Middle school is an awkward time for the best of us and, shockingly, I wasn’t the best of us. I wore black ALL the time. My hair was super long and so flat. Like, the flattest hair. I was mad at the government for reasons I couldn’t really explain, but mainly because I liked System of a Down. I was way too into Dragonball Z and video games as a whole. But I had no shame about it. I loved how dorky I was. I had some great friends who were just like me.
Matt, who I have brought up in previous articles, was my best friend at the time and also a huge Zelda nerd. We also had Industrial Technology together, a class that was, ostensibly, about building stuff out of wood and metal and learning how to use other machinery. It was a cool class. For some reason, we also had to do a PowerPoint presentation about a topic of our choice with a partner. Considering we were both big Zelda fans, we chose to do our report on that.
We did most of the work at school, but we would also go over to Matt’s house to work on it. There, we would mostly play Halo 2 and I would watch him play World of Warcraft, but we also did some work on our project. This was in 2004 when the internet wasn’t the place it was today. Not everyone had access to it, and we had to download it from a CD. Matt had broadband internet, which was WAY faster than the AOL internet I had. To this day, I credit the fact that I didn’t have broadband to why I am not addicted to World of Warcraft.
Anyway, our PowerPoint went through the history of Zelda. This was before any sort of timeline was created, heck, this was before the Wii came out. There weren’t that many games to talk about. We had watched the trailer for the new Zelda game for the GameCube that was coming out in 2006 hundreds of times, but it didn’t even have a title yet. We decided to include it so we could pad out the presentation a bit more. We even included a snippet from a Game Informer article about the CD-i games.
The day of the presentation comes. I’m a bit nervous. This was, honestly, the most nerdy thing I had ever done so far in school. The other students did stuff about baseball and sports or something related to the class we were in. Not us. No no, we talked about Zelda. And, that day, something big was about to happen.
We were able to practice a bit before it was our turn. Of course, we knew the information backwards and forwards because, as stated, we were dorks. So we decided to browse the net for a bit. There, on the front page of GameSpot, was a breaking news story. The new Zelda game for the GameCube… had a name. Matt and I lost our minds. The DAY of our presentation, this bombshell drops! What could it mean? Is Zelda the titular princess, or is it someone else? We didn’t have much to go on, but we updated our presentation with this incredible new information.
Matt and I excitedly started our PowerPoint. We talked about the history of the franchise, the key players of the games and creators, and talked about each game. Then, it was time to reveal the exciting news.
“Today, literally, just today, they announced that this new game will be called…” *Insert dramatic pause* “Twilight Princess!” *Hold for applause*
I don’t know what we were expecting. I mean, we expected a reaction. ANY reaction, honestly. Even a “Huh, cool” from our teacher. We held that silence for a full three seconds. Devastated by their lack of enthusiasm, we rushed through the ending and finished up. After class, we told our friends, Kyle and Grant, about it and THEN we got the reaction we wanted. We all began theory-crafting and chatting excitedly.
As dorky and weird as we all were in middle school, I’m glad I was. I made some great friends who fostered my love of gaming and helped shape me into who I am today. Also, we got an A- on the presentation, so that was cool.
