April 13th 1992 celebrates the 30th anniversary of one of the most significant and impactful games of all time. If you ask me, I’d say it’s the greatest game of all time, period, and plenty of people agree. This post is a love letter to my favorite video game ever: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
The Game that Ignited an Imagination
A Trip to California
Let me tell you a dumb story. When I was quite young, my mother went away to visit a friend in California, meaning my father was in charge for about a week. Since he worked long hours and often worked on-call in those days, he decided to ask a co-worker to borrow some Super Nintendo games to give us something to do while he was gone (my brother was old enough to babysit my sister and me). I’m sure neither my dad nor his co-worker had any idea how impactful this decision would be, but one of the games my dad borrowed was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
Too Young to Play
As a youngest child, I had a sort of complex about video games at that time. I always assumed they were too difficult, too complicated, and too intense for someone my age to actually play. It was a big hobby of mine to watch other people play games though, and watching my brother play Zelda was something else. We had never seen nor heard of Zelda before. A Donkey Kong and Mario family we had always been, so seeing a game with knights, swords, magic, and boomerangs blew my brains right out of my head. I may not have picked up the controller, but I watched with rapt attention.
Against Indominable Odds
My strongest memory from my brother’s first playthrough of the game was when he journeyed into the dark caves of Death Mountain and emerged to the falling rocks at the summit. Words may be my strong suit, but I don’t know how to convey with a keyboard the intensity of emotion and significance that every new discovery in this game had on me.
A Storm of Emotion
It seemed unimaginable that someone would have to plunge into the darkest depths with nothing but a little lantern and sidestep bottomless holes in a video game. I felt such strong fear, panic, and anxiety as my brother’s little green avatar stumbled about. Like a revelation, the end of the tunnel came, and what was he greeted with? Giant tumbling green boulders. He dodged and recovered from hits like a hero. Imagine my visceral dread when later on, when link, guided by my brother, traveled into the monstrous dark world and a beast showed up that could eat shields.
Link picked up little bottles found in the grass or in bushes that gave him the magical energy to use terrific items like rods that shot fire and ice, and gold medallions that could shake the whole world with their spells. It transformed the way I saw everything around me. I wanted magic in my life. I wanted a sword and shield, I wanted to fight monsters and wield phenomenal artifacts.
But I couldn’t.
Not only was I too afraid to pick up the controller, swords were dangerous, and despite my siblings’ joking efforts to convince me otherwise, magic wasn’t real. As big and moving as the emotions this game stirred up in me were, they ended as soon as the little purple switch on the SNES was pulled down, and the screen turned to black. All I had were memories, and my imagination.
A Mind on Fire
But everything changed. My mind was on fire. All forms of playing pretend were dedicated to chasing that high a 16-bit video game gave me. Spacing out to think about the game was my primary objective throughout grade school. Nothing could compare. The sights, the sounds, the experience of Zelda consumed me, and it would not end. Even now, in 2022, my arm hairs still prickle at the thought of the childlike wonder that one game has always held for me.
Sure, the cool technology of Star Trek and space magic of Star Wars had captured my imagination before, but no single piece of entertainment had ever, or has ever transformed my life like A Link to the Past did, and in many ways, still does.
The Continuing Merits of A Link to the Past
I will continue to preach the value of playing this game, even 30 years later. So much time has passed, and technology has rewritten how we look at video games several times over, but A Link to the Past is such a classic people still stream it and record “Let’s plays” of it today. A few of my friends get together on a yearly basis and play through the game. It never feels old, even when we play it with an original cartridge and Super Nintendo game console.
Internet comedian, animator, and co-creator of Game Grumps, Arin “Egoraptor” Hanson had a lot of good and a lot of controversial things to say about this game, especially when compared to the next title in the series, Ocarina of Time. I’ll LINK that here. 😂
A lot of People consider Ocarina of Time the greatest game of all time, but a lot of the structure and gameplay elements that defined it were 3-dimensional adaptations of the 2-dimensional Link to the Past. Collecting 3 artifacts (one green, one blue, one red,) to retrieve the Master Sword, then time travel to an apocalyptic version of the world you once knew to collect 7 more special artifacts which help you gain access to an enormous tower, where you fight a dark wizard that turns into the pig-beast Gannon… sounds familiar, doesn’t it? How about magic boots and gauntlets? How about different colored clothes? Great fairies giving you special boons? Death Mountain, Kakariko Village, the Zora, the Gorons? What about a round, blue musical instrument you play music on? A lot of the most iconic music in Ocarina appeared in A Link to the Past first. Many of these themes, names, songs, and items became staples to the series and that whole gameplay formula didn’t really get shaken up until Breath of the Wild.
For a top-down adventure game, the combat is more nuanced than you might think for a SNES game. Positioning, timing, item choice, and group fighting tactics were essential. Dungeon layouts were reliably challenging, making every heart piece and upgrade feel like a huge blessing. Enemies were varied, and you could take them on in so many different ways. Discovering which items to use on which enemies is a process I still haven’t explored to its fullest extent, these many years and playthroughs since.
Story-wise, it’s still a SNES game that didn’t try to overburden players with dialogue (like some Final Fantasy games did at the time), but it had depth and planted little seeds of lore that the latest games in the series are still exploring.
The sprite work is great, the music rich and immersive, the sound design top-notch for the time, and it always felt like there were more secrets, giving it incredible replay value. The puzzles were unique, mind-bending, and difficult, but almost always self-motivating. Every gameplay idea was given as a seed that grew over time, culminating in one of the most challenging iterations of Gannon’s tower at the end of the game.
No game is perfect, except maybe Tetris. A Link to the Past has bugs, errors, and the occasional unfair enemy lineup or puzzle, but on the whole, it’s a solid game. You couldn’t just brute force your way through the game, and exploration, innovation, and lateral thinking were rewarded. That’s how you make a game. If you haven’t played it, please, give The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past a try. If you have a Nintendo Switch and the basic tier of Nintendo Switch Online, you can play it right now with ease.
This Game Helped me Write a Book
I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t played A Link to the Past. It created an undying passion for fantasy in not only video games, but also television shows, movies, and books. I’ve been writing stories since I was about the same age as when I first encountered the game, and that passion never died out either.
In 2020, I released Withered Kingdom through Kindle Direct Publishing as an ebook. Last year, I turned it into a paperback, and this year, it will be a hardcover and maybe even an audiobook. For now though, I hereby invite you to support this blog and the dreams of an independent author by buying my book.
If you don’t have the money to spare, you can still support my book by sharing this post on your social media pages. I am active on all of the outlets below, and every like, comment, share, retweet, follow, and other interaction helps boost my writing and lets more people know about my book. It’s not based on Zelda, but it is an epic fantasy that has been brewing in my mind the majority of my life.
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The Phyronian Chronicle 
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