Total RecallTotal Recall is a retrospective of 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 worked well, Nintendo did more Zelda games, and we’ve all had a good time since then.
It’s easy to turn this type of post into general retrospectives, a checklist of some of the biggest and most important video games in the history of the medium, but for that kind of thing you can just scan this list that Jason wrote that already does a lot of that heavy lifting.
Instead, I think I’d like to take this opportunity to thanks the series, and one game in particular.
I grew up in Australia in the 80s and 90s, and that meant I was not indoctrinated in Nintendo stuff like most American kids the same age seem to have been. Sega was disproportionately more successful in Down Under in the 8-bit era, and I spent a lot of my time on a Commodore 64 and PC, Mario here and there, some Street Fighter II and Super Star Wars a little bit later, on a friend’s SNES, then some Smash on the N64, I managed to reach adulthood without having much experience with Nintendo.
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That changed in my early 20s, 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 bought a new Nintendo GameCube and a copy of The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker.
As a gray-haired PC player (and an unbearable asshole, to be honest), initially snobbish with 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 of timeless art design and rhythmic combat action, and I was more in love with it than anything I played before or after. I was actually then in love because he was often happy to sit and watch others play.
Kev too, and another friend of ours, wow, and what happened very quickly when we sat down and watched each other play is that we found a way to play with it much singleplayer game cooperatively. We didn’t use clocks, timers or anything so precise, we just played it cool and felt when it was time to pass the control. Maybe it was after a death in a dungeon, maybe after browsing for a while, maybe after getting stuck in a puzzle, maybe because you had to shit. Whatever it is!
That was before the era of YouTube tip videos, so whenever we ran into any of the game’s countless obstacles, instead of being alone or resorting to GameFAQs, we just shot the shit and collaborated, putting our heads together to try and think better in the game puzzles, and when a player’s stubby thumbs fail, we can form a team and see which one of us can win Wind Waker more active challenges as well.
It’s a magical game, but playing it together has made it uniform most. I know this sounds stupid to you, a normal person, who probably played and liked this game alone, but Wind Waker– which in no way was designed for that – is still my favorite cooperative experience of all time.
When we finished, I was in tears with the majesty of it all, something I wrote here earlier. I still think, to this day, that Wind Waker it is my favorite game of all time, and most of the time when asked why I will give very predictable answers: what is the game’s look, or its post-apocalyptic setting, or its dangerously underestimated combat, or is it just the majority vibration beach game all done.
But really, deep down, although I love for all these reasons, I probably also love it because the time I spent playing was so memorable. What to think about Wind Waker now, like a man married to children and a mortgage, he takes me back in time, when the most urgent concern I had in life was meeting friends, ordering pizza, drinking a few beers and going on a hellish adventure.
Memories like these are some of the best we can hope to have and hold on to in an increasingly horrible world, so today is as good as any to thank Zelda-and Wind Waker in particular – for mine.