kingdom Hearts. Want to feel your bones crumbling to dust in real time? To help you contextualize the portion of your life you might have spent waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3, here’s a handy list of events, inventions, extinctions, and other cultural touchstones that have taken place throughout those intervening years.
In no particular order: THINGS AS OLD AS, OR YOUNGER THAN, KINGDOM HEARTS 1 (2002)
- Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones; the invention of prequel memes
- Kmart’s slow decline into retail dystopia
- Britney Spears’ breakup with Justin Timberlake
- The SARS virus (or at the very least, our discovery of it)
- 32% of the Duggar children; media relevance of the Duggar family
- The camera (cell)phone
- Mozilla Firefox
- All social media as we know it today, as (let’s be honest here) Livejournal and anything proceeding it doesn’t count
- Pretty much every Stranger Things character not played by Winona Ryder
- Rickrolling
- 87.5% of the Fast and the Furious movies
- The entirety of the Brangelina zeitgeist
- Three US presidencies and three papacies
- Both incarnations of Queer Eye
- 42.9% of the Harry Potter books and 87.5% of the Harry Potter movies
- The Iraq War
In no particular order: THINGS AS OLD AS, OR YOUNGER THAN, KINGDOM HEARTS 2 (2005)
- The Disney/Pixar merger
- Most stem cell research
- The entire Mass Effect franchise
- Google Chrome
- Two entire generations of people remembering and then forgetting that Doctor Who exists
- The whole manga boom
- So, so many strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
- Drake’s entire post-Degrassi career
- The Large Hadron Collider
- The E N T I R E MCU
- The extinction of: the Western black rhinoceros, Kodak, Margaret Thatcher, millennials’ expectations for becoming more prosperous than our parents, floppy disks
If you want to age 40 more years in one day, head on over to our Patreon to get even more context for how long you’ve waited for Kingdom Hearts 3. Plus: screenshots of the old Kingdom Hearts websites and a list of famous people who were actual babies when the first game can ame out. Go recharge, steal some hapless anime teens’ hearts, and get some quality Waiting 17 Years For A Video Game catharsis.
Original featured image source: iconic Britney/Justin denim ensemble via Jeffrey Mayer / WireImage, by way of Buzzfeed. Kingdom Hearts characters via Square Enix / Disney.
