Total recoveryTotal 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 at the Famicom in Japan. It worked well, Nintendo did a little more Zelda games, and since then we all have a good time.
It’s easy to turn these kinds of posts into general retrospectives, a checklist that reviews some of the most important and important video games in media history, but for that sort of thing you can only scan this list that Jason wrote which makes up much of this heavy uplift.
Instead, I think I would just like to take this opportunity thanks the series, and a particular game.
I grew up in Australia in the 80s and 90s, and doing so meant not indoctrinating myself into Nintendo stuff, as it seems most American kids of the same age had been. Sega was disproportionately successful with Down Under in the 8-bit era, and I spent much of my time on a Commodore 64 and a PC, so apart from a few games Mario here and there, some Street Fighter II i Super Star Wars a little later, at a friend’s SNES, then some To break on N64 I managed to get to adulthood without much Nintendo experience.
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That changed when I was in my twenties when I moved in with my friend Kevin, who was much more versed in Nintendo than I was and then just appropriated both the new Nintendo GameCube and a copy of the The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
As a PC player with grays (and, to be honest, an unbearable idiot about it), initially snubbed by the idea of playing a Nintendo game, I quickly discovered that I had never seen anything like it. This game was alive, a perfect marriage between timeless artistic design and rhythmic combat action, and I was more in love with it than anything I had played before or after. In fact, it was tan in love he was often just happy to sit and watch them play.
Kev, so was another friend of ours, Geez, and what happened very quickly when we sat down and watched each other play is that we worked out a way to play. a lot game of cooperatively individualized games. We didn’t use clocks or timers or anything so precise, we would just have fun and feel when it was time to pass the controller. Maybe it would be after a death in a dungeon, maybe after surfing, maybe after you got stuck in a puzzle, maybe because you had to go do some shit. Whatever!
This was before the age of YouTube tip videos, and so whenever we encountered any of the innumerable obstacles in this game, instead of being alone or resorting to the frequently asked questions of the games, we just threw shit and we collaborated, putting our heads together to try and think about the puzzles in the game and when a player’s thumbs failed, we could team up and see which one of us could win Wind Waker’s more active challenges as well.
It’s a magical game, but playing it together made it even better month. I know this sounds stupid to you, a normal person, who probably played and enjoyed this game on his own, though Wind Waker—That in no way was it designed for that — remains my favorite cooperative experience of all time.
When we finished, I was crying over the majesty of it all, something I wrote 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: which are the images of the game or its post-apocalyptic environment or its dangerously undervalued combat or which is just the most vibey beach game every fact.
But really, deep down, while I love it for all these reasons, I probably love it too because the time I spent playing it was so memorable. That to think Wind Waker now, as a married man with children and a mortgage, he takes me back in time, when the most urgent concern I had in life was to meet friends, order a pizza, drink beers, and go on an adventure.
Memories like these are some of the best we can hope to have and cling to this increasingly shitty world, so today is as good as thanking them Zelda—I Wind Waker in particular, for mine.