The transition into the 16-bit era represented a substantial leap not just in technology, but also in memories. So, let’s talk about heading into the SNES and what would become my comfort game: Zelda: A Link to the Past.

My mother and I moved about an hour away from my father, so that she could attend college. I have few memories of the Nintendo during that period of on-campus housing, aside from having a pet rabbit who consistently chewed through the cords to the controllers. At a certain point we had neither a rabbit nor a Nintendo, so I imagine that the Nintendo went back to my father’s place.

Later on, we moved again to a low-rent apartment complex up in the mountains. I was sent to play outside any time it was not actively raining, as parents were wont to do back in the 90s. One day, I was walking around, and what looked like a little boy called me over to the dumpster area. There, he asked me if I wanted to smoke a cigar with him – the kind that I had seen in grocery stores with the little mouth cap thing? I declined and ran back home. After telling my mother the story, suddenly I was not asked to play outside anymore. A few more days after that, a shiny new Super Nintendo appeared.

I am not certain whether Zelda: A Link to the Past (ALttP) was the first game I got for the system, but it was consistently the most played and most beaten game I have ever owned. Back in those days, I only ever got a videogame on my birthday and during Christmas, so whatever you got had to last. Which was a bit hard, as you never really knew going in how in-depth anything was beforehand. Luckily for me, ALttP had secrets galore. So much so, that it inspired me to start my own cassette tape “[Azuriel]’s Secrets” series, where I basically recorded myself narrating all the game secrets I had uncovered.

I still have the tapes, by the way. A few years ago, I bought a cassette adapter so that I could “rip” the tapes to MP3 and put them on my computer. I only ripped a few though, because A) they are cringy beyond belief, B) they happened to have also recorded the very loud sound of the boombox in which I used to record, and C) the whole thing was kind of a pain. It’s one of those things you think you should preserve, because… reasons. I let Little Man listen to the ALttP one and he was thoroughly bored within two minutes. Which is understandable, honestly, as I wouldn’t really care what a 10-11 year old version of my father thought about life either. May be a weird thing for a blogger to say, but nevermind.

Anyway, the other series of memories I have surrounding ALttP was how often I would get stuck on a boss or puzzle, and only get unstuck once I showed my mother. Not because she was good at videogames or clever with Socratic questions; she was actually quite terrible on both fronts. Rather, whenever I called her over to show her where I was stuck, I felt the desire to explain the situation, how unfair it was, and how many different things didn’t work. “I tried using my sword, I tried using a bomb, I tried using a boomerang, I tried using the hookshot… oh wait. That worked! Now, go away!”

I was a bit of an ass. Glad I grew out of that. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ