reading with zelda
Oct. 8th, 2025 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f0rrestTo hear my dad tell it, I learned to read by playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or so the legend goes.
I must have been like seven or eight or something. I have a hard time remembering that far back, but things come to me in flashes, like a movie montage of disparate events that all occurred somewhere between 1997 and 2000, playing to the background music of whatever my dad was listening to on 99X in his jellybean-shaped Ford Taurus. Stone Temple Pilots, Matchbox Twenty, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” Spin Doctors, “Even Flow,” that sort of stuff. Climbing on top of the slides at the playground at the park where my sister played softball while a wicked sunset was going on so everything was dragonfruit pink and cobalt blue and on fire. Time felt different, longer, more mysterious, mystical almost. My parents were still married. “Name” by The Goo Goo Dolls played on MTV a lot. Happy Meals cost like $1.50 and came with high-quality Power Rangers action figures with accessories. The food tasted better. I had a frankly embarrassing haircut that involved a bowl and kid-safe scissors. I would play Power Rangers out in the field by the haunted house with the other suburb kids. Space Jam featuring basketball legend Michael Jordan was heavily advertised, I remember. Special Ed classes and frequent parent-teacher conferences. Pokemon cards and fucking Crazy Bones, if you remember those. After-school programs. That one time I drank a whole gel pen and the teacher had to call poison control. I remember seeing a movie in the theater was like a bona fide special event and the next two months were colored by that movie as if everything in your life took on some aspect of that movie. PE teachers played “Cotton Eye Joe” at max volume over the gym loudspeaker while kids pelted each other with hard foam balls. Blue’s Clues in the mornings, Dexter’s Lab and Johnny Bravo and Powerpuff Girls in the evenings. I’d see scary witch faces in the darkness behind my eyelids at night, so I’d climb out of bed and go sleep in my sister’s room, which she hated. I would get like two dollars a week for allowance and thought that was a lot of money and spent that money at the comic book store in the strip mall that I could walk to through the backwoods area of my neighborhood, and my parents were totally fine with that for some reason. I couldn't read the comic books but loved the artwork. My dad made me play every little league sport imaginable even though I had no interest or aptitude in sports, and one time in the outfield when I was playing baseball a pop fly literally crash-landed into my skull and knocked me out for a good whole minute, and when I came to and my dad asked me, “Son, what were you doing out there, didn’t you see the ball, we were all shouting at you,” I simply responded, “I’m sorry, Dad, I was thinking about Zelda.”
I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was around this same epoch of my youth, at the Media Play, which was a few miles from my home, located in this giant strip mall near the movie theater. Media Play was this big white stucco warehouse-type building, a little smaller than a Walmart almost, with the words MEDIA PLAY in massive red LED channel letters high above the pneumatic double doors, and between MEDIA and PLAY was an image of the store mascot, a face made from an open green book with eyeballs made from a pair of red musical eighth notes, which looked very cubist and robotic. I must have been seven or eight or nine or something. My dad had taken my sister and me to Media Play to buy a new video game console because we had been bugging him for months to get one. The inside of the store was massive, with rows of ground-level shelf wiring for all sorts of entertainment, electronic or otherwise, like CDs and cassettes and VHS tapes and video games and books and even manga, and I remember the ceiling of the store was like this exposed web of steel beams on which hung fluorescent tubes that bathed the whole store in preternatural white light. My dad gave my sister and me the choice between the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. My sister was dead set on a PlayStation because this boy she hung out with in the neighborhood had Need for Speed II, and they would play it all the time, and she wanted to like fit in or whatever. But I wasn’t sure which console I wanted. The console we had back at home was the Sega Genesis, and I mostly played Sonic the Hedgehog and the 6-Pak on it, and I wanted something like that, and for some reason I had it in my head that the PlayStation was more akin to the Sega Genesis than the Nintendo 64 was, so I was leaning PlayStation. But at some point in the decision-making process, I had wandered off and ended up in the Nintendo section, which actually had its own section for some reason, and in that section, I came across a display cabinet that changed my life.
The cabinet itself is hazy in my memory, but I remember it was dark, woody almost, with curly gold lettering running along the thick wooden side bezels, and it had a large CRT monitor inlaid in the upper portion, and above that, situated on the very top of the cabinet itself, was this golden triangle thing, and the cabinet was double my prepubescent height, so I had to tilt my head pretty much skyward to see the thing in full. There was a single three-pronged controller poking out of the wood, about chin level with my adolescent self. The monitor was playing a scene of a green-clothed man wearing what looked like an elf’s hat, riding a horse through a twilit field while a huge full moon hung in the background. Back then, I wasn’t very attuned to music, but even then I could tell that the cabinet was emitting some of the most beautiful noises I would ever hear in my life. The soothing sounds of synthesized harp arpeggios over a flute melody that sounded like some sort of majestic owl holding its hoots for as long as possible over the ambient noise of hooves clomping and water flowing in a tranquil stream, all calling out to me. I stood there for a few minutes, totally entranced, just watching the green man ride his horse through that twilit field, until eventually I lifted my arms skyward, gripped the controller with both hands, lifted my head up over the thing so I could see the buttons, and pressed down on the big red start button, at which point a dark harmonious jingle sounded and the monitor switched to demo scenes of the same green-clothed man fighting lizard warriors and ghosts and giant super bosses, and then it showed the kid version of that man doing very similar things, and I was totally enthralled by this and at that moment knew I absolutely needed whatever this game was in my life, so when the Nintendo 64 logo popped up on the screen alongside the name of the game, which I couldn’t actually read because I had been diagnosed with dyslexia and had problems with phonetics and couldn’t actually read, but I knew my console-branding logos very well because I loved video games, I quickly released the controller and ran off through the store to find my dad.
When I found my dad, I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him to the magical cabinet I had found and then said, “I want this, I want this, I want this,” over and over until my dad, who was actually a big Mario fan, having played the original games in college obsessively, nodded and turned to my sister, who was arms-crossed and full of blossoming teenage angst, and then he, my dad, asked her what she thought, and at first she disagreed until both my dad and I wore her down, at which point she sort of threw up her hands and said something like, “Whatever,” so my dad flagged down an employee, asked the employee to “get one of those Nintendos and a copy of whatever that game is in the wooden display kiosk my son keeps going on about and a copy of Mario 64 and that Mario racing one too,” the latter of which my sister had picked out, and about an hour later we were back home in front of the old boob tube hooking up the old yellow, white, and red.
Days turned into weeks, and I was hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I played it obsessively whenever my dad wasn’t playing Mario 64 and my sister wasn’t playing Mario Kart. The game blew my little adolescent mind. I got lost in the world of Hyrule, which to little seven-or-eight-or-nine-year-old me felt like a real place with its realistic graphics and its dynamic world and its day-night system and its massive open areas to explore. I skipped all the text because I couldn’t read, but through sheer perseverance and some luck, I managed to complete the Deku Tree and Dodongo Cavern dungeons. I related to the main character, Link, who was like seven or eight or nine himself, and whenever I couldn’t play the game, I was often pretending to be Link, swinging around whatever long sword-like objects I could find, imitating Link’s horizontal sword slashes and vertical sword slashes and that iconic hi-yah jump-slash attack, making the noises and everything. But I couldn’t read, so at a certain point, I was stuck. Weeks turned into months and now my daily play sessions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time consisted of wandering around Hyrule Field, defeating skeletons and blowing up stuff, doing the same thing over and over, which kept me entertained for a little while, but eventually I grew confused because I couldn’t figure out where to go next because I couldn’t read, and eventually that confusion turned into boredom, and eventually I slowly lost interest in the game.
Back then, my parents would work with me daily, trying to help me learn how to read better. I could read a little bit, but certainly not at the reading level of the average kid my age. Back then, reading simply didn’t interest me, and if something didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, but if something did interest me, I would hyper-fixate on that thing until I wore it out. I was in special education classes for this very reason. Whenever my parents would sit down to teach me how to read better by practicing phonetics and reading me simple books and sounding things out, I would pretty much immediately zone out, and then my attention would wander to something that did interest me, like my action figures or my Legos or my video games, at which point my parents would give up for the day, letting me do my own thing because I was quite emotional as a child and would literally scream my head off if I was forced to do something I didn’t want to do. Of course, my parents would try to help me with reading the next day, but the same thing would happen, so they’d give up and try again the next day, and so on.
To hear my dad tell it, at a certain point, after so many failed attempts at teaching me how to read better, he became discouraged and was starting to believe that I had a serious incurable mental problem and like “why even try with the boy?”
That was until one day when I was in the living room sitting on the carpet in front of the old boob tube, wide-eyed and transfixed by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when my dad sat down next to me on the carpet and asked what I was doing. I said I was playing Zelda. He said something like, “I can see that, but what are you doing, you know, in the game?” And I said something like, “I’m fighting skeletons.” And he said, noticing that I would fight skeletons a lot when I played Zelda, “Is that all you do in this game, fight skeletons?” And I said, “No, there’s lots of stuff to do, I just don’t know how.” And he said, “What do you mean, you don’t know how?” And that’s when I told him I was stuck. I told him I beat the big spider in the tree and the giant lizard in the cave and now I was stuck. I told him I didn’t know what to do. He just nodded and watched as I vanquished skeletons until the sun rose over Hyrule and there were no more skeletons to vanquish, at which point I was just wandering Link all over Hyrule Field, not really doing anything, until Navi, Link’s little fairy guide, said HEY LISTEN and pulled me into a dialogue with her. Naturally, I skipped all of Navi’s text and then kept wandering around until a few seconds later when Navi said HEY LISTEN again and pulled me into yet another dialogue, which I also skipped, but this time my dad, who was curiously watching me at this point, said, “What did she say? Maybe she's telling you what to do.”
So I turned to my dad and said rather pathetically, “I don’t know, Dad, I can’t read it.”
He smiled softly and said, “But you want to beat the game, right?”
So I said, “Yeah, I do, I want to get all the stuff and beat the game.”
And just then, Navi said HEY LISTEN again, and the text box was back up on the screen. I went to skip the text with the A button, but my dad placed his hand on mine, which froze me for a second, and then he turned to the screen and, presumably reading the text in his head, said, “Yep, she’s telling you what you need to do.”
So I started getting excited. “Tell me, tell me. What does she say?”
But my dad only shook his head, then he said, with that soft smile on his face, “Try sounding it out.”
And about a month later, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
I must have been like seven or eight or something. I have a hard time remembering that far back, but things come to me in flashes, like a movie montage of disparate events that all occurred somewhere between 1997 and 2000, playing to the background music of whatever my dad was listening to on 99X in his jellybean-shaped Ford Taurus. Stone Temple Pilots, Matchbox Twenty, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” Spin Doctors, “Even Flow,” that sort of stuff. Climbing on top of the slides at the playground at the park where my sister played softball while a wicked sunset was going on so everything was dragonfruit pink and cobalt blue and on fire. Time felt different, longer, more mysterious, mystical almost. My parents were still married. “Name” by The Goo Goo Dolls played on MTV a lot. Happy Meals cost like $1.50 and came with high-quality Power Rangers action figures with accessories. The food tasted better. I had a frankly embarrassing haircut that involved a bowl and kid-safe scissors. I would play Power Rangers out in the field by the haunted house with the other suburb kids. Space Jam featuring basketball legend Michael Jordan was heavily advertised, I remember. Special Ed classes and frequent parent-teacher conferences. Pokemon cards and fucking Crazy Bones, if you remember those. After-school programs. That one time I drank a whole gel pen and the teacher had to call poison control. I remember seeing a movie in the theater was like a bona fide special event and the next two months were colored by that movie as if everything in your life took on some aspect of that movie. PE teachers played “Cotton Eye Joe” at max volume over the gym loudspeaker while kids pelted each other with hard foam balls. Blue’s Clues in the mornings, Dexter’s Lab and Johnny Bravo and Powerpuff Girls in the evenings. I’d see scary witch faces in the darkness behind my eyelids at night, so I’d climb out of bed and go sleep in my sister’s room, which she hated. I would get like two dollars a week for allowance and thought that was a lot of money and spent that money at the comic book store in the strip mall that I could walk to through the backwoods area of my neighborhood, and my parents were totally fine with that for some reason. I couldn't read the comic books but loved the artwork. My dad made me play every little league sport imaginable even though I had no interest or aptitude in sports, and one time in the outfield when I was playing baseball a pop fly literally crash-landed into my skull and knocked me out for a good whole minute, and when I came to and my dad asked me, “Son, what were you doing out there, didn’t you see the ball, we were all shouting at you,” I simply responded, “I’m sorry, Dad, I was thinking about Zelda.”
I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was around this same epoch of my youth, at the Media Play, which was a few miles from my home, located in this giant strip mall near the movie theater. Media Play was this big white stucco warehouse-type building, a little smaller than a Walmart almost, with the words MEDIA PLAY in massive red LED channel letters high above the pneumatic double doors, and between MEDIA and PLAY was an image of the store mascot, a face made from an open green book with eyeballs made from a pair of red musical eighth notes, which looked very cubist and robotic. I must have been seven or eight or nine or something. My dad had taken my sister and me to Media Play to buy a new video game console because we had been bugging him for months to get one. The inside of the store was massive, with rows of ground-level shelf wiring for all sorts of entertainment, electronic or otherwise, like CDs and cassettes and VHS tapes and video games and books and even manga, and I remember the ceiling of the store was like this exposed web of steel beams on which hung fluorescent tubes that bathed the whole store in preternatural white light. My dad gave my sister and me the choice between the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. My sister was dead set on a PlayStation because this boy she hung out with in the neighborhood had Need for Speed II, and they would play it all the time, and she wanted to like fit in or whatever. But I wasn’t sure which console I wanted. The console we had back at home was the Sega Genesis, and I mostly played Sonic the Hedgehog and the 6-Pak on it, and I wanted something like that, and for some reason I had it in my head that the PlayStation was more akin to the Sega Genesis than the Nintendo 64 was, so I was leaning PlayStation. But at some point in the decision-making process, I had wandered off and ended up in the Nintendo section, which actually had its own section for some reason, and in that section, I came across a display cabinet that changed my life.
The cabinet itself is hazy in my memory, but I remember it was dark, woody almost, with curly gold lettering running along the thick wooden side bezels, and it had a large CRT monitor inlaid in the upper portion, and above that, situated on the very top of the cabinet itself, was this golden triangle thing, and the cabinet was double my prepubescent height, so I had to tilt my head pretty much skyward to see the thing in full. There was a single three-pronged controller poking out of the wood, about chin level with my adolescent self. The monitor was playing a scene of a green-clothed man wearing what looked like an elf’s hat, riding a horse through a twilit field while a huge full moon hung in the background. Back then, I wasn’t very attuned to music, but even then I could tell that the cabinet was emitting some of the most beautiful noises I would ever hear in my life. The soothing sounds of synthesized harp arpeggios over a flute melody that sounded like some sort of majestic owl holding its hoots for as long as possible over the ambient noise of hooves clomping and water flowing in a tranquil stream, all calling out to me. I stood there for a few minutes, totally entranced, just watching the green man ride his horse through that twilit field, until eventually I lifted my arms skyward, gripped the controller with both hands, lifted my head up over the thing so I could see the buttons, and pressed down on the big red start button, at which point a dark harmonious jingle sounded and the monitor switched to demo scenes of the same green-clothed man fighting lizard warriors and ghosts and giant super bosses, and then it showed the kid version of that man doing very similar things, and I was totally enthralled by this and at that moment knew I absolutely needed whatever this game was in my life, so when the Nintendo 64 logo popped up on the screen alongside the name of the game, which I couldn’t actually read because I had been diagnosed with dyslexia and had problems with phonetics and couldn’t actually read, but I knew my console-branding logos very well because I loved video games, I quickly released the controller and ran off through the store to find my dad.
When I found my dad, I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him to the magical cabinet I had found and then said, “I want this, I want this, I want this,” over and over until my dad, who was actually a big Mario fan, having played the original games in college obsessively, nodded and turned to my sister, who was arms-crossed and full of blossoming teenage angst, and then he, my dad, asked her what she thought, and at first she disagreed until both my dad and I wore her down, at which point she sort of threw up her hands and said something like, “Whatever,” so my dad flagged down an employee, asked the employee to “get one of those Nintendos and a copy of whatever that game is in the wooden display kiosk my son keeps going on about and a copy of Mario 64 and that Mario racing one too,” the latter of which my sister had picked out, and about an hour later we were back home in front of the old boob tube hooking up the old yellow, white, and red.
Days turned into weeks, and I was hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I played it obsessively whenever my dad wasn’t playing Mario 64 and my sister wasn’t playing Mario Kart. The game blew my little adolescent mind. I got lost in the world of Hyrule, which to little seven-or-eight-or-nine-year-old me felt like a real place with its realistic graphics and its dynamic world and its day-night system and its massive open areas to explore. I skipped all the text because I couldn’t read, but through sheer perseverance and some luck, I managed to complete the Deku Tree and Dodongo Cavern dungeons. I related to the main character, Link, who was like seven or eight or nine himself, and whenever I couldn’t play the game, I was often pretending to be Link, swinging around whatever long sword-like objects I could find, imitating Link’s horizontal sword slashes and vertical sword slashes and that iconic hi-yah jump-slash attack, making the noises and everything. But I couldn’t read, so at a certain point, I was stuck. Weeks turned into months and now my daily play sessions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time consisted of wandering around Hyrule Field, defeating skeletons and blowing up stuff, doing the same thing over and over, which kept me entertained for a little while, but eventually I grew confused because I couldn’t figure out where to go next because I couldn’t read, and eventually that confusion turned into boredom, and eventually I slowly lost interest in the game.
Back then, my parents would work with me daily, trying to help me learn how to read better. I could read a little bit, but certainly not at the reading level of the average kid my age. Back then, reading simply didn’t interest me, and if something didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, but if something did interest me, I would hyper-fixate on that thing until I wore it out. I was in special education classes for this very reason. Whenever my parents would sit down to teach me how to read better by practicing phonetics and reading me simple books and sounding things out, I would pretty much immediately zone out, and then my attention would wander to something that did interest me, like my action figures or my Legos or my video games, at which point my parents would give up for the day, letting me do my own thing because I was quite emotional as a child and would literally scream my head off if I was forced to do something I didn’t want to do. Of course, my parents would try to help me with reading the next day, but the same thing would happen, so they’d give up and try again the next day, and so on.
To hear my dad tell it, at a certain point, after so many failed attempts at teaching me how to read better, he became discouraged and was starting to believe that I had a serious incurable mental problem and like “why even try with the boy?”
That was until one day when I was in the living room sitting on the carpet in front of the old boob tube, wide-eyed and transfixed by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when my dad sat down next to me on the carpet and asked what I was doing. I said I was playing Zelda. He said something like, “I can see that, but what are you doing, you know, in the game?” And I said something like, “I’m fighting skeletons.” And he said, noticing that I would fight skeletons a lot when I played Zelda, “Is that all you do in this game, fight skeletons?” And I said, “No, there’s lots of stuff to do, I just don’t know how.” And he said, “What do you mean, you don’t know how?” And that’s when I told him I was stuck. I told him I beat the big spider in the tree and the giant lizard in the cave and now I was stuck. I told him I didn’t know what to do. He just nodded and watched as I vanquished skeletons until the sun rose over Hyrule and there were no more skeletons to vanquish, at which point I was just wandering Link all over Hyrule Field, not really doing anything, until Navi, Link’s little fairy guide, said HEY LISTEN and pulled me into a dialogue with her. Naturally, I skipped all of Navi’s text and then kept wandering around until a few seconds later when Navi said HEY LISTEN again and pulled me into yet another dialogue, which I also skipped, but this time my dad, who was curiously watching me at this point, said, “What did she say? Maybe she's telling you what to do.”
So I turned to my dad and said rather pathetically, “I don’t know, Dad, I can’t read it.”
He smiled softly and said, “But you want to beat the game, right?”
So I said, “Yeah, I do, I want to get all the stuff and beat the game.”
And just then, Navi said HEY LISTEN again, and the text box was back up on the screen. I went to skip the text with the A button, but my dad placed his hand on mine, which froze me for a second, and then he turned to the screen and, presumably reading the text in his head, said, “Yep, she’s telling you what you need to do.”
So I started getting excited. “Tell me, tell me. What does she say?”
But my dad only shook his head, then he said, with that soft smile on his face, “Try sounding it out.”
And about a month later, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
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Date: 2025-10-15 12:06 am (UTC)