Total reminderTotal 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 launched on Famicom in Japan. It worked well, Nintendo did a few more Zelda games and we’ve all had good times since then.
It’s easy to turn this kind of post into a general retrospective, a checklist that looks back at some of the biggest and most important video games in environmental history, but for that sort of thing. you can only scan this list written by Jason which is already doing much of that heavy lifting.
Instead, I would like to take this opportunity thanks series and especially a game.
I grew up in Australia in the ’80s and’ 90s, and that meant I wasn’t indoctrinated into Nintendo stuff, as most American kids of the same age seem to have been. Sega had a disproportionate Down Under success in the 8-bit era and I spent a lot of time on a Commodore 64 and a PC, so apart from a few games of Mario here and there, some Street Fighter II and Super Star Wars a little later on a friend’s SNES, then a few Coup on the N64 I managed to reach adulthood without having a Nintendo experience.
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That changed in the early 1920s when I moved in with my friend Kevin, who was much more versed in Nintendo than I was and who at the time had just owned both a new Nintendo GameCube and a copy of The legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
As a grizzled PC player (and an unbearable bastard, to be honest), initially a snob at the idea of playing a Nintendo game, I quickly discovered that I had never seen anything like it. This game was in life, a perfect marriage between timeless art design and rhythmic fighting action, and I was more in love with it than anything I’ve played before or since. I really was so in love that many times I was just happy to sit and watch others play it.
So did Kev, so did another friend of ours, Geez, and what happened very quickly as we sat down and watched each other play is that we found a way to play through this. very single player game cooperatively. We didn’t use clocks or stopwatches or anything so precise, we just managed and had the impression when it was time to switch the controller. Maybe it was after a death in a dungeon, maybe after a navigation, maybe after you got stuck in a puzzle, maybe because you had to go for a walk. All that!
This was before the era of video tips on YouTube, and that’s why whenever we run into countless obstacles in this game, instead of getting upset or resorting to GameFAQs, we be shot and we’ll work together, putting our heads together to try and think about the puzzles in the game, and when a player’s thumbs failed, we could equip ourselves and see which of us could beat Wind Waker more active challenges as well.
It’s a magic game, but playing it together did something equal More. I know that sounds bad to you, a normal person who probably played and enjoyed this game on their own, but Wind Waker– which was by no means designed for this – remains my favorite experience in cooperation of all time.
When I finished it, I was crying about everyone’s greatness, something I wrote about here earlier. I still believe, to this day, that Wind Waker it’s my favorite game of all time, and most of the time when I’m asked why I’ll give very predictable answers: that it’s the game’s visual, or its post-apocalyptic setting, or its dangerously undervalued fight, or that it’s just the May vibey beach game every done.
But, really, in depth, although I love him for all these reasons, I probably also like him because the time spent playing was so memorable. Let’s think about that Wind Waker now, as a married man with children and a mortgage, he sends me back in time, when the most pressing concern I had in life was to meet friends, order some pizza, drink some beers and go on an adventure.
Memories like these are some of the best we can hope to have and hang on to in this increasingly miserable world, so today is as good as anyone to thank. Zelda-and Wind Waker especially – for mine.