Does Link's human face in the Zelda movie make anyone else feel a little… odd?

A few years before I started writing about video games – I just googled it, and it would have been 2002 – I went to an exhibition at the Barbican called Game On, and something I saw there made me realise just how much video games were a thing worth writing about.

Game On was a wonderful event, the first celebration of video games in a museum setting that I ever saw. I remember all the playable stuff, the actual art for Edge 100 in a frame up on a wall, and a bunch of really odd experimental game-like things at the very end. But near the end there was also the thing that really stood out to me.

It was a wall of testimony about video games from video game players. One of them – the one I really remember – was from a young kid writing about Zelda, which would have been the Ocarina of Time, I think. They said, not quite in these words, that the game had changed their imaginative world completely. When they went out into the garden after playing, they carried a stick on their back and they knew that the stick was really a sword.

I loved that. I still do. Zelda as a force that gets inside your head and works magic. These games are filled with magical portals, aren’t they? Shimmering doors that lead to strange realms. It’s easy to forget that they’re a magical portal in their own right.