That makes my head spin.
I can remember pouring over previews in N64 Magazine for months before the game came out, scanning screenshots for any new information, sitting and daydreaming about the magical lands and the wild adventures that were waiting for me. One of my friends had read that if you put all of the levels from Mario 64 next to each other they still wouldn’t be as large as the play area in Zelda, which was one joined area rather than individual levels, not a set of challenges, but a living, breathing world. There was a mountain you could climb, with rock people living inside. There was a forest with a musical instrument hidden deep in its mazes. Villages in which you could play little games and buy swords and shields in shops. There was a castle, Hyrule Castle, and within that castle was Princess Zelda, and she was waiting for you to find her, because she had something to tell you that you needed to know...
My mind was alive, swirling, with the excitement and possibility. I couldn’t wait.
And then the game was delayed. And the months that stretched ahead felt interminable.
And then it was delayed again. Nintendo games were always delayed. I could tell that this was an immutable law of the universe: the things that you desired most had to be earned. Waiting was earning. The delay was necessary; the best game in the world would take time. I had to wait.
But I couldn’t wait.
My friends and I would spend rainy playtimes in the school library leafing through old magazine articles.
The day a new issue of N64 Magazine came out was a mini Christmas in itself: convince your mum she needed to do the shopping, go with her down to Tesco and leap out of the car and skip to the magazine racks at the front of the shop. You mum couldn’t be trusted herself, she’d pick up N64 Pro Magazine, or, worse, Official Nintendo Magazine (bleurgh). But you knew what was what. You’d see the inimitable, and starkly named, N64 Magazine peeking from the bottom rack, and you’d grab for it, and spend the rest of the shop - the only shop that you didn’t fight your mum for sugary cereals or Sunny D - browsing the pages, looking for any info you could find on the soon-to-be-released Zelda.
And in this way most of a year passed. Finally, the game could be delayed no longer. It had a new title, Ocarina of Time (what was an ocarina? What did it mean?), and it was coming out at Christmas. The perfect time. The last few months, my friends and I barely spoke of anything else.
And then a Saturday in December, and we were spending the day cruising about town, as we always did. A number 3 bus to the Moor, look in Virgin Megastore, get a bacon and sausage bap the size of a human head from the Great Big Sandwich Shop, and then to the top floor of Debenhams to the Electronics Boutique to peruse the video games.
And halfway up the last escalator I saw it. They had a display cabinet with an N64 hooked up inside, and on the screen was…
It was there. They had it. They had Zelda.
The noise I made at that moment, my friend will swear even today, was not a noise he had ever heard before, or has ever heard since.
We stayed in Debenhams for hours that day. I remember there were two older boys playing on the cabinet as we arrived, and they were discussing the similarities with the previous Zelda game, which had been only 2D, on the Super Nintendo. These boys struck me as impossibly old, and impossibly wise. We stood behind them and I said things about the game to my friends (“Look, that’s what they call z-targeting!”) hoping to impress the older boys.
Eventually the boys moved off, and it was our turn. I’m not sure if there was any argument about who would take control. I assume my friends decided that some battles just weren’t worth fighting.
So we crowded around the cabinet, and my friends crowded around me, and I clasped my hands around the controller, and we dove into Hyrule.
We watched Link shudder in nightmares. Saw visions of a dark rider and a muffled princess on a storm-drenched night. We awoke in Kokiri Forest, and went to play in a secluded woodland realm. We found rupees in tall grass, under rocks. We squeezed and crawled through a tiny passage and into a hidden maze, and we found our very first sword. We hacked down more grass, chopped at signposts, and found enough rupees to buy a shield. We went to meet a giant tree, the guardian of the forest, and he ushered us inside him to defeat the evil that was poisoning him from within.
And we went all the way through that first dungeon, lighting torches, firing slingshots, stepping on switches, burning cobwebs, fighting horrific monsters. And we came out the other side, and learned more about the story, and set off on the long journey to Hyrule Castle, to deliver the guardian spirit’s message to the princess of destiny…
And finally someone checked their Casio watch and saw that we had been there all afternoon, and we were going to be late home. We reluctantly left Link plodding through Hyrule Field, and we descended back into the cold night air, with the Christmas lights above us, the shops all lit up, the magic of the game we had just played alive in our hearts.
… And that day was 20 years ago today.
I am 33 now. But as I boot up the N64 emulator on my modern PC, and run a downloaded Ocarina of Time ROM (it's not piracy; I still own the original cart somewhere)... as I listen to that gentle, bittersweet midi theme take flight... as I load a new save file, and watch Link shudder in his troubled dreams once again - suddenly I am 13 again, and it all is fresh, all magical, and I am reminded that the stories, the games that really mattered to us in our childhoods, they stay with us, they are not forgotten - that somewhere deep inside this depressed and cynical man is a small space where a young boy in a green tunic with tufts of ginger hair leaps and rolls and yells HIYYYAAA into the darkness, now and forever afterwards.
Thanks, Ocarina, for everything.
......
Music? Well, it's got to be the Ocarina of Time soundtrack, right? Sure. Oh, boy, I feel funny.
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