Summary

• Wikipedia attributes a quote about Tifa Lockhart being the pin-up girl of the "cyber generation" to the New York Times.
• Despite a properly cited source, tracking the quote to its point of origin reveals that it isn't entirely accurate.
• The New York Times made a similar comment about Lara Croft, calling her a "pinup gal for the digital age."

Tifa Lockhart is an undeniably iconic video game character. As a central figure in spotlight in FF7 Rebirth. With a design that's been plastered on merchandise and made into a lot of figures, Tifa has the distinct honor of being named the pin-up girl of the "cyber generation" by the New York Times. According to Wikipedia, at any rate.

I'm not really one to fuss about the much-debated accuracy of Wikipedia, as it generally serves its purpose as a basic knowledge repository well. There's something eye-catching about this little tidbit, though. It's so distinctly 90s, and I'm endlessly fascinated by the bemused way that publications like the New York Times tended to discuss games at the time. I wanted to know if the NYT really said it, and in what context they might have done so. I had to find an answer. I did, ultimately, find it, and it's not exactly the one that I wanted.

The New York Times Did Talk About FF7 In The 90s

Brief References Can Still Be Memorable

Per the Wayback Machine, the pin-up girl of the "cyber generation" tidbit first appeared in the Wikipedia article on Tifa in 2010 (it may well have been added in 2009, but it certainly wasn't there in 2008). Prior to that point, it hadn't seemingly been said anywhere else on the internet, or at least not in those specific words. It's survived a lot of revisions since, and the source for the quote has gone from the 38th listed citation in the article to the 63rd.

The citation isn't for the New York Times, though, but for a book called Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood. I got it into my head to examine the veracity of the claim in April during a 2 AM Discord call with a friend, and the first thing I did, naturally, was check this book. It didn't mention Tifa or FF7. Oh well. I stopped thinking about it for the next several months until the compulsion struck again. This time, I dove directly into the digital archives of the New York Times to see what I could find.

Kinderculture is a collection of essays by various authors, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe.

There are a couple of ways to look through old NYT issues online, the most straightforward being an Article Archive search engine available to subscribers. There are some fun references to FF7 to be found here — Edward Rothstein deemed it a "blockbuster fighting game" in a 1997 article that predated its release, and David Elrich went for the more evocative approach of calling it "an ethereal role-playing game with characters out of a Japanese cartoon" after seeing it at E3 a month earlier.

All the same, I couldn't find anything about Tifa and the "cyber generation." The closest phrase I found during this diversion was a bit about Tomb Raider's Lara Croft in a 1998 article by Denise Caruso, who called her a "vastly endowed cyber-Barbie star." I could see that somehow being mutated into the statement about FF7's Tifa, but it wasn't satisfying.

Finding The Source For Wikipedia's Tifa Claim

Editions Really Matter Sometimes

I went back to the citation and realized that, in my 2 AM jaunt from months prior, I had failed to pay attention to a very basic piece of information — the publication date. Wikipedia cited the 2004 version of Kinderculture, which made it the second edition. The first and third are a bit easier to access online — the first can be rented for free through the Internet Archive, for example. I realized that they're all vastly different — as a book on the quickly morphing subject of modern childhood, the contents have to change to keep up.

The second edition of Kinderculture is only available in previews, but sometimes those are enough. Simply searching Tifa within the Internet Archive's preview of the second edition months ago would have saved me some time, because it pulls up a pretty direct version of the quote in a section called "Power Plays: Video Games' Bad Rap" by Stephanie Urso Spina.

"The New York Times Sunday Magazine Styles page (July 11, 1998) featured a character from the game Final Fantasy VII, Tifa Lockheart, as the pinup of the cyber generation. Her animated competitor, Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, receives steamy letters from males of all postpubescent ages."

There it was (well, Lockhart misspelling aside), and there was Lara Croft again as well. But was it actually in the New York Times? Since the generic search was yielding no results, I switched to the TimesMachine, essentially a digital microfiche to browse direct scans of the paper. The closest Sunday Magazine was July 12, so I checked that, and I found my answer. Which was Lara Croft.

The New York Times Never Called Tifa A Pin-Up Girl

The Title Goes To Lara Croft After All

The piece in question is called "Cyberpalooza," and it's easy to access on the digital NYT archive once you actually know what to search for. It gets to the punch immediately — "Meet Lara Croft, pinup gal for the digital age." The column goes on to mention the same steamy letters that Spina noted, and the TimesMachine scan shows a printed image of Lara next to the column. Tifa, as far as I can tell, is never mentioned in the issue, nor in any 1990s work by the New York Times. I believe Spina was simply mistaken.

It's an error that really shouldn't have mattered much, as it didn't alter the point of Spina's argument in "Power Plays." It arguably still doesn't matter, because I have to be the only person that cares this much. The quote's been accepted and repeated as a fact about FF7 for at least 14 years now, however, and I've come to the conclusion that it isn't real. I have to it, I was a little disappointed to find only Lara Croft at the end of the trail.

I don't really think any variant of the phrase is the most accurate way to describe Tifa, and there are certainly more meaningful things to say about the role that Tifa plays in Final Fantasy 7. All the same, I feel some kind of obligation to close the loop as best as I can. So, although the New York Times might never have said it, I'll put it into digital journalistic print: Tifa Lockhart is the pin-up girl of the "cyber generation," at least if you want her to be.

Sources: Wayback Machine, Wikipedia, NYT Archive (Edward Rothstein, David Elrich, Denise Caruso, "Cyberpalooza"), Kinderculture/Internet Archive, TimesMachine