The very first game I ever owned for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System — which was, in turn, my first console — was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Although I had played other games before it on friends’ machines, including the majestic Super Mario World (which I would acquire for myself…
There’s nothing like a map to make a fantasy story seem more tangible. You open a massive tome and there, in the early pages before you’ve even met your characters, or even in the endpapers right within the cover, you’ve already experienced a sprawling continent or entire world of nations, city-states, mysterious regions and magical…
We all have certain games, I’m sure, that while we officially consider them “beaten” in our personal experience, we mentally apply an asterisk to the category for one reason or another. Maybe we used cheat codes to get to the end. Maybe we’ve never made it through without a warp pipe or two. Maybe we…
The second starring vehicle for Link on the Nintendo 64, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, was not the first time the legendary hero had traveled to another world. There was first the mirror dimension of the Dark World in A Link to the Past and then the dream realm of Koholint Island in Link’s Awakening…
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…
Video games like The Legend of Zelda are built as massive quests. In each and every game, Link has a final objective, the culmination of all his hard work he will expend during the long hours ahead. Usually, this is a fairly broad goal, or interwoven goals. Rescue the princess. Defeat the Dark Lord. Save…
As a child, the vast majority of my game time was a performance, as my two younger siblings often watched me play, trying to cadge some time with the controller. Even when they couldn’t convince me to relinquish the game pad, though, playing time often resembled a group effort. We were a highly theatrical family,…
Although I’ve played video games on a regular basis for literal decades now, my earliest days with the medium were quite casual, as I was restricted to playing whatever was available at friends’ houses or what I could find in the arcades. I knew Mario and Sonic and the Mortal Kombat crew, along with staples…
Villains in the Legend of Zelda games come in two varieties: the human-sized, talkative ones with specific motivations and personality quirks, and the dark lord types that are generally bestial blobs of evil and darkness with little forethought beyond corruption and destruction. While the latter is the type that usually ends up playing the curtain-call…
Growing up in front of an old cathode-ray TV, sitting a controller cord away from the warm glow of the monitor, I was rarely alone in my video game playing time. As the oldest of three siblings, and in a house with a limited number of televisions to go around, I often had an audience…
By this point in its long history, The Legend of Zelda series has developed an intricate mythology, and it appropriately stands alongside other epic fantasies and heroic adventure stories. But nothing exists in a vacuum, and, when the Zelda series first kicked off, it was necessary for the series to draw on other sources for…
