As we prepare our minds to be blown by the awesome that is The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia that hits shelves next Tuesday Jan. 29th we wanted to share some love from Zelda fans who are just excited as the rest of about Zelda and what Nintendo's franchise has meant to them through their lives. This week we hear from Helena Jidborg Alexander who is also a writer for her own blog Hyperism and Three if by Space. 

The Magical Timeline of Zelda

You know how people like to tell you they know exactly what they were doing when JFK/Elvis/John Lennon died? Well, in some funny reverse order, I look at Zelda games and can tell you exactly what I was doing when they came out. In 1987 I got an 8-bit Nintendo for my tenth birthday. My dad, being a bit of a tech geek, got into it just as much as I did. One day he came home with a copy of The Legend of Zelda and we didn’t leave the TV for ages. My dad would sit and watch me playing whilst drawing maps of Hyrule, trying to make sense of this wonderful world. Quite often I would hear him starting to snore whilst I was playing. I guess I wasn’t that fast at making my way through the dungeons. In fact, I played and played, but we never managed to find the last dungeon.

The following year, The Adventure of Link came out. This was the first and only game I ever preordered, and, boys and girls, this was before the Internet, so you actually had to go to the shop and give them a down payment for it. It cost five hundred Swedish kronor (around seventy-five US dollars), which I had to save up for ages for. I was eleven years old. This time around I sat for hours playing with my friends, instead of my dad. I also remember reading Link and Zelda comics in the Swedish Nintendo magazine. It was confusing to understand the story line, though; I just couldn’t understand how Zelda was now asleep, but it wasn’t really the same Zelda. I think that confused feeling stayed with me through all the other games.

In the car driving through Germany on the way to a holiday in Austria in 1990, I sat the whole way playing my Zelda Game & Watch game. It kept me entertained for many boring hours on the autobahn.

In 1993, my dad passed away in November, and on New Year’s Eve, I dug out The Legend of Zelda again and played it with my best friend, and while she was on the phone arguing with her mum, I completed the game, thinking my dad would have been very pleased.

In 1995, a bit late to the party, I bought my SNES and of course, with that, Link’s Awakening. I remember one of my friends and I played it nonstop for a whole week at my house during a school holiday while my mum was away. Just the two of us, Link, Zelda, and probably a bunch of unhealthy food.

Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask were played in the rented apartment I had moved into with my boyfriend in London. I was working shift work back then, and we used to sit up to the early hours of the morning playing on our Nintendo 64.

I am ashamed to admit I never got The Wind Waker, even though I had a GameCube. I guess I was just a bit put off by its looks.

Twilight Princess was played in our first house, bought in 2007, and many silly dances were done to the Malo Mart song!

Last weekend we sat down to play Skyward Sword with our four-year-old son. I am now thirty-five years old. I have been playing Zelda games for twenty-five years. It is amazing, really.

As he was running around in Skyloft, I started talking to my husband about how confusing the timelines of all the Zelda games are; you get the feeling you are just playing the same game over and over again, with Link and Zelda reincarnated with different concepts in different times. I drifted away from the game and started reading about it on Wikipedia, but to be honest it still didn’t make much more sense to me. So I, for one, am looking forward to the Hyrule Historia book, because it does feel rather annoying to have been playing these games for twenty-five years and still be very confused as to what is really what!

-Helena Jidborg Alexander