What game made you a Nintendo fan, and what was it about it?

[S.Peelman]

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

I tell this story every year in the Top 50 thread. When I was young my aunt and my two slightly younger cousins lived a short street away from me. My aunt was an avid gamer in the NES and SNES days, and in turn my cousins would spend a lot of time playing video games while I only wanted to be at the playground nearby. I had played some games before though; Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, the black box Soccer game, and perhaps other things like simple 2nd Gen games on my own mother’s old G7000, the Odyssey2 in America. However those were all casual plays, and in my mind it was a silly way to spend time. Young as I was, we’re talking 4 or 5 years old here, I also didn’t exactly know what I was doing.

When my aunt got the SNES she moved the NES upstairs for us kids to use, while the new SNES remained “off-limits”, though she wasn’t very strict about it. One day, I was probably 6 at that point, I came down the stairs in my aunt’s house, ready to go home after maybe having played Duck Hunt for a bit with my cousin, when she called me into the living room. She had something to show me before I went, and she thought I’d like it. I awaited curiously as she reset the SNES. I was immediately captivated by what I saw; the bombastic music of the opening screen coupled with a sword in front of a view of a castle was probably already enough to win me over; I had plenty of LEGO Knight sets and plastic swords at home. She started a new file, and my eyes grew wider with each passing second as the mysterious intro played. I couldn’t understand the English text yet, but I could understand the pixelated art of battling knights and monsters interluded with clips of a wizard making princesses disappear very well. Finally the game started, and my aunt made the character move out of the house you start in and I saw the most epic thing I ever saw in a video game; thunder and rain. This made such an impact on me, that I was all-in at that point; my mind had been blown three times already in the past five minutes. I wanted to play this game in its entirety right then and there, but unfortunately, my aunt only walked up to the castle and then shut off the game again. I’ve been a fan since that very moment, and Zelda is my favorite franchise since that very moment. Sadly though I needed to go home, for dinner.