Game Facts
Game Facts Podcast
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)
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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)

To defeat Ganon, you have to transgress

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
by Nintendo
Released on Nintendo Switch Online in 2019

East of Broad on Lombard Street, it’s 2001, and I am eighteen years old, stumbling home from some UArts party, unconscionably fucked up, the night already half-forgotten. Since moving to Philly, I’ve barely ventured past the four-block radius around my dorm on 15th and Pine. Finding my way back right now is a dodgy proposition, but I see the bodega on the corner of 13th, the one with the white, arched entranceway, and know I’m at least headed in the right direction. 

West of Broad on Lombard Street, it’s 2019, and I am thirty-six years old, locking my bike in front of Jess’s apartment building. Her one-bedroom is less than half the size of her old place in Mantua, and her cat, stressed by the cramped quarters, won’t stop peeing on the furniture. But the apartment has its charm. I sleep over a lot, and it feels like a practice run for domesticity. We brush our teeth together in the green-tiled bathroom. We learn each other’s peanut butter preferences and favorite snacks. I keep a spare change of clothes and a dose of psych meds in her bedroom.  

Driving south on Broad, it’s 2022, and I am thirty-nine years old, on my way to pick up Jess from work. I don’t like taking the freeway to West Philly anymore, so I drive us home through the city. New construction flanks packed restaurants. Hundred-year-old row homes come down for the boxy abominations I first saw spring up in DC fifteen years ago, as so many transplants like me moved to and gentrified the fuck out of Columbia Heights and surrounding environs. Now I live in Overbrook, next to a vacant house that might never be rehabbed, loyal to the neighborhood but complicit in its change. 

So much of my writing pits the past against the present, and I never know which side I’m on. It’s not about age, exactly. I fret about losing time more than growing older; I mourn missed opportunities more than my youth. 

With enough time, the past can feel like an alternate reality, a reflection of the present in a cracked, dirty mirror. Or vice versa, I guess. Maybe that’s what makes memoir writing so alluring: the traversal between a lost then and self-reflective now. It’s the disruption of that binary that remixes time and generates story. What’s fascinating about The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past isn’t that you can move between parallel worlds–it’s that you must. To defeat Ganon, you have to transgress.

So let’s jump back:

In West Chester, PA, it’s 2003, and I am twenty years old, playing A Link to the Past on my college roommate’s SNES. My untreated bipolar disorder is running roughshod over my life. Both my bands are on the verge of breaking up. But for now it’s okay, because I have a six-pack of Hop Devil and a cheese pizza, and I just found the first portal to the Dark World.

In Pennsport, South Philadelphia, it’s 2017, and I am thirty-four years old, playing my new Super Nintendo Classic, the miniature reissue with a few dozen preloaded games. I grew up in a Sega household, and wandering around Kakariko Village is giving me so much nostalgic pleasure and comfort while my dysphoria pushes me closer toward depression, divorce, and transition. 

In Overbrook, West Philadelphia, it’s 2022, and I am thirty-nine years old, feeling both accomplished and underwhelmed after finishing A Link to the Past on my Switch Lite. The cushions on our sectional couch are starting to sag. The world outside collapses. In the end, all you needed to save Hyrule was some arcane relic and one pure wish. But the pleasure of the game was in the fight. 

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Game Facts
Game Facts Podcast
Sasha talks about her middle-aged bewilderment from a QTPOC perspective. And video games, kind of
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