In the days before Christmas ‘98, after much effort and many calls, my Mum managed to find the last copy of Ocarina of Time in the Birmingham Toys R Us. Condolences to those who missed out, but my Mum was always going to get it. When she really wants something, the world just bends to suit.
Black box, gold lettering, a sleepy Link in an enchanted forest, and permission for me, my brother, and cousin to play on the front room TV all of Christmas day (which felt extra long in that childhood slowtime way). I’ve been Zelda-pilled since, and could chart my growth against releases like height lines on a wall, keeping my inner Kokiri child alive.
Zelda is a home note, heroic and true in this life of loving games – playing, reading, discussing, sometimes writing. And so much of it enabled by a supportive Mum who often called a Game Boy a ‘Playboy’.
You might know about the treat in the credits of Skyward Sword, a sequence showing Not-Princess Zelda’s unseen parallel adventure that had been happening alongside and in between Link’s. Today is Mother’s Day in the UK, but for you, it could be someone else. Either way, it’s nice to think of The Legend of The Legends, who bought us Zelda and other games.
Of course, in my Mum’s adventure, there’d be that Ocarina of Time find, but also so many other instances of her using old school skills to tap into strange markets, hidden from the reach of a Google search.
Sometimes this results in absurd flight deals to Sharm El-Sheikh from Pakistani gentlemen who call themselves Jordan, ringing from websites that look like they were made in GeoCities (thanks, Jordan!). At others, it’d result in a surprise OG Xbox she’d persuaded a nice man in Currys to come with a fridge, or something? Once, Mum secretly enlisted my friend from Manchester to source a PS5 when no one else could and drive it to Birmingham without me knowing in time for a birthday surprise (thanks, Mozo!).
Long, long before that, she asked a kind colleague at South Birmingham College to borrow one of the Dell desktops for our house — home turf! — which was beyond exciting and initially felt as surreal as finding a computer in the park. Then came those innocent digital thrills of just playing around in Windows, a thing you could click and change and do, with hypnotic screensavers of endlessly spreading coloured pipes, and the self-expression of choosing your desktop background.
Later, when we had our own computer, Mum humoured her eldest’s (that’s me) intense sense of importance around getting a horned monitor cover that made the screen look like the head of a cow. Of course.
How deep goes the well of a parent’s patience! How large the pool of their interest-feigning faces! Mum was endlessly bugged to come in and witness some unintelligible awesome gaming moment, as the official audience of all developments of anything ever. I remember my first time playing GoldenEye and I couldn’t even see the pixels (thanks, N64 bilinear filtering!), which obviously meant her having to come into the room to watch me repeatedly run into the walls in Facility and express encouraging agreement at how ‘realistic’ this looked.
Technology caught up, mind. When Mum was watching HBO’s The Last of Us, she’d be so eager for the next instalments that weren’t released, I’d show her longplays of the game instead. I’m still chuffed that she said, “Omar, I like this better.”
Of course, there were also disagreements, and new, strange versions of age-old familial frictions.
I abused the hallowed respect for undisturbed toilet time to play Pokémon Red at night for stretches long enough my legs would go numb, but shouting “I’m constipated!” to a disbelieving Mum at midnight.
Or the constantly abused “I’m Nearly At A Save Point!” plea for grace (the second or third of the evening), before that count down with one finger on a power button, and the genuine shock when she’d actually press it even though I guiltily knew I’d already saved. (Soz, Mum!)
Once, one of the students who rented our spare room dobbed me in for playing Duke Nukem 3D‘s Red Light District level, with its shake it baby nipple-pixels that now seem Renaissance quaint (not to my Mum, she was apopleptic).
And sometimes, some sadness. I started to cry when I thought I’d broken my uncle’s Mega Drive II by over-pressing the pill-shaped power and reset buttons. The relief at the return of the glinting Sega logo felt like seeing the flicker of life on a cardiac flatline; Mum had sorted it. Much later, at my grandmother’s house, us kids were allowed to huddle around and play the Mega Drive together in the living room TV in its ornate wooden cabinet, not really understanding the mood or that granddad (burrah-dadee) had died.
Imagine if we could see a real-world Hero’s Path of all those extra journeys made by our single Mum, working so hard to still give her boys “the best”. Dropping me off at Hass’ house when he first got Mario Tennis, or the evening expedition to the guy I’d found in the Bargain Pages who was selling a cheap PC joystick (and a flight game with it so that I could actually use it), or those urgent, last-minute drives to the newsagents before they changed to the new issue of Sonic the Comic, or N64 Magazine.
Anyway, Zelda is 40 years old, and I’m not far off. Even after all these years, if I ever actually ask my Mum her opinion of Zelda, she always says she loves ‘the colours’. But that doesn’t capture the countless instances of her love around my lifelong hobby, not for the games themselves, but for the ways they gave me joy. Maybe this will give her some, too.
And I’ll get lilies as a backup.
Who gave you your first Zelda game?
