Zelda ’s Midlife Crisis
Last week, Nintendo released a remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, a 1998 title widely regarded as one of the finest games among the many iterations in the series.
Key points
- [ Peter Sagal: The Last of Us and the power of video games ] But The Legend of Zelda eventually pulled me in anyway.
- We would grow up, but video games such as Zelda, no matter how old they became, never would.
- The Legend of Zelda, which turned 40 this year, is the latest release at the codger arcade.
“Gamers” did not yet exist when I first played the original Zelda, but in retrospect, by the late 1980s it was certain that they would.
“Do you ever get tired of Andrew and Peter talking about The Legend of Zelda?” I asked him (I had two friends named Peter).
Additional details
- When it was my turn at Zelda, I found myself perplexed by all of the options.
- My first encounter with Zelda took place at arm’s length.
- It seems idiotic to assert that a fantasy-adventure video game with an elfin boy clad in green struck me as childish, but I could already feel adolescence pulling me from Mario to, well, Maria or her equivalent (who was probably named Jennifer or Heather or Michelle).
- What I didn’t realize on Nathan’s floor with Link and Leonard, about to leave childhood behind, was that in the decades to follow, video games would become a place to reproduce that childhood, forever.
- I took the same path every time, dying prematurely at the hands of Wizzrobes (because I did not possess the Magical Shield that could repel their energy beams, dorky knowledge that risked transforming me into Andrew or the other Peter).
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