The other night I’m trying to get my teenager to actually go to bed—you know how that goes, suddenly they’re thirstier than a camel and need to discuss their entire life philosophy—when I catch myself staring at my N64 shelf. There they are, those two golden cartridges just sitting there catching the lamplight: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Twenty-five years later and they still look like artifacts from some gaming golden age that we’ll probably never see again.
I was seventeen when Ocarina dropped in November ’98, working weekends at Target to afford games that cost sixty bucks each. Sixty bucks! My parents thought I’d lost my mind spending that much on “just a game.” Walked into Funcoland—remember those cramped little stores that smelled like plastic and teenage desperation?—with my crumpled twenties, and the clerk, this kid maybe nineteen with hair longer than mine, slides that gold box across the counter like he’s handing me the Holy Grail. “Dude, this is gonna blow your mind,” he says, and honestly? Understatement of the decade.
That first time booting it up…man. I’m sitting cross-legged on my bedroom carpet, three feet from this massive CRT that probably weighed more than I did, and that opening sequence starts rolling. The Nintendo logo fades, that orchestral music swells, and suddenly we’re soaring over Hyrule Field with this camera work that shouldn’t have been possible on hardware that was already feeling dated compared to PC games. But Nintendo didn’t care about polygon counts or texture resolution—they cared about making you believe in a world, and Christ, did they succeed.
Z-targeting was like Nintendo solved 3D combat in one brilliant stroke. Lock on, circle-strafe, time your strikes. Sounds simple when you write it out, but the way it felt…every enemy moved differently, required different timing. Stalfos would block and counter, Moblins would charge like angry bulls, and those damn Like Likes would eat your shield and ruin your whole day. I probably spent more hours practicing sword techniques in my backyard than I care to admit, swinging a stick around like I was Link himself.
The music system though—that’s where Ocarina transcended being just a game and became something else entirely. Five simple notes on the yellow C-buttons, but they became a language, a way to speak to the world itself. Up-C-left-C-right-C-up-C-left-C for Epona’s Song. I can still play that sequence faster than I can remember my Social Security number. Used to hum Zelda’s Lullaby walking between classes, drive my friends nuts with the Song of Storms when it was raining. These weren’t just game mechanics; they were actual music that lived in your head.
But here’s what really got me about Ocarina—the time jump. You pull the Master Sword, expecting to be the hero, and wake up seven years later to find out you’ve basically handed the world to Ganondorf on a silver platter. Hyrule Field isn’t just graphically different as adult Link; it feels cursed. The music’s gone minor key, the sky’s this sickly orange, ReDeads shuffling around like the world died while you were sleeping. That’s not programming tricks—that’s emotional storytelling through environmental design.
I remember calling in sick to school the day I got the Expansion Pak required for Majora’s Mask. Four more megabytes of RAM for forty dollars, which seemed insane until you realized it was the difference between Majora’s Mask existing or not existing. My mom saw that red cartridge sticking out the top of the N64 and asked why our game machine needed more memory than our computer had two years earlier. How do you explain that without those extra four megs, we wouldn’t get Clock Town, wouldn’t get the three-day cycle, wouldn’t get transformation masks? You don’t. You just promise to mow the lawn without being asked and hope she doesn’t look too closely at the credit card bill.
Majora’s Mask showed up in 2000 like Nintendo’s fever dream response to everyone saying Ocarina was too straightforward. Three days to save the world. Reset. Three days again. Reset. That moon—Jesus, that moon still gives me nightmares sometimes. This screaming child’s face hanging in the sky, getting bigger every day until you’re convinced your TV might actually implode from cosmic dread. And you’re the only one who remembers that yesterday already happened.
Clock Town became this perfect terrarium of human routine. The postman runs his exact route every cycle, the old lady gets robbed at precisely 12:15 on the first night, Anju sits in the inn waiting for Kafei who might be permanently ten years old now. You start knowing everyone’s schedule better than your own family’s. It’s like being trapped in the world’s most elaborate dollhouse, except the stakes are literally apocalyptic and you’re a kid in a wooden mask trying to fix everyone’s problems knowing they’ll never remember you helped them.
The transformation masks were pure Nintendo genius wrapped in absolute nightmare fuel. Becoming a Deku Scrub wasn’t just a gameplay change—those bouncy little hops and flower-launching felt genuinely different from being human Link. But then you remember the mask contains the soul of a dead child, and suddenly those playful mechanics feel haunted. Nintendo’s idea of family entertainment, everyone.
Both games pushed that three-pronged controller places it had no right going. That C-stick for camera control, Z-button for targeting, analog movement that actually felt analog instead of digital-pretending-to-be-smooth. The Water Temple in Ocarina nearly ended friendships over those iron boots and water level changes. I’ve got a buddy who still refuses to replay the game because of that dungeon, and honestly? I get it.
Playing these now, whether on my original N64 setup in the basement or through emulation on devices that have more processing power than NASA used to land on the moon, they still sing. Koji Kondo’s soundtracks live in your DNA. Forest Temple’s twisted chanting, Hyrule Field’s sweeping hope, the Song of Healing that somehow makes everything feel okay again. I’ve bought the orchestral recordings, the vinyl releases, even saw the symphony tour when it came through Minneapolis, but nothing hits quite like hearing those compressed, slightly crunchy N64 audio chip renditions.
My kid asked me recently why these games matter so much to people my age. I started explaining about technical innovation and artistic achievement, but really? It’s simpler. These games proved that virtual worlds could feel like real places, that digital characters could break your heart, that a plastic cartridge could transport you somewhere that genuinely mattered. They weren’t just entertainment—they were transformative experiences that changed how we thought about what games could be.
Still got my original save files on both cartridges. 100% completion on Ocarina, most of the masks collected in Majora’s. Sometimes I boot them up just to hear that title music, just to remember what it felt like when Nintendo was swinging for the fences and connecting every single time. Twenty-five years later, and I’m still convinced these represent some perfect moment when ambition, creativity, and technical capability aligned to create genuine magic. That kind of lightning doesn’t strike twice, but man, am I grateful I was there when it happened.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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