Growing up, playing a Zelda game was a communal affair.
We only had two televisions, after all. One was tucked away in my parents’ room, so my video game consoles usually were attached to the living room television, which meant I not only had to navigate TV schedules to find time to play, but I would usually have an audience when I did so.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out when I was 14, and I commandeered the TV every afternoon after school to explore the eye-popping three-dimensional glories of Hyrule. My two younger siblings often were sitting there alongside me, equally fascinated to see the little sprite world of A Link to the Past transformed into this immersive fantasy landscape.
Still, my brother, who was about eight at the time, had a shorter attention span than I did, particularly since he wasn’t holding the controller, so he would often come and go, playing a bit with other things, then returning to check on my progress through some dungeon or subquest.
One toy he’d become fascinated with was a small, plastic magnet stick, designed to work with some larger toy or art device, but easy enough to carry around and stick to anything he might find of interest. Discovering what he could attach it to was half the fun, after all.
As I was playing one day, he came up behind me with the magnet in one hand, watching silently as I raced across Hyrule Field on the way to my next appointment with destiny. Then, solemnly, he walked up to the TV screen and dragged the magnet across a swath of the screen where the green grass of the plains were brightest.
We pulled him away from the TV quickly, but the damage was done. As soon as I left Hyrule Field, it was obvious. Against the browns of Death Mountain or the blues of Zora’s Domain, there, in the bottom corner of the screen of the old CRTV, was a blurry patch of seemingly permanent green.
Thankfully, it wasn’t permanent. On the other hand, it was quite long-lasting. That green patch remained there the remainder of my playthrough of Ocarina of Time, which took about another month, and for weeks and months afterward. It finally faded away on its own.
Until it did, though, it was a constant reminder of the miracle of magnets and how they work, as well as a visual signpost back to Hyrule, shining away on the TV screen through episodes of “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” and “Dragonball Z” for a long time to come.
