Tag: Zelda

Classic Videogame Quotes

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Since their invention, almost overnight videogames have made a lasting impact on the greater culture. Here are a few of my favorite memorable quotes from video games.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.

Game: The Legend of Zelda

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1986

It’s the mid-80’s. The NES is new, and a chip shortage has made this already-hot game a hard to find must-have for the holidays — despite being released in February. Limited quantities of the special gold cartridge meant that a lot of kids had to wait a long time to get their copy of the game everyone was talking about: The Legend of Zelda. In Link’s first encounter, he finds an old man in a cave with a gift and some memorable advice.

Welcome to adventure, kid.

It’s a secret to everybody.

It's a secret to Everybody.

Game: The Legend of Zelda

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1986

There’s something seedy about taking free rupees from a cave-dwelling Moblin. Is this a legit offer? What’s the catch? Why is this overworld enemy helping us? But yes, it’s true. Everyone knows that the secret to getting ahead in the world is to have a little money. It can get you into places, and out of jams. You can never have too much, but you can only carry $255. Don’t spend it all in one place, unless it happens to be the hidden shop that sells the Blue Ring!

Uh Oh. The truck have started to move!

Uh-oh! The trick have started to move!

Game: Metal Gear

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1987

Most videogames for the NES were developed in Japan, and accurate translation never seemed to be a high priority. So many memorable quotes from mid-80’s videogames are remembered for their quirky, incorrect grammar and hilarious misspellings.

In Metal Gear, you sneak about a military base attempting to keep a low profile lest you be discovered and create an international incident. While looking inside a few parked trucks for supplies to aid you in your mission, one of them happens to start up with you inside! Better lie low and hope that you will not be discovered, and that wherever it takes you doesn’t bring your mission to a premature end. Fortunately for you, the blundering enemy has in fact just made it easier for you to succeed, by taking you to an area on the base where you could not get to otherwise.

Earlier in the game, you encounter this tired guard, who, if you wait out of sight long enough, will fall asleep. Oddly, before nodding off he announces, to no one in particular, “I feel asleep!!” Either the designers meant to say he fell asleep, which makes no sense because he’s already asleep, or perhaps they meant to say he feels sleepy. Either way, it’s pretty funny.

The NES port of Metal Gear was a bug-ridden mess, but since most of us didn’t have an MSX to compare against, we had no idea, but we didn’t care. The sneaking about, using stealth tactics to infiltrate the base while quietly eliminating guards, and finding an arsenal’s worth of gear to blow up a nuclear-armed super-weapon were too important to let some bad English stop us.

I feel asleep!!

Congratulation.

Congratulation.

Game: 1942

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1986

A number of early Capcom NES games rewarded the player who successfully beat the game with this stingy accolade, “CONGRATULATION.” What, just one measly congratulation? Isn’t plural, multiple congratulations nearly always in order when complimenting someone’s happy success? After dogfighting your way through thirty-two (!) stages of bland, slow-moving shoot-em-up “action” against an unbearable monotone soundtrack, this is the thanks we get?

Literally, this is the entirety of what you get when you beat the game. Screw you, Capcom!

Fortunately, they more than made up for this with the sequel, 1943, which features improved everything, including one of the best soundracks on the NES. Capcom went on to produce some of the best titles on the NES, and found even greater glory in the 16-bit era with Street Fighter II. All is forgiven.

A winner is you!

A winner is you

Game: Pro Wrestling

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1986

Pro Wrestling is one of those games that is pretty dumb, and yet really fun despite that, with a one of the hardest boss fights to win, the championship bout against Great Puma. But each time you manage to win a wrestling match, your reward was this message: A winner is you! All right! It really pumps up your self esteem!

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all [alike|different].

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

You are in a maze of twisting passages, all different.

Game: Colossal Cave Adventure

System: DEC PDP-10, and others

Year: 1976

There’s so much quotable in Colossal Cave Adventure, considering the entire game is entirely text, and one of the first computer games ever. But this quote from the Maze is the one that I come back to the most. To create the feeling of being lost in a maze, the game just repeats the same text in each room, until you manage to solve the maze. There’s no feedback to tell you where you are, or to give yourself a reference point to have some idea where you are. After puzzling over this conundrum, successful players eventually figure out that if they drop an item from their inventory in a room, it will help them to make that room in the maze stand out from the others, enabling them to map out the maze with pen and paper.

To this day, whenever I’m in a confusing situation where there are many options and I don’t know which is the right one, I’ll think back to this one.

I am Error

I am Error.

Game: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1987

A genuine WTF moment in gaming occurs when you meet the infamous Error. This is all he ever says to you, “I am Error.” Is that his name? Or is he just a chronic screwup? Or is the game telling you that it has an Error? This was a matter for deep contemplation in 1987.

What a horrible night to have a curse.

What a horrible night to have a curse.

Game: Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1987

Castlevania II attempted to innovate by introducing adventure and RPG elements into the action-platformer formula. There’s a level-up system, and shops where you can spend money that you spend hours grinding for… so much grinding for XP and hearts in fact that this game is usually remembered as the least-liked of the NES Castlevania titles. Luckily the music was excellent. Unlike the first Castlevania, rather than having a linear progression through a series of stages, the game featured an open map that you could go back and revisit, and likely would need to several times while trying to figure out some extremely obscurely hidden secrets. Another innovation the game features is a day-night cycle, where during the nighttime hours, the enemies were stronger, doing twice as much damage, and taking twice as many hits to be defeated. Every couple of minutes, day would turn to night, or night to day, and every time the game would freeze and display this message to you… one character at a time… for about 30 seconds. It was… memorable, let me tell you.

Winners don’t use drugs

Game: Various arcade games

Year: 1989-2000

If you went to an arcade in the 1990s, you surely saw this message on a regular basis. I don’t know whether it ever stopped anyone from trying drugs who wanted to, but we sure did know who the Director of the FBI was.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Game: Zork

System: PC

Year: 1980

The early text adventure games borrowed liberally from one another. In Colossal Cave Adventure, you could die if your torch went out, falling into a pit in the pitch black darkness. In the Zork series, there were locations where you could die without a light source, but it made no sense to have a hole that you could fall into. Enter the Grue, a loathsome fell creature that inhabited only the darkest reaches, and had never been seen by anyone who lived. But what is a Grue? No one knew. Some speculate that the name derived from the word gruesome, which is certainly a likely sounding explanation. On the other hand, the term “grue” is also found in the philosophy of Nelson Goodman, which might have been familiar to the MIT students who formed Infocom. But they’re also a monster in the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance. So which is it?

Fight, Megaman! For everlasting peace!

Fight, Megaman! For everlasting peace!

Game: Mega Man

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1987

After winning the original Mega Man, we are informed that Mega Man has to continue to fight (basically telling you that you could now play the game again, enjoying it for “replayability”). “Fight, Megaman!” the game extolls us, “For everlasting peace!” What? How? That oxymoronic statement always gives me a chuckle.

President Ronnie has been kidnapped by the ninjas! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?

President Ronnie has been captured by the ninjas

Game: Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja

System: Arcade (Data East)

Year: 1988

What could be more 80’s than a President named Ronnie? In the last year of Reagan’s presidency, this 2D beat-em-up gave us the attitude of cool badness that we all needed. Are you a bad enough dude? The game play in Bad Dudes wasn’t necessarily great, consisting of mostly standing around on platforms as the level slowly scrolled by, delivering repetitive one-punch or one-kick knockouts to an endless supply of cookie cutter Ninjas, without a great amount of depth or variety to the entire affair. This was a game anyone could beat, pretty much regardless of their skill level, as long as they had enough money. But the giant-sized, 16-bit sprites and (somewhat) challenging boss fights were enough to suck us in and drain the quarters from our pockets.

Barf!

Barf!

Game: River City Ransom

System: Nintendo Entertainment System

Year: 1989

The famous last words of many dying students at River City High school, uttered as they blinked out of existence and left behind their bouncing pocket change. It’s funny that they apparently literally say “Barf!” rather than making the sounds of barfing, such as “Bleaugh!”

Finish him!!

Finish Him!

Game: Mortal Kombat

System: Arcade

Year: 1992

The voice narration gave these words a chilling malevolence. When you hear this, having won two out of three rounds in the Mortal Kombat tournament, it’s time to unleash the combo that triggers your fatality move, giving your opponent a death worthy of the game’s title. Or, if you’re the loser, it’s time to endure the indignity and shame of having your body torn asunder, in the most unpleasant way imaginable. Yet, no matter how many times they die in the MK tournament, you everyone still gets to fight again in the endurance rounds.

Game Over

Game Over

Game: Just about every one, ever.

System: All of them.

Year: Eternal

Game Over, man. Game over!

To be sure there are many more memorable videogame quotes that I’ve left out. What are your favorites?

Why arguing about Link’s gender is dumb, and why it’s important

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So there is a new Legend of Zelda game coming out, as there always is. Nintendo have shown it at E3, and fans have been speculating about it endlessly in anticipation, as they always do. I guess somewhere or other, people glommed on to a rumor that Link might be a girl in this next incarnation.

Nintendo shot down that rumor with some spurious logic about balancing the triforce, which apparently becomes unbalanced if it goes from 2/3 male to 2/3 female. See, in the original Legend of Zelda, a Triforce was a golden triangle made out of 8 pieces of smaller triangles, and there were three of them: a triforce of wisdom, a triforce of power, and uh I forget let me look it up, oh yes a triforce of Courage. These triforces brought “balance” to the world, and whenever the balance gets out of whack, Link (using the Triforce of Courage) has an adventure to restore balance and peace to the world.

Later, I guess, these triforces became identified with the major characters in the Zelda world: Link, Zelda, and Gannon. And because these characters have gender, and because a 2M:1F gender ratio is apparently “balanced”, you can’t make Link a girl. Because apparently there’s no way to restore that imbalance through adventuring, or rewrite Zelda to be a dude, or whatever. It would just ruin Zelda as we know it, according to Nintendo. This, despite the fact that Link takes on a wide variety of identities in many of (immutably) his adventures.

Link can be anything you can possibly imagine... except a girl.

Link can be anything you can possibly imagine… except a girl.

My point in writing this is not to slam Nintendo for their decision to keep Link male, but to point out that Link is Nintendo’s property, and they can manage their property however they want to. They don’t have to make up dumb excuses (and they are dumb) why Link has to be male. They don’t owe fans a female Link. If they decided to offer a female incarnation of Link, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. But Nintendo created and own the Legend of Zelda world, and they’re the ones who get to decide how it works.

Except…

We get to play in that world. As it unfolds for us, we take part in the creation, and so each of us owns a small piece of it. We are invited to become Link — as is the common convention with nearly every videogame ever made: you are the protagonist.

And, it turns out, about half of us are girls.

So, regardless of what the instruction manual says, or what the pixels look like, or what Nintendo wants, about half of all Links are girls.

For some girls, they may think of Link as a boy, and so they’re playing “in drag” while they use Link as their avatar, in much the same way that, in Shakespearean times, men played the women roles too, since real women weren’t allowed to be actors back then.

Some girls playing as Link may think of Link as a girl. That’s fine. Maybe Link’s a tomboy. Or maybe she’s disguised as a boy, because Hyrule doesn’t accept that women can be action adventure heroes. Or maybe some other thing.

Who cares? If someone wants to play the game and use it with their imagination that way, who are we to tell anyone that they’re wrong? That’s the experience they had, playing their game. There’s nothing official about it of course, but that doesn’t matter.

The thing with videogame characters is, we inhabit them for the duration we play the game. It’s like putting on a costume and playing a role. Each actor brings something different to a role.

But if we neglect this aspect of theatrical artifice, and consider the character of Link as a real person, who is a distinct individual, the character has its own identity. Its original incarnation as designed by the original creator seems to have some sort of magical hold on the character concept that defines it. Link is small. Link wears green. Link uses a sword and shield. Link explores the world and finds things. Link is heroic. Link is… male.

But every time a serial storyline has a new story written, or goes on a new adventure, the author of that story takes the opportunity to create new things. If there wasn’t anything new, there wouldn’t be much point to creating a new story. These new stories may be said to extend the existing body of canonical stories that have to agree in continuity. Or they may have an “alternate” reality, often thought of as subordinate in some sense, or subject to pre-existing continuity where possible, but existing in a loosely connected multiverse of worlds surrounding different incarnations of the characters. Sometimes serial stories are “rebooted” or “reinterpreted” by new authors who take aspects of the original work, and use them as raw materials for writing completely outside of the canonical milieu.

There’s some core conceptual things that we sense in the character that can’t be changed, and everything else is subject to the interpretation the author/publisher chooses to present, and the vestiges of the actor’s persona that a player brings for the time they inhabit the role. In cinema, characters like James Bond and Batman have been portrayed by different actors. On stage, over 4+ centuries, different actors have portrayed the characters of William Shakespeare in countless different interpretations. In comic books, different writers and artists crank out new stories in a world that has been worked on in some cases for 75+ years, while the characters never seem to age, despite the world around them always being contemporary to the time of publication. Sometimes these characters go through dramatic re-inventions or spin-offs.

People debate whether these things are good or not, but the world keeps on going.

What’s different about videogames is, we all inhabit the role of our videogame protagonists. This is different from Christian Bale inhabiting Batman for a while, and then handing it off to Ben Affleck, etc. Each of us who plays a Zelda game is Link, contemporaneously and privately. Link *is* a girl, in hundreds of thousands of living rooms, right now. And Link is a boy. Link is all things to all people.

And Link is Link, the published work offered on the market by Nintendo. We’re invited to play with him, and as him, and become him. Or her. But Nintendo gives us a set of traits and constraints to work with.

People just need to get over it and accept it, or ignore it and substitute their own reality. It literally doesn’t matter which you choose.

If the publishers want to reinvent the character or take it in some really different direction, it’s up to them to do so in a way that brings the bulk of the fanbase along, or to be willing to leave a chunk of the fans behind. Either way, it’s fine.

Just do a good job with it.