I was a very neurotic little boy. Very neurotic indeed. I used to think about things – everything - one, two, three times. It comes from being an only child, I reckon: too much time stuck in your own head, your thoughts jostling around all over the place. It reminds me of that scene in Spinal Tap, when the band go to see Elvis’ grave.
“Puts it into perspective, doesn’t it?”
“Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective.”
“Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective.”
There was lots of perspective, and lots of neurosis, back in 1999. There were mock A-Levels, and actual A-Levels. There was the dawning realisation that I was about to be flung from the cozy little alcove I’d dug out for myself, off towards a university, Somewhere Else. Forest were in the midst of getting themselves relegated, again. And perhaps most significantly of all, I'd just turned 18.
I finally left the velveteen womb of childhood on the 9th of February, 1999. There was a huge, clamorous party – two or three of my other friends celebrated their big days in February, too – at the Beetroot nightclub: someone even cobbled together invitations, on purple paper no less, which gave the whole event an ill-deserved veneer of exclusivity and grace (I say ill-deserved, as between them, my mates invited the bulk of the English speaking world, a lot of whom just ended up fingering each other). All night long, as the Tamperer continued to ask what she was going to look like with a chimney on her, I just couldn't shake the impression that my presence there - as a devoutly serious and rather limp young man - was rather... well, incidental. In fact, I was pretty certain that inviting me to my own birthday party had just been a discreet means of thinning out the deposit.
We’d hired out two floors. Unfortunately - and unbeknownst to us - they were the first and third floors: the second was hosting the AGM for the Nottingham Gay Alliance. I spent the whole night pulling glumly at a bottle of Reef, in the company of people I (at best) didn’t know or (at worst) didn’t particularly like, ducking out for an occasional breather to see what the gays were up to downstairs. I remember standing outside at the end of the night, glazed in the watery electric heat of a purple neon sign and waiting for a cab, wondering just what the hell was going on.
But I digress. Whilst that was the most memorable thing about 1999 (that, and Robbie Williams' delusions of rock stardom becoming briefly, terrifyingly real), the second most memorable thing was playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d jump into my DeLorean now, and go back to those final months, the January to May period curtaining off my childhood: I’d tell myself to put down the N64 controller, and go and kiss some girls or something. Go and earn yourself some hangovers. Relax, I’d say. In twelve years' time you’ll have long wavy hair, and a house, and a beautiful fiancé. You’ll get to wear suits all the time, and generally walk around looking shit-hot. You’ll still over-think everything, to be fair, but only because you’re getting paid for it. Oh, and McDonalds don't do sachets of mustard anymore, so enjoy that ride while you can.
By early 1999, with a phalanx of Big, Defining Moments tumbling over the horizon almost every week, Zelda was the only thing in my life that wasn’t poking me in the ribs, reminding me that I’d perhaps not come as far as I should have. I got it for Christmas, and once it had gotten under my skin - after the first unconvincing fortnight of wandering around Kokiri Forest, forward-rolling into trees and flinging shrubs at the village-folk - I was hooked. From that point onwards, Zelda was the centrepiece of a private, self-conscious pledge; to enjoy whatever childhood I had left.
To paraphrase the Ramones, I didn’t wanna grow up: this game was my enabler.
Zelda is acknowledged in many quarters - justifiably I’d say - as The Greatest Computer Game Of All Time. Kind of in a Beatles way; there’s been better produced, bigger selling games since, but it nonetheless has to be understood in the context of what was around at the time, and everything else that it ushered forth. I played it recently on my mate Steve’s 3DS, and even with the 3D effect mimicing life after fourteen pints of Mild, the game’s lost absolutely none of its lustre.
It’s a simple story. As ever, you are Link, a sort of pre-ordained heavenly wood-elf, who comes to understand – across the course of an epic, unravelling, time-travelling narrative – his place as the Chosen One, delivering from evil the land of Hyrule. We open with troublesome dreams, and clapping thunder, and Princess Zelda managing to once again get herself kidnapped (which is pretty much a prerequisite of Nintendo's princesses). And lo, Link the warrior is born, and much of what follows is...
Blah blah blah. Ultimately, to reduce Zelda to a simple plot is like saying It’s a Wonderful Life is just about Christmas. This is a game about life, and growth, and exploration. It’s about learning, and connecting tangibly with the world and people around you. And for a computer game released in 1998, this really was something of an achievement.
It was the first game I remember offering up a sincere, considered and workable sense of freedom. Because once you really started making headway in Zelda - after the game had taken your hand and ruffled your hair, easing you through some remedial chopping / shrub-throwing exercises - you’d have to wander a long, long way in order to find a border, barrier, or proverbial brick wall. What Zelda does so peerlessly is to wrap up a fairly conventional ‘saving the princess / world’ narrative in the fantastical mechanisms of a lavish, distant (and yet altogether human, and believable) world, a world engineered to reward curiosity and exploration.
The central plot of Zelda is an obligation, but never a compulsion: you'll spend most of your time wandering, exploring, returning, reassessing, and conversing. Catching fish and chasing chickens. There's a massive streak of casualism hewn deep into the guts of Zelda, right up to the very end: even when you've progressed to the pinnacle of swordsman, when you're striding about Hyrule as a double-hard bastard, you'll find yourself irretrievably drawn to some pointless favour for an old crone in a shack, collecting bugs in a jar or something. With day and night cycles, the eponymous teleporting ocarina, horseback riding, the ability to move seamlessly backwards and forwards through time... movement is easy, fluid. And because of that, the whole game’s underpinned by the expectation that you won’t just go ploughing through it; that you’ll take the time to meet people, and explore, and understand this foreign world of Hyrule. There’s none of this eventless trudging through five minutes of looped scenery, meandering back from point B to point A just because you forgot a potion or something.
The central plot of Zelda is an obligation, but never a compulsion: you'll spend most of your time wandering, exploring, returning, reassessing, and conversing. Catching fish and chasing chickens. There's a massive streak of casualism hewn deep into the guts of Zelda, right up to the very end: even when you've progressed to the pinnacle of swordsman, when you're striding about Hyrule as a double-hard bastard, you'll find yourself irretrievably drawn to some pointless favour for an old crone in a shack, collecting bugs in a jar or something. With day and night cycles, the eponymous teleporting ocarina, horseback riding, the ability to move seamlessly backwards and forwards through time... movement is easy, fluid. And because of that, the whole game’s underpinned by the expectation that you won’t just go ploughing through it; that you’ll take the time to meet people, and explore, and understand this foreign world of Hyrule. There’s none of this eventless trudging through five minutes of looped scenery, meandering back from point B to point A just because you forgot a potion or something.
The GTA series and other non-linear games owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Zelda. 100 hidden collectables? Seemingly inconsequential sub-games and tasks, that end up as integral to your progress seven years down the line? Discovering new pieces of equipment, acquiring new skills, and returning to previously inaccessible locations? Check, check, and check. Zelda was the tipping point that clued developers up to a realization that an engaging and immersive gaming world was reward in itself; that if it’s lavish and expansive enough, if it’s believably a world, and not just a structured progression of levels or challenges, then it will hold people's attention. And that’s how Zelda - revealing itself in these delicious little increments - devoured so many of my afternoons, and evenings, and weekends, when I really should have been out getting drunk. Or at least revising.
With Zelda, Nintendo spun a juicy array of dimensions, environments, climates and aesthetics around what is a thematically quite a simple and linear game – what contributes to the sheer scale of the game is how distinct and how engrossing the developers managed to make each one of its component parts. Melding seamlessly and instinctively with the control pad, and discovering in the process a practical use for the N64’s thumbstick (which was no mean feat – most of the early N64 games demanded Olympic-standard ambidexterity), Link walks, runs, rolls and jumps through some fabulously visceral environments and climates. There’s bustling towns, and meandering mountain ascents; cavernous shrines and temples; parched, dusty wastelands, and oppressive, simmering volcanoes; crystalline caves, and fetid dungeons. There’s fire, ice, water, forests, deserts, and even a dab of spacey, ethereal weirdness... what’s so impressive about the universe Nintendo engineered in Zelda is that in an indescribably tangible way, each place exists in and of itself, hugely impressive and memorable in its own right, so vibrant you can virtually feel it. They moved away from the thoughtless, superficial fluff of other adventure games: here, it’s not just that the icy bits are slippy, or that the hot bits are redder than everything else, it’s the interactive attention to detail, the evocative packaging that generates a pervasive sense of hot, cold, wet, dry etc.
The other noteworthy thing about Zelda was its fabulous soundtrack. Unfortunately, this passed me by almost completely, as through a processing error at the Britannia Music Club I’d come into possession of Fantastic ‘80s Volumes 2 and 3 (instead of Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears): rather than Koji Kondo’s touchingly evocative score, Zelda for me is now umbilically tethered to Toni Basil, the Bangles, and Transvision Vamp. Although to be fair, nothing compounded the emotional resonance of galloping across Hyrule Field quite so effectively as Cyndi Lauper’s ‘I Drove All Night’.
The other noteworthy thing about Zelda was its fabulous soundtrack. Unfortunately, this passed me by almost completely, as through a processing error at the Britannia Music Club I’d come into possession of Fantastic ‘80s Volumes 2 and 3 (instead of Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears): rather than Koji Kondo’s touchingly evocative score, Zelda for me is now umbilically tethered to Toni Basil, the Bangles, and Transvision Vamp. Although to be fair, nothing compounded the emotional resonance of galloping across Hyrule Field quite so effectively as Cyndi Lauper’s ‘I Drove All Night’.
Zelda was the last game I ever played through a kid’s eyes: fittingly, it was the last game I can ever claim to have completely lost myself in. It was a game that seemed to be, from the very outset - from all of the excitable articles, and the previews, and a universally captivated press - penning its own legend. Reinforcing its own myth, in real time. Games magazines went mental over it. As an N64 owner, having it was a matter of almost religious significance. And if you weren’t an N64 owner... well, you’d bloody well go out and get one. Many did, such were the accolades. Zelda did for the N64 what Super Mario World had done years previously for the SNES – it gave it a sense of exclusivity. And not like a misspelt purple ticket for a sanctioned orgy - I mean meaningful, marketable exclusivity.
I’m not doing it justice really, because to lavish Zelda with the detail and discussion it deserves – baring in mind the scale of its innovation, its sheer beauty, the mesmeric need to conquer it - would take many, many pages. Suffice it to say, if you’ve never played it before, do so. Immediately. Manageably epic, sensibly vast, it stands astride the threshold of sandbox gaming, as an unparalleled example of the genre (before it all got slightly too clever for its own good). It’s an unbelievably rewarding and compelling experience, and it’ll quickly have you hooked beyond all hope.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a cathartic, immersive and memorable distraction in the midst of some considerable turmoil. When I wasn’t playing it, I always seemed to be edgy, and nervous, and churning, my anorexic sense of self-esteem colliding with an impending sense of growing-up, and change. So in a bittersweet way, I’ve always cherished and celebrated Zelda as a sort of self-conscious swansong for my childhood. It’s strange, looking back: that kind of perspective tends only to reveal itself in hindsight, but I was absolutely aware of it at the time - this End of Days, this conclusion. Hence the special place it continues to occupy for me to this day.
I’ll close with another thing that happened in 1999: the release of American Pie. I remember watching it at the pictures and just thinking yeah, righto. All those cheerful, scrappy, gorgeous Yanks... growing up for me – and a few others, it turns out - was just a matter of jarring biological necessity, and those final months of mountainous self-realisation just rammed home exactly where seven prurient years of single-sex public schooling had got me: pathologically afraid of girls and hangovers. Zelda was the standard-bearer for my own personal resolution, to enjoy what little remained of being a kid.
And there it remains today, slightly dusty, holding hands with Billy Ocean on the one side, and the diminishing simplicities of childhood on the other. Gawd bless it.
