As a child, the vast majority of my game time was a performance, as my two younger siblings often watched me play, trying to cadge some time with the controller.
Even when they couldn’t convince me to relinquish the game pad, though, playing time often resembled a group effort. We were a highly theatrical family, after all, and why stop at school plays and church cantatas when we could add video games to the fun?
It helped that I played a great deal of role-playing games, with the vast amount of written dialogue that entailed. We read it all out loud. And we assigned parts.
So a session of Final Fantasy III (née VI) saw me cackling and hissing as Kefka, or chirping a “Kupo!” as Mog, while my brother declaimed heroically as Locke or Sabin and my sister read all the lines of the sadly limited roster of female roles.
This would prove true in other games, like Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, and, although they were not RPGs, in Zelda games.
Despite the traditionally silent protagonist in Link, Zelda games still involved quite a bit of text. And thus we divvied up roles. I would snarl through the lines of Agahnim and Ganon and adopt my best old man stammer as Sahasrahla. My brother was younger people like the Flute Boy or the kid with the bug-catching net. And, every time we beat a dungeon, my sister trotted out of the wings to recite the lines of yet another imprisoned damsel.
This would continue through future Zelda titles, even as other RPGs began to render our efforts obsolete with spoken dialogue. My sister was Zelda, Malon, Saria, Impa, and Ruto, among others (Ocarina of Time was a great improvement on female representation). My brother was the entire Kokiri race (except Mido, because somehow I always got the jerks). I played various roles, such as Ganondorf and that garrulous owl.
By the time Breath of the Wild started to join in the parade of audible dialogue, we no longer played games together, having set up households of our own. The tradition had fallen by the wayside as I now played Zelda games alone.
Yet, recently, playing some Link to the Past with my five-year-old niece, I fell right back into the old habit, reading aloud so she could follow along. The old theatrical flair came out for sinister utterances and brave proclamations. And, once again, all of Hyrule was my stage.
