Cyrillic Partners

Nintendo released “The Legend of Zelda” in 1987 with a marketing flourish that any five-year-old might appreciate: a gold cartridge casing.

I got the game for Christmas in the late eighties and remember how cool it made me feel. The other kids on my street came to my house to play it and I felt like I had friends. It later became an object lesson in childhood fickleness when those “friends” left as fast as they had come.

The game has simple rules that lead to wide array of complex outcomes. The simple version is this: your elfin character tromps through a kingdom and beats monsters to eventually save a princess. Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion of the game’s plot, history and other intricacies.

Reviewer Dave Warmington has a theory on why people like the game and it certainly rings true with me. Most games of the time had a “quest” that directed you from one point to another and required certain actions be performed to advance. The quest was what you did in the game.

But Zelda was different. It has a quest, to be sure, but it also gives the game player a lot of freedom to roam around the digital world and explore its ins and outs undirected. It felt more like play than work.

Programmers caught on and have expanded the variety of potential interactions a player may have with the virtual world of a game.

If a little freedom is a good thing, than more of it must be better…but somehow it isn’t when it comes to an environment such as Second Life: a virtual world people participate in for reasons unknown to me.

I found a service that hosted a java-based emulator of the original Legend of Zelda game. The site hosting the service has since been taken down, but not before I beat the Second Quest–a feat that any player of the game will recognize as noteworthy.

I found something interesting in the experience. I wanted more of the game. I wanted a Third Quest in the same Legend of Zelda world with new challenges, puzzles and maybe even a new map to explore. Consider it an open challenge to any programmer/gamer out there. I’d pay $75 for a Third Quest.

[Image thanks to VideoGamesBlogger.com and Wikipedia]

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