When I was in the seventh grade, my family moved.
It wasn’t terribly far, as far as these things go; we were close enough to our old stomping grounds to drive back for the holidays and the like, but it did mean I had to make new friends in a new school in a new city.
Well, I did so, finding a bunch of similar prepubescent males with cracking voices, little fashion sense, and an enjoyment of things involving monsters and magic in large portions — you know, nerds.
We liked computer war games and Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars and, yes, The Legend of Zelda.
There weren’t many games in the Zelda series at the time: just the four over three systems, meaning the mythos of Hyrule was pretty simple at the time. There was no timeline to worry about yet. The order of the games was simple enough. Still, we found plenty to talk about whenever it came up, integrating elements of the game into our other interests, which meant we found ways to include a Hookshot in any D&D campaign we might run.
A year later, circumstances saw my family move back to our old home, as if nothing had ever happened. I was able to reconnect with old friends.
But it was hard uprooting all over again and leaving my new group of friends.
So, in those days of AOL start-up discs and internet over the phone lines, when very few 13-year-olds had their own computers, let alone email addresses or messenger nicknames, I tried to stay in touch the old-fashioned way: via letters, hand-written and sent via the Post Office.
Being teenagers, our correspondence didn’t last long: maybe a letter or two on each side before we got busy with our lives at home.
But I still remember the first letter I wrote to one of my brief pen pals, because, as in the past, it was about Zelda.
After all, we were young lads. We had no idea how to talk about feelings or personal matters. And we were nerds. So we talked about things, particularly those things, we were most likely to obsess over.
Soon after returning to my old hometown, I’d acquired The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening as sort of a consolation gift for another long-distance moving trip. I pored over the game’s instruction manual when I started writing my first letter, intent on sharing all my thoughts on this new-to-me Zelda journey: items, dungeons, new concepts of Zelda lore I was discovering for the first time. Combined with the wonder of actually playing it, I probably filled more of the letter with series arcana than any actual personal information about myself and the move.
I doubt the letter survived for long. I certainly don’t have any of the handful of letters I got in return so many years later. But every time I think of Link’s Awakening, I recall my brief time of having a Zelda pen pal and smile.
