Masks and Ocarinas

or, I got literally nothing but time, baby

The other day I saw someone on reddit asking how anyone could possibly play Majora’s Mask without a guide.

Their question went on: How did someone play this in 2000 when the internet was a baby?

I remember because I was there. I was that baby finding every secret in the game without a guide, without even connecting to the internet because I barely even had access to a computer.

Usually when I write these essays, the part that you don’t see is me replaying one of these old games and then even reading whatever available books exist dissecting them. Sometimes I’ll even read some reviews. Then, once I start writing, I pretend like I didn’t do actual work and write as if I’m pulling matter out of the ethereal fog of memory’s hole.

This time, I have not replayed Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask (though I plan to soon and may write some additional thing about them) because I really just want to talk about this one specific experience. That of discovering all a game’s mysteries, not through guides, but through experimentation and sheer volume of time.

Buddy, if you replay a game seven times over the course of two years, you’re going to discover almost everything on accident. You can’t hide something well enough in your digitally constructed world to keep a bored eleven year old from discovering it.

The real trick of the whole thing, the reason we young ne'er-do-wells discovered all those secrets no matter how secretly the developers secreted them into the game is because we didn’t have money but we did have time.

So little money did we have and so much time did we have that the games we played as children wrapped around our tiny psyches and set in motion certain lines of thinking and feeling that we’d end up returning to decades later while writing a newsletter about being a father and liking art.

How did I play Majora’s Mask without a guide?

Buddy, I didn’t have a choice! But I also had nothing but time.

I have two brothers. We would each get a game once a year, which meant we’d get, at most, three games per year (assuming each of us wanted a game worth wanting). Fortunately, I had two friends who were brothers that had an additional four brothers, so they also got a number of games per year (though, of course, the Venn diagram of the games we had would sometimes be a circle). Together, we cobbled enough games to play, like, five or eight per year.

But some of those games were Mario Kart or Mortal Kombat or Snowboarding Kids 2 (anyone else remember this?) or Golden Eye. You can play those for hours—yeah, sure, absolutely you will—but you’re less likely to play those for hours by yourself.

So, really, I ended up with one or maybe two substantial single player games per year.

This is how I ended up playing Ocarina of Time seven times over the course of about two years. I played that game in every conceivable way. I would burn up my Deku shield in the Great Deku Tree immediately and then play as much of the game as possible without a shield. I played the temples out of order. Went for every sidequest, no matter how hidden. Found all the Golden Skulltullas and Heart Pieces. Sometimes I would play just to be there in Hyrule again. Inhabit that world that meant so much to me.

I have always loved Zelda games. There’s a powerful transience to the game, a heartbreaking melancholy that struck me powerfully even as a child. Ocarina of Time especially struck me this way. Probably because I kept replaying it.

I think of Skullkid often. He’s not really a character in Ocarina of Time. He’s more like a fairytale. A warning.

You can lose yourself. If you become lost in the woods, you will lose yourself and become a Skullkid too. Cursed and trapped within the forest.

It’s a nothing bit of lore. Something Navi says the first time you encounter one. I don’t think you’re meant to think about it longer than a moment. But it slapped me in the face when I was nine years old watching my friend’s older brother playing Ocarina of Time. There was something so powerfully ominous and sorrowful in that little thrown away line about a creature that has almost no impact or significance on the game.

It made Hyrule more real to me. More than that, it showed me the stakes. This was not just a game about saving the world. It was about not losing yourself.

I find that distinction meaningful and interesting. Interesting enough that it’s never left me. The fear of losing yourself.

Memory. Time. Identity.

Ocarina of Time is a simple adventure game designed for children, but it plays with those three words in powerful ways. Essential ways. Memory and time and identity have slurred in my veins ever since then. The transience of existence, the impermanence of even the moments that seem so significant.

Time moves on and we are forgotten, our identities cast as dust in Time’s wind.

Pretty heavy!

That heaviness was part of the appeal. Something that kept me returning again and again, no matter how many times I beat Ocarina of Time. I wasn’t playing for the adventure. Not really. I was playing for that mood, that sensation of transience, impermanence, of quiet melancholy in a constructed world made so real to my child heart.

And then we find ourselves with Majora’s Mask, a game about wearing new, temporary identities in a locked prism of time. Its Groundhog’s Day mechanic may have even helped popularize the roguelike genre.

The game was more sinister and apocalyptic, even as it relied less on combat. The game is an existential nightmare that may have primed me to not get sick reading Sartre’s Nausea a few years later. Choice became instrumental and time was always running out and every action was washing away, being forgotten by everyone but you.

And so you experiment. You play. You try to influence this tiny speck of a world caught spiraling in eternal recurrence of the same three days. Because if you do things just right, you may unknot a puzzle, tease out a new storyline, save someone who seemed as trapped as you were, forever caught beneath a menacing moon threatening to obliterate the world.

Skullkid reappears here. Both lonelier and more frightening. But still a lost child. A child who lost themselves.

I hate reading philosophy. I gave up on it when I was a teenager. My feeling is that either I’m too stupid to understand or they’re too stupid to explain, and I don’t even think it matters which of us is correct.

I learned philosophy from games like this. What can teach you more about choice than a game that documents every choice you made by revealing how those choices impact people caught in a temporal loop? What can teach me more about humanity than watching children get lost in the woods, lose their humanity?

Zelda showed me the weight of a life, of a memory, of time. It showed me the power of sorrow and joy. It filled an emptiness within me with the vast open Hylian spaces filled with ghosts of other lost humans.

And because I only had these games to occupy me, I returned again and again. Had I been given shittier games, I would have returned endlessly to them instead.

I was fortunate to have Zelda as my guide.

I didn’t need the internet or some guidebook telling me how to find every secret.

The game taught me how to feel, how to love, how to understand and excise meaning from experience, from art. I didn’t need someone to tell me how to do that. I just needed an absence of money and an excess of time.