Twelve Games for Life
VII - Pocket prayer book of youth
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA is, and will assuredly remain, the superior entry from among the vast and varied compendium of creations which constitute video game’s most hallowed and perennial franchise. Where early entries in similarly longstanding intellectual properties may deserve recognition for presciently paving the road to the confirmed greatness of its sequels, this very first glimpse of Hyrule already carried with it the complete spectrum of the series’s identity. Yet for all the unassailable merits of this, the action role playing game paradigm of the ages, it was its portable counterpart which came to constitute an enduring chapter of my life in games; of which I keep memories so precise and so vivid, the emotions elicited by them far outmatch the descriptive competence of my meagre vocabulary.
Some context is thus required to adequately set the scene. Readers of advanced years should be at an advantage here, having lived through these times when access to emerging technologies was fettered, either as a result of a stagnant economy and ensuing low purchasing power; or as the consequence of a poorly interconnected geography characterised by varying degrees of access to products and services. We find ourselves transported back to a moment in history when the vast majority of families owned but a single television, imperatively situated in the common room. The highly coveted access to screen time was, itself, the object of truculent negotiation among relatives. Accordingly, my generation’s instant fascination with the fledgling domains of pocket electronic gaming was not in the least fortuitous. The untapped degrees of liberty permitted by these often shoddily manufactured, gaudy and strident machines were tantamount to a lifeboat rescue from the sinking vessel of dysfunctional households.
But therein lied the rub. For most of my childhood, the notion of portable game play was synonymous with an initial sense of excitement and novelty, soon followed by the dismaying apprehension of how lean their substance, how finite their content was. In retrospect, it would be no exaggeration to affirm the emergence of the Game Boy as one of the most significant technological advancements of that not so distant era. Reductive and deficient assessments of the day place this phenomenon in lines parallel to what role the Walkman played for music listening, misguided perhaps by the parallel operation of interchangeable cassette tapes. A closer inspection should place it nearer to the introduction of the pocket transistorised radio from the mid-twentieth century, in that it first permitted music and radio programming to be accessed from virtually any location, at a safe distance from the quarrels of the living room.
My deep-seated infatuation for LINK’S AWAKENING cannot be dissevered from my obeisance for the system itself, the former representing the most carefully weaved and delightfully balanced specimen of what the latter’s five by four centimetre dot matrix with stereo sound could possibly offer. What few full-screen animated frames could be fitted into the tiny cartridge made for a riveting opening I seldom pinched the rubbery start button on. The ever-expanding scale of the world therein played the thousand tricks with my mind, the console feeling increasingly heavier every time I stored it inside my schoolbag or coat pockets. Inexplicably, it lived and breathed the same as LINK TO THE PAST, the monochromatic scale only further highlighting the stylish contours of Arimoto’s (et al) endearing artwork.
Yet, it was by virtue of its intrepid and noncanonical qualities that the tiny cartridge acquired its distinctive effulgence. For this was a project whose guiding principles were founded on a reductive design approach, one seeking to confuse and amaze the player by renouncing those elements and symbols that had thus far categorised the former trilogy - the elusive Triforce, the land of Hyrule, or the fabled princess herself. Standing in for them was a bold new iconography: a gigantic egg resting atop a mountain, a circular assemblage of eight noble instruments from the ancient world, the indecipherable runes etched in weathered stone, the myth of a flying whale clothed in majestic naperons, and the unannouced visitations of a talking owl not what it seemed.
LINK’S AWAKENING was as the proverbial dream within a dream. Whether I chose to play it in the park sitting on a bench, or standing by door of a classroom during school recess, I was permanently befuddled by the seeming impossibility of it all; that a machine smaller than most books I’d known had the capacity to elicit such an intense sentiment of déplacement, my surroundings barely holding together, wholly eclipsed by the signals emanating from that ghostly liquid crystal grid. What wonders unfolded before my wide eyes of youth were perceived not unlike an encounter with the transcendental.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Takashi Tezuka
Nintendo EAD, 1993