Notes from a Ford Orion.
The game was released the year before.
For this car ride, at least, the Nintendo 64ismine.
Ocarina of Time entered development in 1995 alongsideSuper Mario 64.
You run, you jump, you reach the end.
The Legend of Zelda, however, was a more complicated beast revolving around combat and exploration.
The combat posed more of a problem.
Nintendo had found in Super Mario 64 that the question of distance in two-dimensional space was complicated in 3D.
The problem of how to judge a jump on a Goomba was never really answered.
This lack of depth perception became simply another learning curve for players moving to 3D gaming.
That wasn’t good enough for Ocarina of Time’s swordplay.
The result was Z-targeting.
But in the late-1990s, we’d never seen anything like it.
To do so, I believe, would be a mistake.
I never wanted Ocarina of Time; Idreamedit.
And it stayed with me.
For a few months, I genuinely believed I needed Ocarina of Time.
I wasn’t the only one.
The playground filled with children playing “Zelda” long before the game came out.
Sent home from school to write a weekend diary, recording my mundane childhood felt pointless.
Instead, I wrote an elaborate self-insert story in which I was part of Ocarina of Time’s world.
Now, it would be regarded as a piece of limp fanfiction.
We’d seen The Legend of Zelda games before, even 3D adventure games.
But Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro the Dragon, evenFinal Fantasy VII- none elicited such an all-encompassing and passionate response.
This was something not equalled until Pokemon appeared a year later and eclipsed every other available childhood interest.
Looking back now, we know what Ocarina of Time is.
No hand-me-downs, no disappointment, only anticipation.
