I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1996. Alongside it came a Nintendo Power subscription for my birthday the following month, which gave me all of the hype Nintendo was attempting to surround the console with. In reality, Nintendo had made some perhaps foolish and isolating decisions with the system, alienating third parties in the process and making anyone who did program for the system have to work with some pretty tight constraints in terms of texturing, memory and sound quality. For teenage me, I didn’t necessarily pay attention to this — I just had access to
Super Mario 64 and …uh…
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire? And the impending flood of great games coming down the road! So while Capcom, Square, Enix, Namco and many other companies deserted Nintendo for the greener Sony Playstation pastures, Nintendo and Rare picked up a lot of the slack as best they could. One of the earliest titles Nintendo themselves was readying was
Zelda 64, which looked incredibly early when first shown off but still tantalized regardless of those simple polygonal models and sparse environments.
As 1997 rolled through and
Goldeneye 007 surprised the shit out of everyone,
Zelda 64 began to become
Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And with each screenshot and preview article in
NP and
Next Generation I became increasingly excited. And that was likely due to an increasing frustration with the titles that were available that I bought and eventually regretted the $80-90 investment on.
Dark Rift? FIFA Road to World Cup 98? Extreme-G? Ugh. But I knew that
Zelda would be worth it. When the local
Toys R Us put pre-order slips out, I grabbed it as soon as I knew and eagerly waited for November to roll around. Thankfully, the wait wasn’t as bad in 1998 as it was in 1997, as
Body Harvest, Banjo-Kazooie, and
International Superstar Soccer 98 overshadowed the poorer decisions I made in
Mission: Impossible, NBA Courtside, and
Mario Party.
November finally arrived. And while the game came out on the 21st, I wasn’t able to pick it up right away, being that the game was on reserve an hour away and my parents didn’t have to go to that city right away. So I went to my friend Chris’ house, who had gotten his copy and waited a bit so we could experience it together. He too was a N64 kid and had been pretty obsessed with waiting for
Zelda as well, so his courtesy was much appreciated. We started a file and sat slack jawed over the entire weekend. I even brought a blank VHS tape over to record it — yes, I was that much of a nerd.
So I watched Chris play the game up to the first few temples, and then the weekend ended and it was time to return home. Arguably the first thing out of my lips to my mother was “can we go pick up
Zelda?” She kindly said no, as she couldn’t justify the gas just to get a game. I understood, but deep down I was disappointed.
The next day, I’m sitting in the living room of my house. Nothing excites me save the tape I made of Chris and I playing the game. My mom walks in and sees my choice of activity, and after a few minutes tells me we’re going to get
Zelda. Best trip down to that city in my life up to that point. The yellow fields, the wooden posts scattered throughout sprinkled with barbed wire — a monotonous sight that existed nine months of the year — seemed so much more dynamic under the thrills of happiness. I walked into the store, handed over my slip and paid my $70 or whatever it was, and then the ride home was the most agonizingly long trip I sat through up to that point in my life. Funny how that works.
The cartridge was slid into my N64 the instant I burst back into my home, and the rest of my Thanksgiving vacation was making up lost time. You see, I was envious of Chris and his extra time with the game, and that turned into an unannounced competition. I wanted to beat him in seeing the game to the end of the line. So I dedicated my life towards marching through the portion of the game that I knew, and then tackling all of the segments I did not have previous knowledge on. I was enraptured. Few games had caught my whimsy the way
Ocarina had — it was a special, one-of-a-kind delight that I still consider a precious memory, even though mechanically and visually the game has not aged super well.
After I felled Ganon and the credits rolled, I called Chris. I told him I beat it.
He was just beginning the fight against Ganon.
I had won my silly little contest.
It — for whatever reason — remains a goofy joyous bit of high school remembrance. One of the few I treasure. I don’t know if Chris ever knew I was racing him. But that’s irrelevant, really. Because we both had achieved something amazing thanks to
Ocarina of Time: a strengthening of our friendship due to a mutual love for an great game that changed the landscape of the medium.
Of course,
OoT continued to excel during the rest of the N64 lifespan. I put in numerous hours post-game just wandering around the world and inventing my own quests for Link to go on.
Majora’s Mask didn’t connect with me the same way
Ocarina did — it was a great game in its own right, but it definitely went on its own journey with narrative and mechanics that restricted my own projections into Termina.
Ocarina, meanwhile, was a revelation. It granted an outlet for me to express elements I felt I must otherwise confine…something that really helped push me towards exploration, discovery and scope as key factors in my game playing. While the
Zelda formula has certainly evolved and refined itself from here, there’s still something special in
OoT. It’s a remarkable achievement and one of the pivotal 3D games that helped define the medium moving forward.
