1. December 25th, 1987

 

I am in the center of the screen.

 

I have entered my name.  I have watched the darkness part down the middle like the curtains of a play.  Now I wait at the center, in a clearing, and the screen waits too.  Everything is so still and quiet, save a song I will soon come to love.  Am I alone here?  Is that even me, that green and brown thing in the middle of the TV?

 

I press a button – nothing.  Another – no dice.  The button letters, B and A, hover over blank spaces in the top margin.  Then I press the directional pad and the center comes to life.  Up, down, left, right, a quick dance to see just what is what.  And I’m off.

 

But off to where?  There’s an opening at the top and each side of the screen.  But the top is widest.  It seems like the way forward, right?  After all, I am here to see the world, to go beyond, to ascend.

 

Above the first screen is another screen.  But this one is filled with moving things that aren’t me.  I learn later they are rock-spewing land-octopuses called Octoroks, but at first glance they’re just fuzzy red bugs spitting hairballs.  Hairballs that hurt.  Not because they sap my life, which I don’t even notice at first.  But because these hairballs push me back and make me blink in wounded pinks, as if I’m not quite myself anymore.  And because they produce the most terrible derp when they touch me – the sound of error.

 

My buttons still do nothing, so I retreat to the first screen.  And it’s like I’m the only one in the world again.  This is my refuge for now.  A world without red bugs and hairballs.  A world without others.

 

That’s when I notice the black square in the green rock border.  I’d seen it moments before when I’d arrived.  Why hadn’t I checked it first?  No matter, I do so now and my little self sinks into the black square, to the sound of shuffling steps.  It’s a cave, I get it, but it’s still vaguely disorienting.  I am descending.  I am going further in to the screen.

 

There I find an old man, fixed at the center, flanked by two flames.  Above him are first words: “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS.”  The ‘this’ being the sword at his feet.  He waits, the sword waits, the screen waits, and the flames flicker, prehistoric gifs in two frames.

 

He disappears when I touch the sword, and I’m as alone as before.  Except that now when I press A, a blade stabs the empty space.  I have extended myself.  I have given my blunt little body an edge.  Now I can return to the first screen – above? outside?  Now I can venture forth to other screens, to screens beside screens, to screens within screens, sword versus hairball, bug versus boy.

 

This is what The Legend of Zelda says with its very first screen: Go in before you go out.  Descend before you ascend.  Take the measure of yourself, and then the world.

 

For within the land of Hyrule are hidden things.  There are secrets everywhere, and you must find them to survive.  Every surface has a basement, and there is terror and treasure in the dark.  Within a glowing television screen, there are countless other screens.  Within a golden cartridge, there is a world.

 

It’s spooky, things that are bigger on the inside than the outside.  But this describes The Legend of Zelda.  This also describes videogames, books, most art.  And all because of the thing that can see past surfaces, that can imagine interiors, that is itself far bigger on the inside than the outside – my little, 11-year-old head.

 

 

2. December 13th, 2016

 

I turned on my NES Classic and chose Zelda and waited for the first spine-straightening note.  But I wasn’t really there.  I wasn’t in the center of the screen.  There was Link, right where he was supposed to be.  But I was still here, not there.  Here, three days ago, I turned 40.  Here, five weeks ago, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

 

This wasn’t the first time I’d tried to replay The Legend of Zelda since the fifth grade.  Over the years, as it became available on the Game Boy Advance or Wii Virtual Console, I would check in.  Does it hold up?  Does it still resonate, this foundational adventure in my gaming life?  What’s it like now?

 

It was just that in this particular now, I couldn’t even muster the will to move.  Most aging players know the feeling, or the lack.  That particular nothing.  Dead shapes on a dead screen.  A brick in your hands.  And then the nagging questions.  Where did my old feeling go?  What am I doing wrong?  How do I get it back?

 

It wasn’t that videogames didn’t continue to haunt me.  I came from the first game-haunted generation, my life spanning almost the entire history of the home videogame market.  I aged alongside them, and like many players I didn’t really choose the games that intersected my life at crucial moments.  I didn’t choose Zelda.  Rather: Zelda just happened to me.  It happened, and then that happening somehow haunted me for decades.

 

But the haunting had proven unpredictable over the years.  I couldn’t simply conjure it at will.  It wasn’t mine to command.  When I looked at that first Zelda screen on my mini Nintendo, I couldn’t just make it all happen again.  I could not will myself to see the adventure ahead, the openness and mystery of its world.  I could only stare at the first screen and think: this is where you’re resurrected when you die.

 

There’s this persistent fantasy about videogames – that they offer a preserved world, a miniature garden outside of time, immune to change, that you can visit whenever you want.  It’s akin to the fantasy of stable objects, of timeless works of art, of fixity and isolation in our roiling world.  A fantasy of that fabled philosopher’s stone: the thing-in-itself.

 

But there is no Legend-of-Zelda-in-itself.  There is only Zelda at a particular time, in a particular place, on a particular system, with a particular player.  It is always embedded in a particular lived reality and as such requires constant reframing.  Otherwise, it’s not a videogame but an artifact, a collection of art assets, music files, AI subroutines.  Something, the main thing, the thing that made anyone care in the first place — what it’s like to actually play The Legend of Zelda — is lost.

 

And there on my mini, I could not find it.  I pressed the cross, the two red buttons, but my Link just lurched, zombie-like, an echo of other playthroughs, other lives, my hand-eye synapses left to fire vacantly across the gap.  I lasted only a few screens before the nothing became unbearable and I shut the whole thing down.  This is not my Zelda, I thought.  This is not it at all.

 

 

3. December 27th, 1987

 

The screen is repeating itself, and I’m trying to make it stop.  It’s the same forest crossroads to the west, the same north and south.  Only east returns me to the non-repeating world.  But I need to go west.

 

The paper map that comes with Zelda calls this LOST WOODS.  Along with LOST HILLS, these are the only named places in the overworld of Hyrule.  They are also places where the map deceives.  I’d solved the repeated mountain screen with repetition itself, doggedly going up and up and up until I reached the top.  But these woods are stranger, less impressed by persistence.  

 

I’m reminded of my old Atari games, Combat and Asteroids, where the screen wraps around itself and there is no real edge.  I don’t yet know of the Euclidean 2-torus, the donut shape which these screens would become if seen in three-dimensional space.  What I know is that these game spaces feel creepy.  It’s not just the infinity.  It’s the sense that there is no offscreen.  A fixed screen like that in Space Invaders or Donkey Kong doesn’t say there is no world beyond its edges; it’s just not shown.  But a wraparound screen is a rimless prison that says: this is the world entire – there is nothing else.

 

So the threat of the LOST WOODS feels familiar, like an old dream stumbled upon in the middle of a new one.  It’s not quite the same as before – the screen still scrolls, even as it repeats.  But this disturbs me in another way.  It’s acting continuous, like every other Zelda screen, as if there’s a stable videogame place beyond each edge.  And yet there’s a glitch in the world logic here.  I move forward but end up behind.  I’m turned around, the world not where, or what, I thought it was.

 

I haven’t yet met an old lady in a nearby cave who will tell me, for a fee: “GO NORTH, WEST, SOUTH, WEST TO THE FOREST OF MAZE”.  I haven’t yet figured out how much The Legend of Zelda is about labyrinths.  Going around, not through.  The first dungeon is four screens directly above the opening screen.  But you can’t go straight.  The second dungeon is five screens east of the first.  But you must detour.  

 

The solution to the LOST WOODS is based on the same circuitous logic: to go forward, act as if something is in your way.  To go through, go around.  There will be short cuts in time.  But first you take the long cuts.

 

 

4. January 28th, 2017

 

There were protests at the airport.  Trump had been in office only a week, but it was already worse than expected.  The Muslim travel ban, his growing cabinet, every word he said.  My wife was visiting her family for Chinese New Year, and though I didn’t think she would have trouble getting back in the country, I wasn’t as sure as before.  It was the year of the Fire Rooster, which sounded about right.

 

Why I felt like trying a Zelda run that night wasn’t clear to me.  I hadn’t played all the way through in a few years.  I had no particular videogame itch, but my hands were restless.  My whole body was restless, antsy even, my breath shallow, as if something inside was uncoiling.  It was the kind of night where nothing sounded good.  But I couldn’t just do nothing either.

 

I took notes while playing:

 

– movement feels stiff, always forget this; boomerang feels best, especially when diagonal; bit of freedom in a right angle world

– enemies don’t all home in, kinda do own thing; habits/tendencies not patterns; the threat of erratic movement; how aware of me are they exactly?

– still love the roar of a boss from a room away, as if it’s really there; want indicators of presence beyond me

– how many words in whole game?  a few hundred?  economy of language creates indirect world, oblique world

– easy to forget: this is also a devastated world

 

I was thinking of some of the recent revelations about the Zelda universe as I played.  In 2013, Nintendo had published a kind of Zelda bible called Hyrule Historia, which included a controversial timeline of the entire series.  Not only did it claim that the first Zelda took place in the “Era of Decline”, it posited 1998’s Ocarina of Time as a kind of fulcrum for the Zelda universe.  Link’s actions in that time-travel adventure split the future into three variants.  The original Zelda, as well as every game that preceded Ocarina, was revealed to take place in the dark timeline that resulted from the hero’s defeat.  Essentially, every time you died in Ocarina of Time, you created the reality of every Zelda prior to 1998.  And if you gave up and left that Ganon undefeated, you made the dark timeline permanent.

 

This potential revelation, though, only reinforced what the original Zelda was already saying with its world.  The first Hyrule is a land under siege.  There is no castle, no town.  The people have been forced underground, and monsters roam free.  The ruler is a prisoner deep in the dungeon of the Prince of Darkness.  The enemy has clearly won.  

 

You, would-be savior, have arrived late to a land of death.  Death Mountain itself looms over the entire top of the map, and the sword you need to defeat evil is sealed not in some magisterial Temple of Time but in a simple unmarked grave.  In fact, the single biggest land feature in Hyrule is its graveyard.  It takes up 6 full screens, which may not sound like much.  But in a world spanning just 128 screens, it’s massive.  If Hyrule were the size of the United States, it would have a graveyard bigger than California.

 

The fallen world of Hyrule was perhaps not so unusual in the 80s.  Many games from the arcade era offered lost worlds and fundamentally unwinnable scenarios.  The space invaders would always invade.  The ghosts would haunt Pac-Man until the screen itself went crazy and died.  The machine’s endless hunger for quarters may have ensured eventual fail states, but this also admitted a certain truth about our struggle.  How long can anyone last against the inevitable march of aliens, ghosts, apes, time?

 

That night of the Fire Rooster, I lost.  I reached the final dungeon but stumbled into Ganon’s chamber without the silver arrows needed to kill him.  I lingered on the death screen, knowing that ‘continue’ would send me back to the entrance with three hearts to try again.  But I felt done.  It was late.  I was tired.  How many times had I already beaten Ganon in my life?  This could be an ending too, I thought.  Winning wasn’t the only true end.  This was the dark timeline after all.

 

 

5. December 29th, 1987

 

I’m trapped in a room full of Darknuts again.  They are blue, half-blind, and prone to sharp turns.  They carry shields that keen something awful when struck head-on, and I must find ways to sidestep, backstab, withdraw in order to survive.  But I love the struggle, love feeling out the space between me and these squat knights, love the sense of isolation and entrapment deep within the earth.

 

The Legend of Zelda is a lonesome game, and I’ve been told this is dangerous.  But I’m not feeling it.  I like being alone.  I especially like being alone in the deep indoors – closets, bathrooms, hallways, any corner far from the outside world.  I like rooms within rooms, pillow forts and blanket tents, and I dream of building a box that I can climb in whenever I want.  Nature is nice and all.  But I like it best through a window.  Or a wall.

 

I don’t say these things out loud very often.  People around me don’t seem to like it.  Taking too much pleasure in being alone seems like an insult somehow, and complaining about the first day of spring, because I hate the sun, draws only side-eyes.  My large extended family lives in the same small town, and most are conspicuously extroverted.  But even when it’s all too much for me, I try to smile and get along.  I’m a positive kid, mostly.  I’m not a troublemaker yet.  Still, the brightness, the noise, the buzz of persons in my space, they hurt my eyes and ears and skin.  They hurt my head most of all. 

 

Zelda’s underworld thus feels like home from the get-go.  The statues at the entrance, contorted faces and animal hybrids, set off each dungeon as a place apart, a sacred space.  The wideness of the world narrows, temporarily, and makes a certain sense.  Here there is focus, constraint, a separation, almost a heightened reality, and I don’t feel nearly so exposed.  I’m calm, centered, even with enemies bearing down on me.  I clear each room and piece together the shape of the whole.  I love feeling enfolded in this pocket of world.  This structured space for dreaming.

 

The dungeons feel like little stories within a larger story.  In the days since Christmas, I’ve been learning to tell new stories with every life and death.  I’ve discovered that the real reward at the end of each dungeon is not the golden Triforce, which is really just a key fragment, but the heart container that extends my life.  At the beginning I could tell only 3-heart stories.  Short, brutish tales of precarity and overwhelm.  Tales that could short-circuit at any moment, ending my journey before it had a shape.  Before it even knew what it was.  But now my many heart containers allow me to tell longer stories, more elaborate stories, stories with room to breathe, room for error.  I want this most of all.  Room for error.

 

 

6. March 2nd, 2017

 

The reviews were coming in all day, and they were crazy.  It was being called not just the best Zelda in years, perhaps even the best Zelda ever, but one of the greatest games of all time.  I’d cleared the entire weekend for this new Zelda, Breath of the Wild, something I hadn’t done for any game in a decade.  But before it came out, I needed to finish my playthrough of the original, all the way to the end.

 

I tried to see the first Zelda again, really see it.  But my eyes were no good.  I was a sleepwalker in a family home.  I slipped through its space so easily, clipped few corners, smacked into no furniture.  My eyes kept drifting to the open tabs on my laptop or the fingernail moon in the window.  I forgot how much the game is a war of attrition, of little mistakes that add up over time, and later I flubbed my way through one too many rooms and stumbled into death.  Couldn’t I beat the many-headed dragon Gleeok with half a heart?  Wouldn’t I survive all those shifty Wizzrobes in Level 6 on my first try?  No and no, actually.  But it didn’t matter much.  I was a persistent enough sleepwalker in the end.

 

The month before I had asked both my brother and my wife to play Zelda and tell me what they saw.  Tyler had been my faithful co-op partner for two decades, there at my side for many key game experiences – Final Fantasy VII, Halo, Minecraft.  He knew of the original Zelda, had played a few in the series, and his reaction to his first death was “Whoa, you really have to be careful.”  He wavered between brashness and panic, struggled with the stiff movement, relished much of the intimate combat.  Like me, he enjoyed fighting the Darknuts most.  Whenever he died, he jumped right back in.  “It makes you want to keep trying.  Like you see it’s possible even when you die.”  Though after 3 or 4 dungeons, he was done.

 

Ellen was a less experienced player, especially of Zelda.  She’s seen me play a few years earlier, and even then it was clear that we weren’t seeing the same game.  To her eyes, Gleeok’s fireballs were “pomegranate seeds”.  Gibdo’s lurching attack was a “mummy hug”.  The dreaded shield-eating Like Like was simply “the lasagna monster”.  Which was its own kind of horror for her, since she hated my lasagna.

 

When she tried playing herself, Zelda brought out all of her tenacity and wrath.  She threw herself against the first dungeon again and again, cursing the bats and “boomerang devils”.  She told the maddening beep that sounds with your last heart to shut it.  She stabbed an old man for his vague advice.  “Eastmost peninsula is the secret?  What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

While caught in the loop of death and resurrection, she was fierce.  But once we paused for just a bit, her dedication bled out and she put the controller down.  “That was fun.”  I asked if she wanted to play more.  “Later.”  And I understood.  I had faced the same motivation problem when trying to play the old games on my NES mini, at least past the first few deaths.  There were the initial charms, the moments of “Oh yeah, this”, even some real appreciation of the artistry.  We both agreed that Metroid’s atmosphere was still wonderfully alien and oppressive, that the gaudy excess of Castlevania, all its gothic muchness, was rather spectacular, that the sound of Mario walking in Donkey Kong was plain fantastic.

 

But then came death.  Then another.  I was more patient with the games I didn’t know as well, like Ninja Gaiden and Punch-Out!!  And any game with good rhythms and sharp melodies could keep me going awhile, though ‘awhile’ now meant about 15 minutes.  It wasn’t even that the games were too hard.  I appreciated their obstinance.  I just had little desire to see them through to the end.

 

I couldn’t help thinking that there was nothing timeless about these classic videogames.  They were very much of their time, and they were now very much in mine.  Even my treasured Legend of Zelda.  I was still excited about the new one, Breath of the Wild.  I was certainly motivated to play it.  But how long would that last?  A month?  A year?  30?  The question wasn’t a technical or critical one: can this game be played?  is it still good?  It was a basic question of desire: will anyone still want to?

 

 

7. January 1st, 1988

 

It is finished.  Ganon is dust.  Piled in a heap around his Triforce of Power.  I am still shaking, afraid to touch it, afraid to touch anything, afraid any sudden movement might undo what has been done.

 

Years before, my parents had agreed to buy me Ms. Pac-Man for the Atari only on the condition that I reached a certain high score on the original Pac-Man, proving I was done with it and really needed the sequel, as I’d claimed.  I did not know how to explain that this Pac-Man was not like the arcade, that it wasn’t fun, that it was bad.  So I worked hard to get the score, and when I finally did, I jumped up ecstatic and ran to get them, forgetting to let go of the controller.  Which promptly pulled the Atari from the shelf, and its power cord from the wall.  

 

That, I decide, will not happen with Zelda.  This time will be different.  I lay the controller on the carpet slowly, very slowly, like old dynamite, or a Jenga log, and stare at my hands until they stop shaking.  There is just one more door to pass through before the end.  Have I ever really beaten a game before?  Reached a real the end that wasn’t just my death?  I can’t remember one.  Most of my old Atari games seemed to go on forever.  And the end of Super Mario still feels a ways off, so many worlds to go.  I can’t quite do it yet, can’t jump just right, not every time.

 

But this feels different.  It’s not that I’m so much better at Zelda than I was a week ago.  It’s that I know it now.  I know the map, know the dungeons, know the enemies, know so many secrets.  I know how the world works.  I discovered it, screen by screen, death by death.  And discovery feels so good.  Now there is only one last thing to discover: the girl whose name is on the cartridge, the person at the heart of the legend.

 

I pick up the controller, steal the Triforce from the Ganon dust, and walk into the next room to meet Zelda.  She’s dressed all in red, like me, and stands quietly behind statues and flames.  There is something about this room and its dark center, though, that makes me hesitate.  Something is wrong, or at least not right.  I had imagined Zelda as someone like the Childlike Empress in The Neverending Story.  We would huddle in the dark, and she would tell me the secrets of the world.  We would, in fact, be the only two people left, and it would be up to us to wish the world back into being.

 

But now, I feel not only vaguely unheroic, but like an intruder.  Like I don’t belong here.  She’s been waiting in this room the whole time.  The fire at her side, a Prince of Darkness at the door, the labyrinth of the world beyond each wall.  It is her room, and suddenly I don’t want to be with her.  Not as I am, not as Link.  He shouldn’t even be here.  He’s in the way.  

 

No, I want to somehow be her.  To cross the threshold and be changed.  To be different, finally.  Princess Zelda captures my imagination in a way that a mute little elf boy simply cannot.  She is the one who had the plan to hide the Triforce.  She is the one who knows the underworld so well.  She is the one who lives in its innermost room.  Here, at the end, she is the legend at the center of the screen.  And this is where I want to be.

 

I cut through the fire and walk up to her and think to myself the same thing I will think every January 1st to come: this year will be different.

 

 

8. April 17th, 2017

 

It was raining in Kyoto.  Rain here meant the same thing as rain anywhere: an excuse to stay inside.  I did not want the world that day, and apparently the world didn’t want me either.  I was so relieved when the feeling was mutual.

 

I settled into our room, and the rain settled into the walled garden beyond the sliding doors.  All morning I listened to it drum the leaves while I beat Zelda again on my 3DS.  But playing Zelda in Japan felt no different.  The repeated playthroughs of the spring had dulled it, and a new Kyoto frame didn’t seem to matter.  So I turned to the second quest, the remixed and more difficult version of the game that opens up after you beat the original.

 

I had almost forgotten: the second quest is crazy.  It takes everything you’ve learned the first time through, all that precious wisdom, and uses it against you.  It looks the same on the surface, but it’s a treacherous veil.  It conceals an underworld that has plain lost its mind.  It’s become crueler, less fair, more ancient in its logic.  You must relearn the maps, the secrets, the very rules of the world, for no one will help you if you cling to what you know.

 

It’s also hilarious.  It’s filled with such delightful perversity that laughter is probably the wisest response.  What else should you do when the treasure you need is located not in the dungeon proper but beyond an unmarked walk-through wall at the end?  Or when you face a straight gauntlet of bosses and Darknut bullet hells, all in a row, only to fall in the last room?  Or when a bubble of static steals your sword and you die and yet you remain empty-handed upon resurrection?  The curse of Dark Souls starts right here, and Zelda’s original quest prepares you for none of this.

 

There in my traditional 6-tatami room, it cracked me up again and again.  I loved its ruthless admonishments, its broken rules, its undiluted meanness.  This seemed closer to the actual world than the relentless fairness and empowering fantasies of most videogames.  And the opportunity to laugh about it, in the virtual safety of this second Hyrule, felt something like a gift.

 

After a few hours of comic failure, I stretched back onto the hard floor and gave my spine a few minutes to adjust.  The tense laughter began to evaporate from my limbs, and the unfamiliar ceiling put me in a meditative mood.  Why didn’t I remember laughing at the second quest before?  Had I not found it funny when I first worked through it that summer almost 30 years ago?

 

I often wasn’t sure what I truly remembered from my past.  Some claimed that with the right trigger it all came back.  My memory was pretty decent, and yet that wasn’t how it worked for me.  Even with the simplest scene, I could feel myself reconstructing it, stealing details from whatever was at hand to fill in the gaps.  And it was mostly gaps.  I’d read somewhere that our most vivid memories were the ones we’d most meticulously reconstructed, again and again, until we were just remembering remembering, not the original events themselves.  Which suggested that our clearest memories might be the least accurate.  More like legends.

 

This brought to mind how the original concept for The Legend of Zelda involved golden microchips and time travel between a past and future, with your hero as the literal ‘link’ between the two.  Thus the name.  But the actual link between our past and future outside the game didn’t seem so clear to me.  Not only the mechanism, but exactly what we did with that link, and what it did to us.  I knew that videogame culture was sick with nostalgia.  I knew that the reactionary shitstorm named Gamergate was part of the same backwards-looking movement that brought Donald Trump to power.  I knew that any link between the past and future required a reckoning.

 

How should we relate to the past?  Why was so much at stake in this relationship?  I was immune to none of those stakes there on the tatami mat.  The rain was still falling on the walled garden.  The room had gone gray in the late afternoon light.  Tomorrow I would visit Sonobe, the hometown of Zelda co-creator Shigeru Miyamoto.  I did not look forward to it.  My own capacity for wonder had become too unreliable.  The Legend of Zelda seemed to mean both too much and too little to me.  There among the hills and caves that inspired Miyamoto to make the game, I had no idea which Zelda I would see.  That original videogame wellspring, my primal virtual wound.  Or a valley of dead pixels, the end of a dream.

 

 

9. May 26th, 1988

 

The seats on the bus are brown and broken-down.  Death by a thousand butts.  The biggest butt of all belongs to Mr. D, our driver and legendary bellower.  I’d seen his voice knock kids flat.  

 

I cool my temple on the window and ignore Mr. D’s hollering.  I think about renting a game for the weekend.  Most of mine have been played to death – Zelda, Mario, Gumshoe, even Ice Climber and Dragon Power, which aren’t actually fun.  I’ve tried a bunch of rentals since Christmas: Karnov and Rygar, Castlevania and Pro Wrestling, Wizards & Warriors.  A few are always rented out – Metroid, Deadly Towers, and that game with the hideous box art, Mega Man.  But maybe I’ll get lucky this weekend.

 

I think about the sequels they say are coming any day now.  Zelda 2, Mario 2, someone kicks my seat.  I think of how addicted to Nintendo I was after Christmas, another kick, how I had to punish myself in February, a half-kick, no Nintendo for a week.  I lean away from the seatback and listen to the two boys behind me.

 

“It’s like so rad.  You should see me!  I’m like” two quick kicks and a punch.  Three bad sound effects.  The bones of my seat groan.  The boy beside me closes his eyes and keeps them closed.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah man!  Like so rad so rad.”  A thump with each rad.  “Come over and I’ll show you!”

 

I know this kid.  He’s not mean but he gets so hyper.  He starts out fine and then one little thing will set him off.  Suddenly he’s bragging and punching air, feet flying, elbows unaware, exaggerating until he’s just making stuff up.  Like that his brother saw Winnie Cooper on spring break in Florida.  Or how he has a cousin who works for Nintendo.  Dumb stuff that no one believes.

 

“I don’t know if I can today.  So wait, how do you do it again?”

 

“Aw man, you beat it right?”

 

“Yeah, almost.”

 

“So just load up your same save file after you beat it and it’s right there!”

 

“Oh ok.”

 

“Or my brother says you can just type in your name as Zelda and skip right to it.”

 

For a second, I pretend I didn’t hear that.  I pretend that what they’re talking about has nothing to do with me.  I stare hard out the window and pretend not to listen closer.

 

“I just have to make my name Zelda?”

 

“Yeah but when you do it’s hard man!  Like way harder than the regular game!”

 

“Oh.”

 

Mario is harder after you beat it the first time too.  Why had I never noticed in Zelda?  More exaggerations.  He can’t be right.  But it’s true that I always start a new save file every time I beat it.  I want to get my death count lower.

 

“And it’s way different too!  Like things are not in the same place as before.  And the dungeons aren’t the same either.  Everything’s changed around man!  It’s this whole other world!”

 

I stop listening.  I lose track of time.  At some point, they get off the bus.  Sometime later, I do too.

 

I stumble into the house, dizzy, breathless.  It can’t be true.  It’s impossible.  I load my original file, marked with a sword to prove the world has definitely been saved, and the first screen is the same.  My clearing is still there for me.  The cave, the old man, his sage advice – everything in its right place.

 

I take my sword and head north, not even bothering with the Octoroks, old friends by now.  They do their thing, spitting their rocks, thinking beached octopus thoughts, and I slip through without an unkind word.  I go east, then north and north and north, and finally west across the longest bridge in Hyrule.  And there it is, the first dungeon entrance.  The same gaping mouth in the same hollow tree.

 

I hesitate.  Part of me really wants to believe the boy on the bus.  But it sounds too good to be true.  And I hate being tricked.  Besides, he can’t be right.  Not him, that stupid loudmouth.  That bragging boy.  He cannot be the messenger for the greatest secret I have ever heard.

 

So when I descend and find the familiar totems, the old bluish palette, the same circling underworld song, I’m relieved.  Slightly disappointed – it’s supposed to be this whole other adventure – but mostly relieved.  God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

 

Except the doors are wrong.

 

There are three doors out of the room instead of four.

 

There are supposed to be four doors, one on each edge of the screen.

 

But there are three doors.

 

The western wall is flat and featureless, just like any other wall.  It’s as if the fourth door has been bricked up.  Or maybe there was never a door there to begin with.

 

No, I know The Legend of Zelda by heart.  I know the shape of this first labyrinth, the Eagle.  I know there are four doors.  

 

But there are three doors.  There are three doors on the screen.

 

I stumble backwards, out of the labyrinth.

 

It was true.  The world had changed.

 

 

 

*This was meant to be the first chapter of a now abandoned videogame memoir about the original Legend of Zelda and the passing of time.  Written in 2017, published on December 25th, 2020.