I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Zelda, unlike some people for whom it skews in pretty much just one direction. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an iconic game that cannot but recall childhood in a visceral way for a certain group of games that were born around the late seventies.
So of course I couldn’t help but love the video below. Most video game music isn’t particularly memorable, but there are a few notable exceptions, Zelda being one.
Consider the “instruments” this songs were written for: the NES could generate five channels of audio – basically five different sounds. Two square wave synths, one triangle wave, a white noise generator and something that sounds like a very primitive digital sampler. (In case you’re not a digital audio nerd, just know that’s not much to work with.) The fact that anybody was able to write something for the NES that could eventually be turned into something of this complexity I think is worth some accolades.
I’m not sure how much someone gets out of this type of thing if you weren’t a 10-year-old kid playing Zelda back in the late eighties. I still remember the first time I went to a neighbors house and saw my friend playing Zelda – it was revolutionary, immediately recognized as something new and magical. Zelda had a rich, complex narrative and a persistent avatar – these were very new ideas back in 1986, and it was one of the first times a game really surprised me. I didn’t have my own Nintendo yet, but at that point I knew I had to get one.
A pivotal moment in a young boys’ gaming life.