Weird atemporal times to be living in that there are still articles being written about this.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but this wasn't that memorable compared to the rest of the game. I recall needing to read about it in the magazines to get past this part and feeling annoyed despite having what we now refer to as a "shared experience". Seemed gimmicky both then and now.

Tvtropes has a nice list of Fourth wall breaks in video games: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/BreakingTheFourthWall... (lots of spoilers, of course).