So.
I hear Link, of the very first Legend of Zelda game – you know, the best game ever – went to visit his mom recently.
Apparently she’s a pretty strong-willed old lady, and just like the old man at the beginning of the Zelda game, she has a few things she’d like to give her son in order to help him succeed in his quest.
Still waiting for the sword, mom. I’m 30, I think I can handle some adventuring right about now!
Kids today have literally thousands of video games to choose from, from puzzle games to farm simulations to role-playing games to first-person shooters, many with stunning graphics in three dimensions and weird equipment shaped like guitars, magic wands and light sabers.
Maybe they don’t have it so great, though. I don’t think most of them have ever laid their mitts on what I consider the best video game of all time: The Legend of Zelda, the first game of a franchise of great games, which celebrated its 25th birthday this week.
Yep. My favorite game is older than a large percentage of gamers. I guess that makes me an old lady by the standards of the geek subculture. Pretty soon I’m going to be waving my cane and shouting at kids to get off my Internet.
The Legend of Zelda was a two-dimensional, eight-bit Nintendo game with a tinny, chirpy soundtrack that could worm its way into your skull and sit there, lurking, for literally decades. To this day, whenever I get a package in the mail and open it, the treasure-box-opening sound plays in my head.
As plots go, the game wasn’t exactly “War and Peace.†You played an elf named Link on a quest to save Princess Zelda, which you were supposed to accomplish by visiting dungeons to retrieve bits of the Triforce.
The Triforce was supposed to help you defeat Gannon, who was evil. I don’t know how we knew Gannon was evil, but we knew it. Games back then didn’t offer a whole lot of moral complexity or choices — anybody shooting at you was a bad guy, because you were the good guy.
Given the Nintendo’s graphical capabilities, Link was pretty much a little green, brown and peach blob on the screen.
He had a sword. You could get a shield, bombs, a candle, keys and a fire-flingin’ wand later, but it all started when an old man (red, white and peach blob) told you “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.†Then he gave you a sword and disappeared.
This sets you up for a life of disappointment, by the way. Never once has a strange person come up to me, said “It’s dangerous to go alone,†given me something cool, and vanished.
I spent many hours in my basement, curled up on the hideous orange shag rug and playing Zelda, and so did my mom.
She spent even more time painstakingly mapping out all the dungeons on graph paper for me, noting secret passages and writing down our nicknames for all the bad guys — shield-eaters, sword-eaters, skeletons, red knights and the much-trickier blue knights, which could turn on a dime and gut you.
My mom served as my patient navigator, helping me fight evil by hitting it repeatedly with sharp, pointy objects. With mom’s help, eventually we collected the pieces of the Triforce, defeated Gannon and saved Zelda, and it was truly awesome, even if Zelda was just a red, peach and brown blob.
So get off my Internet, ya whippersnappers! I have a virtual 25-year-old magic sword and a Triforce with your name on it.
Victor Pineiro of Popten published this fun Top 10 Songs of Geekdom list and after listening to the fun version of the Legend of Zelda theme there, it got me thinking about how much I think about video game music.
A lot. I think about video game music a lot.
Most of the time when I’m going on a long walk, I hear the Mt. Kolts theme from Final Fantasy VI in my head, or else it’s the old Zelda (the original) music from the overworld. I know all the words to the opera scene in Final Fantasy VI, and have been known to sing it in the shower.
And who doesn’t remember the loopy, goofy theme song to Super Mario Brothers?
Other games’ themes have faded from my memory (probably crowded out by my recent purchases of the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack and the music of Quigley Down Under) but I do recall that at the time I really loved them. The Secret of Mana and the Secret of Evermore had great music.
Of course, these aren’t really nerd anthems, per se.
When I think of nerd anthems, I think of "Holding Out for a Hero," because in my very first D&D game that song featured in the plot. (Sadly, this was in the 2000s, not the 1980s. We were that geeky.) Of course, that’s not really a nerd anthem either.
Pineiro picked out "White & Nerdy/Dare to be Stupid" as his choice for Weird Al, but I recall "It’s All About the Pentiums" a bit better. Either of those is a true geek anthem.
I would also recommend Fatboy Slim’s "Weapon of Choice" as a geek anthem, since I’m pretty sure its lyrics are at least partially based on Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, "Dune."
Any other ideas for geek anthems?
In the days of Halo III and the Wii, I would have thought that old-fashioned Nintendo games would be a distant memory relegated to the mental dustbin of "the bad old days." However, it seems I am not the only one to have fond memories of the 8-bit Nintendo system.
I liked to play Tetris on my gameboy when I was a kid, and occasionally, when I visited friends’ houses, I’d play the original game. If you played Tetris, you may like this modern version, called "first-person," in which the blocks do not rotate. Instead, everything else rotates.
Or you could try this version of Tetris, which combines Tetris and Super Mario Bros. Wacky fun!
I also played Super Mario Bros. quite a bit, and although I liked it, I did not like it enough to wear a sweatervest based on it. In fact I’m not sure I like anything enough to wear a sweatervest of any kind. However, these old-school games (including Pacman) made pretty good mom-based sweaters.
My favorite game, however, was Zelda, because you could save your progress. My mom would watch as I sat and played, and she even helped out by making maps to show me where I’d been, where I needed to go and exactly which critters I needed to kill and which ones I could run away from.
We had a lot of fun with Zelda, and we had a lot of fun together, which is one of the reasons I’ve never believed in the "antisocial videogamer" stereotype. Videogames are best played with other people.
I never pondered what Zelda would look like as a medieval manuscript. But it’s cool that someone did.
