The phantom train
Tyler Joseph Petty 1984-2025
It is easy to think you are belated. Inevitable, even. If only you had been born slightly earlier, in a slightly larger city, you would have wound up in glamorous rooms of fashionable people trading bon mots over cocktails. It is so easy, in fact, that it becomes difficult to recognize the moments when you truly were in the right place at the right time. I am prone to such blindness as much as anyone. More, probably. Writers are always looking over their shoulders wistfully, longing to have lived in some golden age when people still read their words and feckless aristocrats granted them patronages for their satirical sonnet sequences about intrigue in the royal court.
It behooves me, then, to recognize a moment when the stars did align, when I did find myself in the right venue at the right moment to receive some life-altering message. For I did indeed live through such a moment. The early-to-mid-1990s, when my younger brother and I were pubescents, then adolescents. Our youth cosmically aligning with the civilizational glory that was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
The Super Nintendo! Still the greatest video game console humanity has produced. Don’t believe me? Then I invite you to peruse the catalog of Steam or the Switch and see that players are still playing Super Nintendo games from thirty years ago. Those games hold up, is what I’m saying. Game creators of the era labored tirelessly to squeeze every last digital drop out of the Super Nintendo’s 16-bit processing capacity, creating gaming experiences that felt expansive, thrilling, immersive—endless. Enchanted forests where youthful boys could wander and get lost to their heart’s content.
My brother, Tyler, and I received a Super Nintendo for Christmas one year. Not when it first became available, I know that. Ours was a lower-middle class household that couldn’t quite afford cutting-edge electronic gadgets the moment they hit the market. But maybe a year or so into the Super Nintendo’s lifespan, prices dropped in an effort to move units, and boy did that work. Our parents bought us a Super Nintendo when it went on sale at Walmart. Me and Tyler pledged our fealty to the gray box beneath the TV in the entertainment center. We studied up on the sacred texts, subscribing to Nintendo Power and begging our parents to buy the latest game. Birthday parties consisted of renting two games from the video store and inviting friends from our homeschool group over to play all day. Tyler’s birthday was in December, which meant that it coincided with the biggest holiday releases, while mine was in January, when the video game industry went through its annual hangover. One year, Tyler rented Super Empire Strikes Back and Earthworm Jim, stone-cold classics each, while I had to make do with freaking Plok.
Our favorite games, though, were RPGs. Sprawling fantasy stories where you guided some chosen one through treacherous landscapes, learning magic spells and acquiring armor upgrades, finally meeting some cackling villain, engaging in a final boss battle, and emerging victorious, the world saved once again. The Super Nintendo boasted some stellar entries in this genre. Secret of Mana, the Breath of Fire series, and arguably the best game released on the system, Chrono Trigger. That game had at least eleven different endings, and Tyler and I found them all. One game, though, remained a perennial favorite of ours for its sheer breadth of gameplay, the way it could turn on a dime from pathos to slapstick. That game was Final Fantasy 6.1
Final Fantasy 6 follows a vast group of characters as they band together to form a rebellion, called the Returners, set on overthrowing a tyrannical Empire. Fourteen different playable characters, all told, the most out of any game in the series. My favorite character was Sabin, a martial arts master who unleashed Street Fighter-style attacks on enemies. Tyler’s favorite character was Cyan, an archaic swordsman who always spoke of honor in “thou” and “thine” language. Early in the game, Sabin gets separated from the other characters when he falls off a raft speeding down a river. He winds up on the other side of a mountain range, washing ashore before a fortress called Doma Castle. There, he meets Cyan, who tells a tale of woe. When Doma Castle failed to pledge loyalty to the Empire, the Empire’s army poisoned Doma Castle’s water supply. Cyan was away from the castle at the time, and thus spared. But his wife and son remained inside. They died, and Cyan vowed revenge on the Empire.
Sabin and Cyan team up in an RPG version of a buddy-cop dynamic, with Sabin the loose cannon and Cyan the straight arrow. (This also mapped pretty well onto the dynamic between Tyler and I—he was more of a rule follower, yet obviously rules didn’t apply to me!) Sabin and Cyan enter a spooky forest and, thanks to Sabin’s cat-endangering curiosity, board a broken-down train abandoned there. Of course the train starts moving. And it’s not just any train—it is the Phantom Train, bearing the souls of the recently deceased to the afterlife. If Sabin and Cyan don’t manage to get off in time, they will be trapped in the afterlife themselves.
Sabin and Cyan battle ghosts aboard the Phantom Train, and then, in a boss battle, confront the Phantom Train itself, fighting the engine as it toots nefariously. In a moment that has since become a meme among FF fans, Sabin uses one of his Street Fighter moves to suplex the train—as in, he literally takes hold of the entire engine and flips it over like Macho Man Randy Savage performing a piledriver. Super Nintendo games! Joyfully unrealistic!
Sabin and Cyan defeat the Phantom Train and manage to disembark. Once they’re off, they watch as more souls board the train—including Cyan’s wife and son. He calls to them, running down the train platform like he’s in a 1950s melodrama. But there is no reunion. The train still leaves. Cyan remains in this world while his family passes into the next. Sabin stands beside him in silent support.
And here, identities shift. I am no longer Sabin. Tyler is no longer Cyan. Instead, I am Cyan, running on the platform. And Tyler is aboard the Phantom Train, borne into the next world, never to return to this one, where I yet remain.
Tyler died on July 2, 2025, as a result of complications from cancer. He was 40 years old. He passed away quietly, surrounded by his mother, his father, and me, his brother.
About as real as life gets, when it comes to an end. Which is why it feels silly for me to write about an old Super Nintendo game that featured winged bear-like creatures called moggles. Perhaps that’s just the grief talking. My mind and my heart grasping onto some childhood obsession as a means to distract myself from the welter of feelings that simultaneously overwhelm and numb me. Yet I think there’s something more there, too. Something of Tyler that I can’t otherwise access.
My brother was hard to get to know, in some ways. He was quiet, and introspective, and reserved. Personal relationships sometimes presented a struggle to him, though he did have many friends, especially online ones. It is possible that he was on the spectrum in some way. He was never officially diagnosed—indeed, he actively resisted any kind of official testing, not wanting any sort of label affixed to him. Much like Nathan Fielder in season 2 of The Rehearsal, which Tyler loved and related to. (It was one of the last shows he watched, in fact. I am grateful that he was able to experience it.) It was difficult to relate to him head-on, face-to-face. At least for me—others may have made more headway there. I hope so.
The instances where I felt like I was granted the deepest access to Tyler were, to use a word that may sound strange in such a context, mediated. As in, media in any and all its forms opened up avenues to Tyler that were otherwise unavailable. Video games. Movies. TV shows. Books. Music. From myself to him, but also himself to me. Belying the stereotypical image of the thoughtless, clueless man, Tyler was extremely considerate when it came to giving gifts. Come Christmas and my birthday, I knew I could always count on Tyler picking out some book or DVD that I hadn’t yet read or seen, which proved perfectly aligned to my taste and my vision of the world. He didn’t just do that with me, either. His gifts to our parents, to my wife, to my children—all of them were thoughtful and funny and just right.
And I’ll never receive another such gift from him. Some hours of the day, I lament the fact. Others, I manage to treasure the gifts I do have. I try. I do.
Look at Tyler from a certain angle, and you might have seen a resemblance to the Lost Young Men our pundits so often bemoan. He never married. Never had children. He remained in the small Indiana town where he was raised, even after he studied at a university for a master’s degree in English and creative writing. He worked a steady, unglamorous job in manufacturing. He played video games, he followed sports, he watched movies and TV. He maintained many friendships, though he largely did so online. He lived alone in a sparsely furnished apartment.
In short, he lived the sort of life that so many members of the commemtariat claim will inevitably result in men feeling resentful, frustrated, bitter. Yet Tyler, to his great credit, never became bitter. He never blamed anyone for snapping up some portion of contentment that should have rightfully belonged to him. As he wrote in an essay about the film I Saw The TV Glow, he had come to realize that such striving never made him happy.
The reason I’ve come to feel at peace about who I am and what I want is that I’m happier when I’m not chasing things that fulfill most people, and the times when I’ve felt the most hopeless and despairing are when I was desperately trying to attain the milestones I’m supposed to want.
Though he deliberately eschewed the mantle of the heroic in the essay, I beg to differ. Accepting who he was, what he wanted and didn’t want, without growing bitter about the fact is an act of heroism the world needs, now especially. He lived the life he wished without apology.
Until he couldn’t, of course. Until he let others take care of him when he could not. There is heroism in that too.
The Super Nintendo came with two controllers, for two-player mode on certain games. Fighting games like Street Fighter and Killer Instinct; sports games like NBA Jam and Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. The RPGs that we loved, though, were strictly one-player affairs. The all-seeing, all-knowing player guiding his party through dungeons and across the world map.
But perhaps I can hook up the second controller. Perhaps I can place the Final Fantasy 6 cartridge in the console. Perhaps, as I stand on the train platform and the Phantom Train bears Tyler away, he can travel out of the game, out of the Super Nintendo, and into the second controller. Perhaps he can sit beside me once more. Perhaps he can remain there always.
Or Final Fantasy III, as it was called during its first release in the mid-90s, the other entries not having made it out of Japan and over to the US market. Truly, we suffered.
This is really, really lovely in the way that only one sibling can talk about their love for the other. Thank you.
This is a lovely essay, so I feel kinda bad about bringing up this minor, incorrect point that hints at an opportunity lost, but:
"The Super Nintendo came with two controllers, for two-player mode on certain games. ... The RPGs that we loved, though, were strictly one-player affairs."
For the SNES version of FF3 specifically, you could actually assign different character to different controllers in battles. Because it was turn based, that didn't really confer any advantage, but it was a way to include a friend or little brother in the game.