Beyond playing the games and reading the manga, one way that my daughter and I share the Zelda fandom is through watching theorists on YouTube. At least once a week, we’ll cuddle up together and watch and discuss any new hypotheses put forth by channels such as Zeltik, NintendoBlackCrisis, and Hyrule Gamer. One afternoon when my wife was out and my daughter and I were left to our own devices, we decided to take our love of Zelda videos a step further.
As we were sitting at the dining room table, my daughter said she was thinking that it could be fun to make her own theory video. Now, I don’t know a lot about YouTube, but I know that there’s a lot more that goes into making gaming videos than I would think. There’s a lot of careful planning and research as well as a lot of writing and technological troubleshooting. With that being said, I wasn’t going to leave behind the chance to spend some time doing something Zelda related with my daughter, so we set about brainstorming topics.
Pretty quickly, we settled on the idea of the Giant Horse in Breath of the Wild. Exactly how tall was it? Were there any horses that are actually that tall in real life? We quickly got to work, forming our own miniature think tank with both of us sitting across from each other at the dining room table, our faces bathed by the Sheikah Slate-like glow of our Chromebooks.
The first step was to figure out how tall the horse was, so my daughter searched up how tall Link was in Breath of the Wild. She got a quick response that gave us our first shock of the day. According to many websites, Link is 1.22 meters tall in Breath of the Wild. Not being all that familiar with the metric system, this didn’t seem all that interesting, but after performing a quick conversion between meters and feet, we found that Link was supposedly only about four feet tall. What? That didn’t seem right. Not that Link couldn’t be a little on the shorter side; there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like he’s a Minish or anything, but he never seemed small compared to the residents of Hateno Village or any of the other NPCs scattered across Hyrule.
Immediately, my daughter and I went back and checked our information. After a few more minutes without any contradictory information, we decided to go forward with what we’d found. Link is just a small powerhouse of a Hylian. Good for him!
After establishing Link’s surprisingly diminutive size, we used his height to determine how tall the Giant Horse was. My daughter grabbed our Switch, powered it on, and set off for the nearest stable. After retrieving the gargantuan steed (who she’d simply named “Triforce”), she spurred him on to find the flattest land possible. A short ride later, she had Link dismount, and after fiddling a bit with the camera, she got a shot of Link and the humongous horse where they were level with each other.
As we overlaid our piece of tracing paper with Link’s measurement on the Switch, it was clear that the beast towered over Link, but how tall was it? We marked the horses imposing measurements and set to solving this new problem. If Link was 1 /4 inches tall on our Switch screen and is supposed to be four feet tall, the equine colossus’s 2 and 1/2 inches tall would convert to a staggering eight feet tall! The second shock of our evening!
Our last step was to see if any horses in our world actually got that tall or if it was another bit of magic exclusive to Hyrule. With a little bit of searching, my daughter found that the Guinness World Records website credits the largest horse ever as being “the shire gelding Sampson (later renamed Mammoth), bred by Thomas Cleaver of Toddington Mills, Bedfordshire, UK.” This massive horse measured a whopping seven feet, two-and-a-half inches. That’s amazingly tall, but based on our research, even Sampson could not topple the Gerudo Giant!
Alas, our video never saw the light of day because as a little more research proved, it’s both difficult and expensive to record longer videos on the Switch, especially when you are only eight years old. Despite the stutter in her burgeoning career as a Zelda-Tuber, that night is one that both my daughter and I look back on fondly because we got to have some Zelda-themed fun together.
