Total recallTotal Recall is a look back at video game history through their characters, franchises, developers, and trends.The original came out on February 21, 1986 Legend of Zelda was released on Famicom in Japan. It did well, Nintendo has made even more Zelda games, and we’ve all had a good time ever since.
It’s easy to turn posts like this into general retrospectives, a checklist for looking back at some of the biggest and most important video games in the history of the medium, but for that sort of thing you can just scan this list that Jason wrote who already does a lot of that hard work.
Instead, I think I would like to take this opportunity thanks the series, and one game in particular.
I grew up in Australia in the 80’s and 90’s, and that meant I wasn’t indoctrinated with Nintendo stuff like most American kids the same age. Sega was disproportionately more successful Down Under in the 8-bit era and I spent a lot of time on a Commodore 64 and PC so aside from a few games Mario here and there, some Street Fighter II and Super Star Wars a little later on a friend’s SNES and then some Smash on N64 I managed to grow up completely without having much Nintendo experience.
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That changed when I was in my early twenties when I moved in with my buddy Kevin, who was much more familiar with Nintendo than I was and who at the time had both a brand new Nintendo GameCube and a copy of the The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker
As a gray PC gamer (and an excruciating bastard, to be honest), initially snobbish at the idea of playing a Nintendo game, I soon discovered I’d never seen anything like it. This game was living, a perfect marriage of timeless art design and rhythmic combat action, and I was in love with it more than anything I’d played before or after. Indeed I was so in love that often I was just happy to sit and watch others play.
So was Kev, and that was another friend of ours, Geez, and so what happened very quickly while we were watching each other is that we figured out a way to play this through. very single player game game cooperative. We weren’t using clocks or timers or anything that precise, we just played it cool and got a sense of when it was time to pass the controller. Maybe it would be after a death in a dungeon, maybe after some sailing, maybe after you got stuck in a puzzle, maybe because you had to shit. Whatever!
This was before the age of YouTube tips videos, and so whenever we came across one of this game’s myriad roadblocks, instead of raging alone or resorting to GameFAQs, we just hit the road and worked together , put our heads together to try and think about the puzzles of the game, and if a player’s blunt thumbs failed, we could work together to see which one of us could beat Wind Waker’s more active challenges.
It’s a magical game, but playing it together actually turned it into something LakeI know this sounds stupid to you, a normal person, who has probably played this game alone and enjoyed it, but Wind Watcher– which is not designed for this in any way – still ranks as my all-time favorite co-op experience.
By the time we got it done I was in tears from the majesty of it all something I’ve written here beforeI still think that to this day Wind Watcher is my favorite game of all time, and usually when asked why I give very predictable answers: that it is the visuals of the game, or the post-apocalyptic setting, or the dangerously underappreciated battle, or whether it is vibey beach game.
But really, deep down, while I love it for all those reasons, I probably love it because the time I spent playing was so memorable. That to think about Wind Watcher now, as a married man with kids and a mortgage, he sends me back in time, to the moment when the most urgent concern I had in my life was to get together with friends, order some pizza, have some beers drink and have a great adventure.
Memories like these are some of the best we can ever hope to have and hold on to in this increasingly crappy world, so today is as good as anyone to say thanks Zelda-and Wind Watcher in particular – for mine.