An event requiring me to speak into a microphone and through speakers reminds me of the most terrifying encounter I’ve ever had with my own voice.
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my voice throughout my life. Mostly hate when it comes to how it’s used naturally. Whenever I hear recordings of me just talking in a non-performance-type setting, I cringe. It sounds too high and pinched, and I uptalk like a Valley Girl.
Plus, I can hear these unnecessary ironic emphases that I put into certain words when I’m trying too hard to make people laugh. This technique was impressed on my brain from years of hearing my father on the phone, sweet-talking a business associate or schmoozing someone who had something he needed. I always made fun of him for these phone calls behind his back, and my punishment for this insolence is to inherit every single one of his verbal mannerisms.
But he was an excellent mimic, too. He could do “voices” extremely well, and I’ve inherited that trait from him. So what I do like about my voice is its chameleon qualities. I’m good at imitating accents, picking out the idiosyncrasies of someone’s speech and repeating them. I also have the curious skill of being able to hear voice work and identify the responsible actor, even if I don’t know their names. This ability was honed by years of watching kids shows, whose rosters of voice talent are small and incestuous.
So I often feel like Peter Sellers when it comes to my voice: I’m more comfortable when I’m not Me.
Just so I’m not ending the working week on a total down note, please enjoy this workout video from the glorious, un-self-aware 1980s starring Phil Simms. This came over my transom thanks to Dan Epstein, author of the great retrospective of 1970s baseball Big Hair and Plastic Grass. I interviewed Dan on this site way back in May of last year. Why not read it, tough guy?
Though Mario remains the more beloved character, Zelda is the more enduring title, because it was a progenitor of what video games have become over the last 25 years. Consider that it was the first game that:
Allowed you to save your progress, without the need of any codes or add-ons. Games like Metroid and Kid Icarus had made you input codes to get sort-of near where you last played, but only Zelda let you pick up exactly where you left off, with exactly as much stuff as you had when you left off.
Required an enormous amount of time to complete.
Had tons of secrets and extras you had to figure out yourself. Unlike most video games of the era, it was solvable not by repetition, but creative problem solving.
Zelda wasn’t meant to be a game you played for a little bit and then put down. It was meant to be a universe you immersed yourself in, one that you had to discover for yourself. That’s why it came with a map with huge portions of it missing. (I filled in my copy as I went along, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.)
These were all revolutionary ideas for the time, and technology had just advanced to the point where such a game was possible. The original game contained a small lithium battery that allowed you to save your game (as long as you remembered to reset before turning off the NES). It brought video games out of the scrolling, Flintstone-ian universe of Super Mario Brothers and into the world we know now.
My first encounter with Zelda was this bizarre ad. I can’t say this made me want to play the game, but it did grab my attention and intrigue me, mostly because I had no idea what was going on in it. The game itself is not so much the focus as the weird antics/voice of the man in the black unitard. (The man’s name is John Kassir, best known for being the voice of The Cryptkeeper. So, yeah.)
The first time I actually played the game was at my cousin’s house, which was where I probably played every new game–be it video, board, or other–for the first time. This detail would be unremarkable except that the reason I was at my cousin’s house at this time was because we all had to go to a family funeral.
The kids were not happy about having to abandon the gaming when it was time to go to the funeral home, so we brought along Zelda’s enormous instruction manual to examine at length, trying to learn its secrets and occasionally saying the names of the enemies in the same weird voices we heard in the ad above. We were doing this at a wake as people wept and grieved, completely oblivious. I do remember feeling the occasional pang of guilt but then, ooh look, Dodongos dislike smoke!
I’ve played almost every Zelda game ever for each system Nintendo’s put out over the years. (I think of myself as a Nintendo man the way some people think of themselves as Ford or Chevy men.) And while I’ve enjoyed many of them–particularly the ones put out for Nintendo 64 like The Ocarina of Time–the original remains my favorite, and I think not just for nostalgic reasons.
Zelda is one of those rare instances where subsequent advances in graphics and technology didn’t make the fun of the original pale in comparison. In retrospect, it seems not simplistic or cartoonish, but minimalist–if you can call something that requires to much time to play minimalist. It had exactly as much detail and complication as it needed, no more, no less.
I spent hundreds of hours playing the original NES games, but Zelda is the only one of them I can imagine myself wasting so much time on now. It’s one of the few I can imagine kids nowadays playing, too, because it is one of the few that wouldn’t look paleolithic to the gamer of today.
I am also sure that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, there will be a bunch of kids saying TEKTITES at my wake. Clearly, karma demands it.
This is your FINAL REMINDER that I shall be reading tonight for the Show and Tell Show at Union Hall in Brooklyn. Be there or be elsewhere!
