A few years before I started writing about video games – I just googled it, and it would have been 2002 – I went to an exhibition at the Barbican called Game On, and something I saw there made me realise just how much video games were a thing worth writing about.
Game On was a wonderful event, the first celebration of video games in a museum setting that I ever saw. I remember all the playable stuff, the actual art for Edge 100 in a frame up on a wall, and a bunch of really odd experimental game-like things at the very end. But near the end there was also the thing that really stood out to me.
It was a wall of testimony about video games from video game players. One of them – the one I really remember – was from a young kid writing about Zelda, which would have been the Ocarina of Time, I think. They said, not quite in these words, that the game had changed their imaginative world completely. When they went out into the garden after playing, they carried a stick on their back and they knew that the stick was really a sword.
I loved that. I still do. Zelda as a force that gets inside your head and works magic. These games are filled with magical portals, aren’t they? Shimmering doors that lead to strange realms. It’s easy to forget that they’re a magical portal in their own right.
Anyway, I thought of this again this morning when I read that casting had been finalised for the leads in the new Zelda movie. I thought about it and I had one of those twinges of sadness that I’ve learned to interrogate because they’re often a suppressed belief of some kind that, on reflection, I discover that I don’t actually agree with. I’ve just read up on the casting now and the actors seem like excellent fits for the roles. I’m sure the film will be lovely. Video games moving out into the rest of the world is something I’m all in favour of. Spread the joy. So why that twinge?
I think it has something to do with Zelda, and I think it gets at a deeper belief that I’ve always had and never really explored very much. It’s the belief that, of all Nintendo games, Zelda Is Different. Hardly a complex idea, and hardly one that I’ve been able to express particularly clearly up until now. But I believe it. Zelda is different. It’s insular and personal in some strange way – personal not just to me; I mean it feels like it’s strangely personal to everyone who encounters it – and it’s odd to think of it projected on a huge screen. But why?
To approach from the angle of this new film, I was struck with a feeling: oh, so now everyone will have a fixed idea of what Zelda and Link look like. Now we’ll all know. This is an odd thing to think, of course, because we already know what they look like – we’ve played the games and they’re in the games. And yet in the games there’s this strange mutability in play. Zelda and Link look different from one game to the next. And many of the things around them are different too. There’s a core of ritual in Zelda, but there’s also a lot of reinvention: new art styles, new approaches to the setting, new lore. Lots of quite fundamental stuff resets every few outings.
All of this mutability? For me, it gives you the kid at Game On who realised a stick was a sword and that they were Link exploring Hyrule in their back garden. This shifting nature, this willingness to tweak and change and reinvent the series all around Link and Zelda, all while telling what amounts to the same story each time, creates a space wherever you find Link, a space that allows the games to offer something unique. You get a game world that is deeply, deeply known – you can tell instantly when a Zelda-alike gets a detail wrong, just as you can tell instantly when video footage of a pool table has been reversed to create a trick shot – but that world still has this imaginative, writable space in it for the player. It’s space for the player to play the games and solve the puzzles, but also to wander out into the garden afterwards and become Link. It’s very personal space, individual to each member of the Zelda audience.
Link, in a way, is a cypher: he’s youth, enthusiasm, curiosity and the eagerness to do good, and that’s kind of it? All of which makes him perfect for us to step into, even to the point of selecting a different name for them on the save screen. To see Link transformed into a movie character, to see the deep specifics of a specific actor’s face and performance, does that cut into the writable space a little? Does the concrete experience of seeing an actor in a role – along with the myriad specificities of a movie – damage the inherent flexibility of Zelda, in the same way that it can be hard to read Pride and Prejudice these days without seeing Colin Firth as Darcy? By making it all unambiguous, in the way that a lot of good movies do, do you close off a little of the space for players to become imaginative participants?
There’s at least one answer to this, and the first that comes to mind is Batman. Batman is in every kind of media, generally in multiple forms. There are Batmen out there, just as there are Supermen, and somehow none of them get the deciding vote when it comes to how your imagination sees them. Keaton, Conroy, the hulking form of the current Absolute incarnation, you still get to pick your favourite or ignore them all and create something new.
But I think there’s a difference. Characters like Batman have evolved over decades for this kind of constant recreation and reinvention across media, for this kind of imposition of new specificities, because they’re the modern relatives of the mythical pantheon. There are many Batmen in the same way that there are many versions of Zeus or Artemis. These things are meant to scatter and multiply.
Link isn’t meant to be a god, I think. And for all the changes from one Zelda to the next, he’s meant to stay the same person – because he’s meant to be us, an approachable, almost everyday figure who closes the gap between the person holding the controller and the person throwing the boomerang on screen. To give this collective us a specific face, an actor’s face? I’m sure it will work, but I still get that twinge. And I hope, on the other side of it, people still wander into the back garden now and then after playing Zelda and find a friendly tree branch that puts them in mind of a certain sword.
