Nintendo’s success is built on a cast of beloved characters endlessly milked for new installments and spinoffs. But behind that formula, there’s a genuinely adventurous spirit.

Each Zelda game foists new control and input methods on players, making the series Nintendo’s most open-ended and reliable laboratory for what the company believes could be the future of video games. Link and Zelda, across decades of time, are Nintendo’s most reliable tools for teaching us how to play — even if the results are sometimes infuriating.

Whether it was the N64 controller or the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, The Legend of Zelda has always been Nintendo’s best tool for teaching new hardware.

It may have seemed inconceivable to scientists merely decades ago, but this dream is inching closer to reality thanks to recent leaps in reproductive technology: One day, couples assigned the same sex at birth may be able to have children that are genetically related to both parents.

Recently, scientists have made some breakthroughs, though only in lab mice. But if these cutting-edge technologies are ethically and safely developed for humans, different types of families might be possible in the distant future.

“These researchers have been remarkably creative,” David Albertini, an embryologist at the Bedford Research Foundation, tells Inverse. “They kept Mother Nature in mind in their engineering approaches when building gametes — that is, sperm or eggs — out of stem cells.”

In the myth of the “tech founder,” Hollywood has found its favorite protagonists. Archvillains, tragic heroes, and the people in between. Can you tell an interesting story while making your larger-than-life characters feel human, like the kind of people who might actually sit in front of a keyboard or solder a circuit board?

If we look at the work up until now, the answer is mostly no. Films like Steve Jobs, The Social Network, and even early projects like The Pirates of Silicon Valley, regardless of how committed they are to the truth, default to putting their protagonists on a pedestal.

BlackBerry, directed by Matt Johnson (Operation Avalanche, The Dirties) and releasing on May 12 ends up feeling like a refreshing alternative. To find out why it works and how far we’ve come in pop culture’s understanding of the tech industry, Inverse spoke to Johnson about the film and tried to trace Hollywood’s love affair with “visionaries” from the past until now.