On first acquiring my Super Nintendo Entertainment System, long ago in the halcyon days of my fifth-grade year, I had one major competitor for time on the console: my father.
The SNES was the first console in our house, so video games were new for my dad, and he quickly found he enjoyed playing my first game, which was included with the console back in those innocent times when buying a console meant having a game to use with it: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
After the long, laborious process of figuring out how to connect the gray and purple box to the TV, juggling RF switches and cable jacks and power cords, my dad finally set the system down, inserted the cartridge, turned the TV channel to the required Channel 3, and hit the power switch.
We were both taken by the majestic fanfare of the game and the mysterious prologue introducing the Triforce, the Golden Land, Agahnim, and the danger to Princess Zelda and the kingdom of Hyrule. And then, after dutifully naming the file “Link,” we started the adventure. The rain. The psychic cry for help. The death of an uncle. Delving into the dungeons of Hyrule Castle. We were equally captivated, my father and I.
I had to badger him to let me have the controller at times, as we took turns descending to the prison cells, defeating the Ball and Chain Soldier, and freeing the princess, only to have to enter the sewers via a secret passage to reach the safe haven of the Sanctuary.
We both had a learning curve to overcome. I had played some games at other friends’ houses, so the controller felt familiar, but the basic logic of early game design was not yet imprinted in my mind, so I wandered a great deal before realizing where I needed to go.
Meanwhile, my father struggled with the game’s staircases, particularly the curving types, where you would enter by pressing up and emerge in a new room facing down. He had a tendency to keep his finger on the D-pad and press up through the entire process, which meant when he walked out in the new orientation, he accidentally would reverse direction and go back up the staircase, leading to a Mobius loop of frustration.
Eventually, he let me play uninterrupted, but his time with Zelda was not yet finished. He started his own file and slowly and methodically began his own personal adventure to save Hyrule. He only had so much time to play though, given he worked much of the day and was uninterested in playing in the evening, which was when he and my mother would instead watch television together.
So while I did most of my playing in the mid-afternoon, between returning home from school and the nightly ritual of dinner, homework, and bed, he would play Zelda in the morning before he departed for work.
This went fine — for a time. He wasn’t as quick to pick up on the nuances of the game as I was, but he fought his way through the Eastern Palace and defeated the Armos Knights before he put the game down forever for a different reason other than virtual adversaries.
No, my father’s problem was his limited playing time in the morning didn’t often contain the extended time needed to conquer a typical Zelda dungeon, meaning he was late to work for several days in a row.
Ultimately, he made the great sacrifice of giving up on Zelda to avoid entering the unemployment line and maintain his work schedule. He would instead enjoy the series vicariously through me and mostly drift away from video games.
He still remembers his time with A Link to the Past fondly, however, as short as it turned out to be. I had to save Hyrule for the both of us, but he launched us both on the journey that first Christmas morning we obtained the keys to the kingdom.
He still hates those staircases, though.
