In the early days of video games, it was true that it was difficult to feel empathy for a handful of pixels, although young people in the 70s and 80s had highly developed imaginations.
Luckily, the evolution of technology soon made it possible to give more concrete and credible shapes to those pixels that gradually gained colors and formed more complex sprites.
Until we get to today’s hyper-realistic graphics, capable of shrinking us inside and making us drop a tear… And even more than one. Thus, from the first love stories, which could be summed up as a hero who goes to the rescue of a maiden in distress, we have gone on to games in which love is directly the protagonist, as in the recent Maquette or Haven. Here you can read Haven’s analysis and, here, Maquette’s analysis
Winston Chu and Peggy Li
Start of their relationship: 2014 • Place where the spark arose: PS3 – Xbox 360 – PC • Last meeting: Sleeping Dogs
Sleeping Dogs is one of the best open world games in history, and it is thanks to sequences like the wedding. Wei Shen, the protagonist, was a police officer who was an expert in martial arts who had to infiltrate a mafia triad, but ended up becoming dangerously close to its members, especially Winston Chu and Peggy Li. In several of the missions, you had to help this couple of lovebirds to prepare their wedding ceremony , which ended up giving rise to one of the best episodes of the adventure, both narratively and playably. Here, the analysis of Sleeping Dogs.
Ezio and Sofia
Start of their relationship: 2011 • Place where the spark arose: PS3 – Xbox 360 – PC • Last meeting: Assassin’s Creed Revelations
No one can doubt that Ezio Auditore is the most prominent and charismatic protagonist of the long-running Assassin’s Creed saga. In the first two games of him, we saw him mature as a rogue member of the brotherhood and, in the third, already with great experience and wisdom, we saw him travel to Constantinople, where he met Sofia Sartor. She helped him with a book search and they fell in love, after which they returned to Italy and had two children. Without Sofia’s collaboration, Ezio might never have found the valuable keys to Masyaf. Here, analysis of Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection.
Ori and Ku
Start of their relationship: 2020 • Place where the spark started: Xbox One – Switch – PC • Last meeting: Ori and the Will of the Wisps
The friendly relationship between Ori, a spirit of the forest, and Ku, a newborn owl, was the sweet axis of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, but, to understand it in all its dimensions, you had to have played Ori and the Will of the Wisps first. the Will of the Blind Forest. Not surprisingly, the cute and defenseless bird was the daughter of Kuro, the “villain” of that first adventure. 
Max Payne and Mona Sax
Beginning of their relationship: 2001 • Place where the spark arose: PS2 – Xbox – PC • Last meeting: Max Payne 2
In detective, spy or gangster adventures, it is very common for there to be some kind of love-hate relationship between members of different factions. A clear example is in the first two installments of the Max Payne saga, where the protagonist (played by Sam Lake himself) had to deal with a murderer named Mona Sax.
Clementine and Lee
Start of their relationship: 2012 • Place where the spark arose: PS3 – Xbox 360 – PC • Last meeting: Telltale’s The Walking Dead
Of the many licenses that Telltale Games has managed over the last decade, there has been none more prominent than The Walking Dead. The study took advantage of the universe of zombies from Robert Kirkman’s comics to raise the crude story of Clementine and Lee, two survivors who undertook a flight to save themselves from the virus.
2B and 9S
Start of their relationship: 2017 • Place where the spark arose: PS4 – Xbox One – PC • Last meeting: NieR Automata
The NieR saga has left us many moments that go deep. If the first installment presented us with the story of a father who was looking for a cure for his daughter’s disease, Automata wounded us with a love relationship as impossible as it was tragic, between 2B and 9S, two androids that could only have come out of the great and peculiar mind of Yoko Taro. Here, analysis of Nier Automata.
Survivor and Meatball
Start of their relationship: 1997 • Place where the spark arose: PC • Last meeting: Fallout 4
The dog is man’s best friend, and we have been able to verify it in many video games. Now, the most paradigmatic case is, without a doubt, that of the Fallout saga, in whose installments the survivor on duty has always had the invaluable and faithful company of a dog named Meatball
BJ Blazkowicz and Anya Oliwa
Start of their relationship: 2015 • Place where the spark arose: PS4 – One – PC… • Last meeting: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
The Wolfenstein reset made by MachineGames brought with it different changes for this saga of the subjective shooter. The protagonist continued to be BJ Blazkowicz, just like the purpose of ending Nazi soldiers and machinery, but the Swedish study raised a love story that began with the fact that a Blazkowicz in a vegetative state was cared for in a psychiatric hospital by a Polish nurse named Anya Oliwa, with whom he had two daughters who would end up starring in their own video game. Here, the analysis of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.