Total revocationTotal Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends.On February 21, 1986, the original Legend of Zelda was released on the Famicom in Japan. It’s right, Nintendo made something else Zelda games, and since then we have all had good times.
It’s easy to turn these types of posts into general flashbacks. A checklist looks back at some of the greatest and most important video games in the history of the medium, but for the kind of things you can only scan this list written by Jason who is already doing a lot of the hard work.
Instead, I think I just want to take the opportunity to thank you the series, and especially one game.
I grew up in Australia in the 80’s and 90’s, and that meant I was not indoctrinated about Nintendo stuff like most American kids were of the same age. Sega was disproportionately more successful in the 8-bit era Down Under, and I spent a lot of time on a Commodore 64 and a computer, except for a few games. Mario here and there, some Street Fighter II and Super Star Wars a little later on a friend’s SNES then a few Smash on N64 I managed to reach adulthood without having much Nintendo experience.
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That changed in my early twenties when I met my friend Kevin, who was much more familiar with Nintendo than I was, and who at the time was just a brand new Nintendo GameCube and a copy of the The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker.
As a make-up PC gamer (and an unbearable asshole about it, to be honest) who was initially snobbish about the idea of playing a Nintendo game, I quickly discovered that I had never seen anything like it . This match was alive, a perfect marriage of timeless art design and rhythmic fighting action, and I was more in love with it than anything I played before and after. Indeed I was so in love that I often just sat and watched others play it.
So did Kev, and so did another friend of ours, Geez, and what happened very quickly when we sat and watched each other is that we worked out a way to play through this. very single-player-game-game collaborative. We did not use clocks or timers or anything like that exactly, we would just play it cool and get a feel for when it was time to give the controller around. Maybe it would be after a death in a pit, maybe after a sailing trip, maybe after you got stuck in a puzzle, maybe because you had to go shit. Whatever!
That was before the era of YouTube video tips, and so, when we would run into any of the countless roadblocks of this game, instead of raging alone or going to GameFAQs, we would just shoot the shit out and work together and put our heads together to try and think of the riddles of the game, and if the blunt thumbs of one player let them down, we could team up and see which of us could beat Wind Waker’s more active challenges as well.
It’s a magic game, but playing it together made it even more. I know it sounds silly to you, a normal person, who probably played and enjoyed this game alone, but Windwaker– which is by no means designed for this – is still considered my favorite collaborative experience of all time.
When we were done, I was in tears over the majesty of it all. something I’ve written about here before. I still think, to this day Windwaker is my favorite game of all time, and most of the time when asked why I would give very predictable answers: that it’s the game’s footage, or the post-apocalyptic environment, or the dangerous underrated battle, or that it’s just the most vibey beach game every made.
But really, deep down, even if I like it for all the reasons, I probably love it too, because the time I spent on it was so memorable. That to think about Windwaker now, as a married man with kids and a mortgage, send me back to the time when the most important thing in my life was to hang out with friends, order pizza, drink beers and go on one hell of an adventure .
Memories like these are some of the best we can ever hope to cling to in this increasingly shitty world, so today it’s good to resign Zelda-And Windwaker in particular – for mine.