Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Legend Of Zelda

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writers/podcasters Stefan Heck ('Go Off Kings' Twitch, 'Blocked Party' podcast) and Hana Michels (Reductress, The Devastator) for a look at why the Legend Of Zelda franchise is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

The Legend of Zelda franchise. Known for Link. Famous for Link is the Boy. Players obsess over it, others don't. So let's find out why Zelda is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks! Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and it's dangerous to go alone. So I'm joined by two guests today, Stefan Heck and Hannah Michaels. Stefan Heck is one of the funniest people on Twitter. He is at boring underscore as underscore heck on that service. Stefan also co-hosts Blocked Party, an amazing podcast. It's where Stefan and other friend of this show, John Cullen, bring on a guest who talks about an experience of getting blocked on social media or in real life.

It really goes a lot of directions. And Stefan is one of the very best game streamers. He's part of the Go Off Kings Twitch channel. So please check that out. It's the best place you can laugh while watching video games. check that out. It's the best place you can laugh while watching video games. Hannah Michaels is an amazing comedy writer with work at Bunny Ears and The Devastator and Reductress and lots more great places. Also an old pal and one of my favorite guests across podcasts. So I'm so glad Stefan and Hannah are here on this one. Also, I've gathered all of our postal codes

and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Stefan recorded this on the traditional land of the Coast Salish, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Acknowledge Hana recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wurtongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledgeledge Hana recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about the Legend of Zelda franchise. That topic is a patron pick for January. Many thanks to Jared Halverson for

that suggestion. I feel that created a very special podcast episode because it works for two audiences at once. There are people who've spent hundreds of hours playing Zelda games. There are people who've spent few or zero hours playing Zelda games. If you're a huge fan, I think we discover things outside the gameplay that really enrich it for you. If you're a huge fan, I think we discover things outside the gameplay that really enrich it for you. And if you're somebody who's not into it, we flesh this thing out for you. Because as we discussed on the episode, it is one of the biggest video game franchises and just pop culture franchises that has ever existed. So you live in a world where Zelda exists.

You should know about it. It's cool. Also, this episode continues the thread within SifPod where we talk about great art once in a while. And there have been episodes about paintings like The Scream. There was an episode about the novel The Great Gatsby. This joins that through line of episodes about truly iconic and truly ubiquitous art that there is something more to know about. Also, we don't really spend time on the super basics of the franchise, so in case anyone would like that background, The Legend of Zelda is a video game franchise by Nintendo. In the games, you go adventuring,

do combat, do puzzles, lots of other stuff too. The games are set in a fantasy realm called Hyrule. They always have three key characters. There's an adventurer called Link, a princess called Zelda, and then a villain called Ganon, sometimes Ganondorf. And then just like extra fun fact, that Princess Zelda, the franchise's creators named her after the real-life writer and socialite Zelda Fitzgerald, who was the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. So if you want to, this is an extension of the Great Gatsby episode of the podcast. It really isn't, but I can't stop you from thinking that way. Maybe you'll find that fun.

And with all that established, please sit back or climb every tree to grab every apple in Hyrule. It's a cozy way to play, and it's valid. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Stefan Heck and Hannah Michaels. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Stefan, Hannah, it is so good to have you. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start. But how do you feel about the Legend of Zelda franchise? I am fairly familiar with it, I think. I mean, not I think I know I played. I mean, I don't know the exact amount of hours I've put into Breath of the Wild, but it's a lot.

I bought a wii u specifically for uh the wind waker uh remaster i guess i am very familiar with zelda if i bought a wii u for it yeah really yeah i mean i had you know ocarina of time on the n64 i played that growing up i had a like a prima strategy guide for it that i would treat like an actual book and like just like read it like it was not like a strategy guide but like an actual book and like just like read it like it was not like a strategy guide but like an actual book to the point where one of our cats um peed on it and i was like 10 i'm not gonna go to the store and like buy a new strategy guide so i still use the strategy guide so i guess that's my level of familiarity with the legend of zelda

now i i've had a cat urinate on a blanket and it really really really stuck what is yeah it's what is the book like i know maybe that gross people out but i want to know i mean it was um it was like i let it it dried out you know i wasn't i oh you did i think i i i encountered it after it had been pissed on like oh you know enough time had passed that it wasn't like wet. The book was never wet at any point where I was like touching it. Cool. But it was like the pages were stuck together in some sections.

So there were a couple of dungeons I had a lot more trouble with than others. But it was, you know, yeah. I mean, it didn't smell. It smelled like cat pee. So, you know, but that speaks to how interesting the strategy guide was that I would still read it. It does. The gap between smelling the cat pee and finding the cat pee is very real because there's cat pee in this room right now and we have no idea. We'll find out when we move. It's a very strong odor for sure.

Yeah. It's not good. And that's such commitment to the franchise it is as i understand that the wii u kind of struggled sales wise and you were still like i need that game so here we go yeah it was great because you had the little the wii u controller with like the it was like a tablet almost and so you'd have like the map and your inventory and stuff on on the tablet and uh it was great i think that was the only game I played, really, on the Wii U. I don't know if it was worth it.

And Hana, how about you? I would say I'm a little less familiar because every time I try a game in the franchise, I remember that it is my nemesis. And for some reason reason the mechanics of gameplay don't work with my brain in any of the Zelda games. So I just am terrible at the puzzle-solving aspects, the knowing what the quest is, the just basic walking around with the very minor enemies that are in the main areas and not the dungeons um is it because i and i feel like the the games they sort of have a consistent logic to them right like i suppose if one is built in a way that's frustrating to you they kind of all

are huh i think the the games are very they're very innovative within a specific format but you're always going to have a certain type of dungeon a certain type of puzzle a certain type of quest i think that those were just they're just made in such a way that my brain goes no no or my fingers or my whatever connects those two things go no and i've tried on emulators as well yeah it is it is me um okay okay i am the problem well i i also i like that you keep coming back keep giving that a shot it seems so fun and it is so fun for everyone else. Because this topic, it was a patron chosen topic. I found it sort of intimidating right away because I grew up without consoles.

I just had PC games all the time. Me and my partner, we got a Nintendo Switch, which is both of our first console ever. And then I've just like watched her play Breath of the Wild. And that's very fun. But so many people have so much more experience playing this game because it's such a one of the most popular franchises ever made in all of gaming. Such a thing. Have you been playing Breath of the Wild like yourself or you're just you're watching your partner play mostly? I have only watched. Yeah. And it's pretty cozy. Like the landscapes are amazing and, uh, it's like chill to hang out and watch it.

It's very, it's very pleasant. I mean, I watch, um, like speed runners play it. That's like kind of a different way to play it, I guess, because they're trying to like break the game as fast as possible. I don't know. I forget offhand what the record record is but it's just absolutely insane like they just they'll you know launch themselves across the map uh at like 200 miles an hour and then go beat the game with three hearts and like a wooden sword um yeah it's it's a lot of fun

because it's so spread out they must like get that hang glider and just leap across the map all the time huh yes they don't even really use the hang glider and just leap across the map all the time huh yes they don't even really use the hang glider i think they they figured out ways to like i mean there's a bunch of ways to do it but um they'll like launch themselves with like bombs and like the stasis stuff and i think there was a thing where you could use uh the the magnet power to like lift up a mine cart but you're like standing standing on a log that's in the mine cart, so you can fly with it, basically. It's one of my favorite games of all time,

just because there's so much stuff you can do in it. Wow. Man. I need to watch these so I can tackle my lifelong nemesis, apparently. Yeah, or just decide to do Tom and Jerry stuff exclusively. I'm exclusively going to launch myself with bombs. I'm not going to just walk places or climb trees or whatever. Yeah.

I thought bombs were just for dying. I mean, a lot of the times you do die when you launch yourself. But there's like, it's just people are playing this game at just like a total. They're playing a different game, essentially. Yeah. Like, I think I'm like, I'm pretty good at the game i've beaten it a couple times i've played it a lot but these people are just doing things where it's like oh i'm not i'm not capable of doing that like i just don't i don't have the coordination to do what they're doing or the timing you know

they'll jump off like a mountain and to get to the bottom of the mountain faster they won't use the glider they'll just like fall really, really, really, really fast. Um, and they'll like switch their, their sword or their shield at the last possible second.

And it like cancels the fall damage. Um, and I've tried to do it a couple of times and it just, I mean, it just doesn't work. I can't cancel the fall damage. I also, the friend of this show,

Michael Swain, he put out a video for ign about speed running and like the history of it i didn't really know anything about it but it like among other things he said there's people who exclusively speed run within the actual rules of the game and then there's other people who like mod it and then that's the art a different kind of speed run that you can't do yeah there's like tool tool assisted speed runs i think right where like that's it yeah they'll get like a the computer to do the speed run for them i think and i could be wrong about this but my understanding is it's like the perfect possible speed run uh that like humans just like aren't fast enough to do basically they're so much fun to watch maybe i

mean i'm the cat piss gamer guide uh guy so maybe I'm the wrong guy to be, but they really are a lot of fun to watch. So I do recommend it. This is such an expansive franchise because I've been over here like watching my partner gather mushrooms, you know, like, like, and that's like still so much fun too, like the cooking and everything. Like it's great. You can do, that's why it's so good.

Cause you can just play it however you want to play it and yeah we've got some uh stats and numbers about it and then takeaways about it i think we can get into the stats because on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called look at the stats Look how they count for you. And all the data you do. And it was all numbers. And that name was submitted by Duncan Miller. We have a new name every week.

Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. That was good. Thank you. That was good. Thank you. That was very good. Yeah. Coldplay, I was talking to the 1-800-HOT-DOG guys about this the other day.

Coldplay is like weirdly pretty good for being a punchline. It's like pretty good as a band. Yeah. I don't see it. Yeah. But it holds together, you know? Yeah. I feel like I listened to them in high school and stuff.

They had some bangers. Yeah. It's not weird. I think people's anger comes from the ubiquity of those songs in that time period, not the actual songs. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. It's just hearing it wherever you went, hearing it in commercials and stuff.

But I mean, they're fine. Yeah. Yeah. I enjoyed the cold play word play yeah duncan did a great job he he harnessed their music for excellence it's great and there's just a couple numbers here for the takeaways the first one is over 75 million copies and it's probably easy to figure out over 75 million is a low estimate for the total sales of Zelda games because the numbers from 2018 and it's only for like the core canonical games.

Yeah. And quick next number is 19 because that's the number of major canonical Zelda games in the franchise. What would a, what would a non canonical game be? Yeah. It turns out they made some like super smash oh yeah oh i think i think that's like for real in its own way apparently that doesn't count some like low quality games and mini games and stuff they made along the way apparently one example is they partnered with

phillips to make early 90s games for the phillips cdi okay which is i've not played those yeah so like that doesn't count but if you count those and then also that numbers from 2018 if you count the most recent sales it's way over 75 million and the very first one was the just first game called the legend of zelda in 1986 in Japan, 87 in North America. Then most recent is Breath of the Wild. Also, there's supposed to be a new one in 2022, which is this year. So strap in. Nice.

I'm so excited. I'm already planning to take a day off, at least one day off, and just stream it for 48 hours straight. I'm so excited are you gonna stream it as like a go off kings thing or just like purely please watch me play this thing i love i think you mean like will i be trying uh yeah i gotta yeah uh yeah i think i mean i think i'll be i'll be putting some effort into it i think it'll just be i'm just you know like the first time i played it the first time i played i mean it's a different franchise but like skyrim um just games like that where you're just exploring this like huge really interesting world for the first time um i i'm

just i can't wait i've watched the trailer for the new one i mean there's not even a name for it yet right yeah apparently people are just kind of calling it breath of the wild too but that's not official we just don't know i think they said they said that if they reveal the name now, it will give away too much about the game, apparently. So, very intrigued. I'm very excited for it, though. What if the name is like Ganon is the bad guy? Or just, you know, like not... That's a huge spoiler.

Yeah. Or like Zelda is the boy or something. You it's wrong that'd be great really into it yeah yeah yeah zelda is the doctor link is the monster i feel like there's a rumor every time a new one comes out that you can play as zelda in this version and i think eventually it's gonna happen where you can where you can i mean maybe it's this one everyone's like well look at is that link like look at look at the haircut in the trailer you know that sort of thing so i don't know that could be that could be a lot of fun because you could have you know totally different like powers and and all that sort of thing so i think it is actually

like my most anticipated game of all time the more i think about it because like the gameplay trailer i think was last year and then before that there was like the teaser trailer like two or three years ago i think and i've just been and it's not even official that it's coming out in 2022 everyone says it is but you know i fingers crossed i really wanted to yeah what i do like about nintendo is that they're one of the few companies that is not notorious for putting out a buggy game when it wasn't really finished. Yeah. Did you play Cyberpunk? I did not. Okay. I had to write OGN headlines for Cyberpunk and that's when I decided I wasn't going to play Cyberpunk.

Yeah. I got it like, I pre-ordered it very stupidly i mean you just shouldn't pre-order games anymore at all really but uh i played it like opening night the night it came out and it was just like oh this is like a disaster it really was so broken i think everyone's saying it's very fun now like the witcher 3 when that came out was very buggy as well and now it's like amazing so but you're right nintendo is like they usually just like nail it the first time yeah and i'm sure that's a huge part of these humongous sales like most of the time they deliver so people you know it's it's you're you're paying what 60 bucks up front or more and i'm thinking in american currency sorry but yeah it's like up in canada it's like 90 bucks

oh no oh damn yeah well and hannah you said you wrote headlines for about it for ogn is that that onion gaming section is that right yeah yeah it's an offshoot i don't know if any of mine actually got picked probably not because i didn't play the first one. And so I was, I was writing those with no context. And I'll bet that was the most joyful way to write about Cyberpunk. Cause apparently I feel like all real headlines were just like, this is frustrating. We're investigating the company. Honestly. Yes, it is. It is more fun. Sometimes knowing very little or using something very broad. One time I just sent in a picture of a turtle that said this real life Yoshi hates human contact. They didn't take that one. But I liked that I sent them a turtle. Yeah, don't ride it, folks. That's great. Yeah, don't write it, folks.

That's great. The next number here, speaking of game reviews, next number is 99 out of 100. And 99 out of 100 is the Metacritic.com rating for The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Wow. And that was a Zelda game in 1998. The source is Metacritic because that's a review aggregator, but the real source is the Guinness Book of World Records. They say as of December 2021, no other game has scored 99 or higher on Metacritic. So it's officially the

Guinness World Record holder for the most acclaimed video game of all time wow i i think i i do prefer breath of the wild i think they're they're both just they're both so much fun i i spent hours as a kid obviously like in the game itself but even just in like the little like fishing hole where you can just you can just go fishing in legend of zelda and i would just do that for hours on end and it was so much fun like all the little mini games in it were great it really it really is like a perfect game and as I understand it it was really mind-blowing in its openness like because it was for N64 really my only N64 experience was GoldenEye at other kids houses we're just shooting each other in little hallways but Ocarina of Time that was like, here's Hyrule,

just go, go off. Two kids who had mostly had 2D games. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was massive. Like I, you know, I had like Mario 64 and I actually, I think the N64 was my first Nintendo console. I had a Sega Genesis before that. So, you know, I played like Sonic the Hedgehog. I'm sure there were other games on there as well but that's like the big one those are relatively big levels for like back then you know for like a

2d like platformer but yeah i remember you know getting out into hyrule field for the first time and just being like oh my god you can just kind of go anywhere and it is you know it's funny looking back at it now and like you see like they do like the map comparisons online and it's really not very big at all uh but back then it felt it felt just massive because there was like nothing else like it and it gave you that freedom which i'm sure there might have been some i can't think of an earlier game that did that even if the levels were big there was a specific path yeah like even like mario 64 you still had like the castle where you jump into the painting and then like some of those levels were quite big but even then they weren't like

yeah you're still limited with what you could do but like yeah zelda was just it was huge it was massive because i was curious like are these reviews from at the time people's minds were just blown or are they from the present? And Metacritic, it was a mix of both. And then at the time, the game got a perfect 40 out of 40 score from Famitsu Video Game Magazine in Japan. And apparently that was the first time a game had ever gotten that from them. Wow. Like this, it came out and everyone was just like, oh yeah is the best game ever we all just sort of agree that's cool uh and speed runs speed runs of that like are breath of the wild speed runs are really cool obviously but like those are kind of like still being optimized i guess but like the ocarina of time ones people have been doing for so long that there's just like the perfect way to do it basically. And it's just, it's just so crazy how they'll get to areas before you're supposed to get

that area. Like they'll, again, I don't know what the record is offhand, but it's, it's just obscene how good people are at this game. Um, but I guess it's been, I was gonna say 20 years, but I guess it's 24 years now. So I was going to say 20 years, but I guess it's 24 years now. On the plus side, puts us closer to Breath of the Wild 2, right? Passage of time. Cuts both ways.

It's good. Well, and the last number here is $870,000. So, you know, approaching a million. $870,000. That's how much money someone paid for a rare zelda cartridge in 2021 oh my god this was an auction gq magazine says it was a sealed copy of an early production variant of the original legend of zelda for nes it's something called a no rev a type because they printed a few this way and then did a lot more another way and so it was a sealed extremely rare cartridge and at that time it was the most

anyone had ever paid for a video game cartridge wow yeah i know like the the video game like auction world has just like blown up the past couple of years um but i remember reading something about how there's like a couple companies that are sort of like not falsifying the numbers but they're sort of inflating the numbers working to get like there was a huge huge bump in like i think it was mario 64 like a sealed box it sold for six figures like low six figures and then it sold for like i i want to say over a million dollars within like a couple years and everyone was like where did that come from you know but this one seems like it's actually like a super rare there aren't very many versions of

this of this like sealed cartridge around whereas i feel like there's a few mario 64 cartridges uh floating around that are still sealed. And I wonder if this kind of record for the sale got swept up in that because the Smithsonian Magazine is another source here. They say that the Zelda cartridge sold for $870,000. And then two days later, somebody bought a sealed Super Mario 64 for $1.56 million US. I think that's the one I was thinking of yeah yeah and that i agree doesn't sound right there must be something magical about this game that i was alive for the release of and i don't know it's probably somebody has one in a box somewhere but i think it would be a good bit if uh the person who bought that

just bought it to like play it normally they were like i really need to yeah play super mario 64 yeah there's only like one i gotta get a sealed version obviously you know i want to like start from start from the beginning so just look i can't blow on the cartridge because i have no breath and i downloaded malware once so i'm not doing emulators here we go million dollars just tearing the box apart i do i mean this is a more video game specific comment but i i really do miss the the smell of like a fresh printed video game instruction manual i don't know if that's just i guess it's like just the ink or whatever but like um the ones i remember specifically

were the pokemon ones uh like pokemon blue and red i don't know what it was um but i remember getting those for christmas and there was just something about the instruction books and they smelled so good if someone could bottle that smell. You just rekindled a memory for me, I swear to God. I'm right though, right? Like there's something to that smell. It's crazy.

Yeah. There is. There completely is. I mean, just to be clear, the cat did not pee on my Pokemon instruction manuals. This is a normal smell. Yeah, because I don't have personal experience with it, but just various articles I saw, people also kept mentioning that they just found the Zelda manuals really fun, because

some of them had a map in it, like the front of a fantasy novel and it was just like another cozy gaming element is oh i can just look at where this river goes on the map of hyrule fun yeah yeah there's something just very nice about that yeah i mean even just the in-game map like looking at it and thinking of like ocarina of time like there's even something just about like the the menu that you bring up like the inventory and stuff the way it just like rotates and like how all the little items look and it's just it's just a very pleasant game that's so nice yeah yeah well and speaking of making stuff pleasant we can get into the first takeaway for the main episode here takeaway number one. Nintendo made a few special adjustments to North American Zelda releases with very fun results every time. There's a couple stories here. It's little changes that Nintendo made for specifically the North American market. And there's a lot of sources here. One of

them is the book A History of Video Games by Ian Simons, James Newman, and Ian Livingston. the book A History of Video Games by Ian Simons, James Newman, and Ian Livingston. Also Mental Floss, Kotaku, and Polygon. But the first thing here is just at a basic level, Nintendo thought North America would not like The Legend of Zelda, like the first one. They released it in Japan in February 1986. Hit right away, but it was another year and a half till they put it out in north america and apparently minoru arakawa the president of nintendo's american division was concerned that it would be too complex and puzzle-based and slow for like north america specifically even though it was actively blowing up in japan he was like they it's not for them i don't i don't think it'll work yeah because i guess like what were the i'm not sure what the other big games were at at the time

but like i'm not sure if they're any like i guess like tetris maybe but like yeah i could see it as like i i i can see what where he's coming from sort of and that it's like such a huge step up probably from you know whatever else is being played at the time but did they make they made like changes for the american version or yeah that's a great question because they they didn't really change it much except they just tried to like pave the way for americans which is that they put out a hotline that people could call for tips okay they set up a hotline specifically in north america because they were

like these people will need that kind of like tech support basically because it's it's probably pre anyone making a english language guide for it so you could call nintendo on the phone and get help it's it's so funny like thinking of like the evolution of you know looking up like when you need help in a game like what you do so back then you would phone someone i guess or you would listen to one of your friends who like would lie about it and and talk about all these secrets that didn't exist and then like i remember growing up like printing out like cheat codes from like all the you know ign like cheat code central all these websites um and now you can just like yeah watch a video of someone doing like the exact specific issue

that that you have uh and and there's a video on youtube and i mean hopefully it's a video where no one's narrating it and it's just like i just need the gameplay i don't need someone talking during this but um it's just it's the concept of the the game hotline is so funny to me so this uh this nintendo hotline the zelda game was a hit but also the hotline was a hit too and then also apparently players just started calling about any nintendo product and it got to the point point where Nintendo changed the number to a 1-900 number, because then they could start charging US callers money for calling it on the phone. And so it became a little income stream for them. And then from there, that same executive Arakawa,

another one of his ideas was the Nintendo Power fan magazine. And so then they turned the hotline into the Nintendo Power line. And it was then they turned the hotline into the Nintendo Power line, and it was rolled into the magazine, and it kept going until 2010. Wow. Okay. That's a long time. They built a whole phone operator system in North America because they were scared we would not comprehend Zelda initially. And then as a result, Nintendo power became a thing.

So yeah. Wow. That's incredible. Oh my God. Yeah. I grew up, I read some Nintendo power growing up and I feel like I don't, I mean, do they make magazines just in general anymore? I don't know if they make video game magazines at all, but like I, I would have, I had like

electronic gaming monthly and like yeah nintendo power i guess those are like the the big pc gamer i mean younger people listening to this might not understand this but like that was the only way to get like video game like news and previews a lot of the time yeah yeah because pre-internet, no other media covered it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or pre-good internet, you know. Yeah, that too. No one wants to answer ASL with, do you know how to unlock this on the level where... Oh, well, my location is the water temple. I can tell you that.

Yeah. Yeah. Another change that happened with the North American market specifically is that there was an issue that Nintendo missed because the NES in North America didn't have a microphone. It turns out that when Nintendo made the NES, it was a console based on their Japanese console, which was called the Family Computer, or Famicom for short. One of the biggest differences was that a Famicom controller had a microphone built into the middle

of the controller. And that doesn't really matter except that in one part of the original Legend of Zelda game, there's an enemy that's called the Pole's the pole's voice it's a rabbit like ghost character and in the japanese game there was sort of a shortcut to kill it where the manual had a hint that said it hates loud noises and if you just made a loud enough noise into your controller you could wipe them out otherwise it took a bunch of hits and a bunch of effort to kill them and then they just never adjusted that for the nes which has no microphone oh my god yeah that's so cool that's that's very like uh i i feel like there's some pokemon games that have done things with with the microphone built into like the the 3ds or whatever where you can like there are blow into it or or make a loud noise and it like i

don't know if it helps you capture the pokemon or if it scares at all or something but i know there's like some sort of interaction so it's very cool that that was happening in like the 1980s yeah wow are you are you both big pokemon players i only have done pokemon go and like caught up that way yeah i yeah Yeah, I, yeah, I play it a lot. Yeah. Same. Um, and one of those people who like, you know how, and Alex, you will know a person I'm talking about specifically, you know how some people like, especially when they're young, they'll get mad at for a moment because they'll be like, I was into punk before everyone else got, before pop punk became a thing. Or like, I was into this before everyone. I got put into lockers and stuff because I was so obsessed with Pokemon.

Oh no. It's fine. Mostly they were just amused that I was small enough to fit. I'm not mad about it because I'm 34, but I'm also mad about it. And it seems like it's another one of these. Nintendo just seems really good at creating a franchise that can be huge for decades. It's some kind of storytelling or design or quality magic. I don't know how.

This isn't an ad for Nintendo. It turned into that, I guess, but just really good at it. Opposite case, not doing quality control. They released this original Zelda game with a bunch of really hard to kill rabbit ghosts. And then they also just directly translated the japanese manual so the north american manual had a hint about like they hate loud noises and then kids were just like that doesn't mean anything or like chasing it like a red herring because they didn't have the hardware to do the microphone part it's the best oh my god and then the the last big adjustment to talk about is that there's an entire zelda character and set of games that were kind of sidelined or not released in North America because the whole audience here really doesn't like them. And the character is named Tingle. I don't know if either of you have heard of or seen Tingle.

Yeah. He's like the little elf guy in the green pajamas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he exists as kind of an item in Super Smash Brothers that you can use. Yeah, he's a freak for sure. What does the item do? Oh, it's one of like the trophies, right?

That you can like throw? Yeah, yeah. It's one of the items that you can like release the Tingle, which now that I'm saying that, I understand why americans yeah that'll go on the poster great for the episode uh no yeah and uh yeah it's it's as you describe the book a history of video games which i had to like read to understand this character describes him as a 35 year old man in the canon who is obsessed with forest fairies and wears a big green costume. And then his catchphrase is tingle,

tingle, cool. Olympia. And he is wacky and goofy. And, and apparently he first appeared in the legend of Zelda Majora's mask, which was a game in 2000. He immediately became a hit in Japan

and everyone hated him in North America. Just an immediate divide between these two regions of the world. It's so funny that his main descriptor is he's 35. Yeah. That's my age and I don't trust 35 year old men. that's that's my age and i don't trust 35 year old men but so he's like super popular and because i feel like he's like ironically popular here sort of but that might just be through like like that might be a recent development i didn't i didn't really play majora's mask that much um yeah so i sort of missed out on like the the first wave of like tingle hate i guess but i i feel like he's bounced back a little bit because I think people are like, he's so, he's so weird.

I love, he's just this, he's wearing like skin tight green clothes. He's, and he's like just a guy. He's not like, he's not actually like a, he doesn't have like magic powers or anything. Does he really? Yeah. As far as I can tell, the delight of him is that he, like, I guess his catchphrase is some sort of translation of a description of being crazy and the Japanese language. Like he's, he's on purpose weird, but I think it's like weird in a way that is sincerely

enjoyable to the Japanese audience. And then apparently at the time that he came out in north america a lot of reviewers were comparing him to the recent new star wars character jar jar binks and like with that much invective like with that much this is ruining the whole thing kind of kind of oh wow yeah that's so funny to compare him to like, cause the other thing with Zelda is that no one really talks in it. Right. Like there aren't, no one really says that much stuff.

Like, well, like link doesn't say very much stuff at all, obviously, but like, I mean, you can get, Hey,

listen, Hey, listen, Hey, listen, listen, stuck in your head, but that's about it.

There's not really any like, you know, famous like lines of dialogue. Like it's not a super dialogue heavy game in terms of like voice acting and stuff so um i like i guess the visceral hatred i mean tingle tingle cool olympia but sure just skip that skip over that yeah and maybe that's why he stood out is that yeah exactly but he and he does look i guess he sort of looks like um he's like one of the the kokiri like the forest children or whatever right where he's dressed in the he's like one of the Kokiri, like the forest children or whatever, right?

Where he's dressed and he's got the pointy hat sort of. But does he also have like a balloon? There's some sort of balloon involved with him, right? Where he like flies away on the balloon. He does apparently. And this is how much of a divide happens. In 2006, so just a few years after Majora's Mask, Nintendo put out an entire game with Tingle as the main character. It's a Nintendo DS game called Freshly Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland.

And you run around and do Tingle stuff in it. It was such a hit in Japan, they made a sequel called Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love, which is really fixated on the balloon. Neither of these games ever even tried to do a North American release. They were in Japan, they were in Europe, and then our continent put a wall up. We were like, no, we're not going to play this thing. Forget it.

I'd be interested to know if the UK put a wall up, because it seems like a lot of the issues are in the translation. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I need to play this game now. put a wall up because it seems like a lot of the issues are in the translation oh yeah oh my god i need to play this game now i'm sure there's like a rom or something floating around but what did you what did you do in the game as tingle i found like a little of just footage of the screen on youtube and the graphics vaguely reminded me of Stardew Valley. It's like it's that kind of grid and you go around finding stuff and I especially that name freshly picked

tingles rosy rupee land. I think you're finding fruits and rupees and stuff all the time. Okay. Oh man I love Stardew. Wow. Yeah or like Harvest Moon almost like it's almost that sort of okay hmm I think I'm on board. I think I have to play this game now and the sequel and he was also jumping and stuff i don't i might still be fighting but either way yeah there's two games out there for enterprising north americans to to get a hold of some way yeah god yeah i've got to play there's there's a bunch of um i mean this is a different game franchise but uh dragon quest they they put out a ripoff of pokemon called dragon warrior monsters uh and did you play it hannah i did not have been trying to find it it's i almost liked it more than pokemon to some extent it was it was incredible it was so much

fun i had on the game boy color um and then i I feel like none of the sequels that they've made recently have come out in North America at all. And I'm like trying to figure out a way to play them. It's yeah. So now I'm adding the Tingle games to that list. Zelda games to replay because this also bled into the regular ones. And apparently same year, 2006, they released Twilight Princess, the Zelda game. And before release, Zelda director Eiji Aonuma had them redo the North American version to cut Tingle. I guess there's Tingle stuff in the Japanese version of Twilight Princess, but they were like, we need to alter the whole game for them. They won't like it. We're ready for Tingle.

If any Zelda producers are listening to this right now, we're ready for Tingle. Give us Tingle. We want Tingle. Yeah. Every phrasing of requesting it. They're normal. They're totally good. totally good uh and also apparently in breath of the wild there's a first dlc pack that gave people a tingle outfit that link could wear and i sent you guys a gif that probably gone compiled

because it's a bunch of shots of link wearing the tingle outfit and approaching npcs and nintendo put in a little easter egg where every NPC gets upset. Like they react very poorly. They kind of jump and they, and there was one Goron who kind of waves his arms at you and makes a sad face. Like they made it. So the game acknowledges that there's a controversial character. Does the costume like give you any powers or anything,

or is it just, is it purely aesthetic? It looked like it's purely aesthetic i don't really know okay yeah it would be great if it's like the most powerful outfit you just have to play that way now if you want to optimize yeah yeah because i know they have um you can wear like monster masks uh and if you put the mask on you can like blend in with the monsters and they won't attack you i guess the tingle one would be the opposite. Like everyone attacks you.

Maybe you're like, I'm here for my horse. And they just start shooting. Like, where'd you get a gun? Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have

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Well, there's the other takeaways are real quick for this main episode, but let's get into them. Takeaway number two. The longtime head of the Zelda franchise started working at Nintendo before he had ever played video games. Wow. The main person, his name's Eiji Aonuma, and he joined the company in the late 80s. In 1988, he finished his master's degree at Tokyo University of the Arts, and his focus there was marionettes. He built wooden dolls and wooden pupp puppets and he designed them to have all kinds of like interlocking mechanical elements but he he got a master's degree in that

and then needed a job of some kind and at a nintendo was one of the companies at a job there at the university and then he fully interviewed and then interviewed again with Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the top people at Nintendo and also just in gaming history, and got hired and then said, okay, I should start to play some games maybe to work here. Oh my God. I wonder if he kept on building marionettes, if that was his secret passion. Oh, I don't know. Yeah, that'd be great. I hope so.

Because they also apparently got him the job. Apparently he showed up to the interview and like presented marionettes to Shigeru Miyamoto. And Miyamoto said, quote, if you want to make things like that, Nintendo might be a good place for you to work. End quote. Like, they're probably amazing. Like, it's that thing where they just saw somehow this is transferable. He can work on Zelda games. Wow.

I'm going to bring a puppet to my next job interview. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to work. It better work. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to work.

It better work. Because also, if the interviewer turns you down, you can just have the puppet disagree with them and hire you, you know? Yeah, exactly. You know, you gang up on them. What if the puppet gets hired, but not you? It could sort of backfire, yeah. You and the puppet go to different jobs in the morning. Yeah. I'll see you later. Yeah. But, and, uh, the other, the other really cute thing to me about this story is that Aonuma gets this job in 1988 and then he's like, okay, how do I, what should, what should I do to

start playing video games? And his first move there is to ask his girlfriend to lend him her games. So apparently his girlfriend was already a gamer and had PC games mainly lent him the 1986 Dragon Quest. And so he was even in a gaming household, but just hadn't tried it when he got hired by Nintendo to do this. Wow.

Didn't Nintendo do something else before video games were they like a trading card company or something yeah playing cards or something yeah yeah yeah they started in 1889 as a like playing card and toy company and then just found their way into gaming maybe that's part of why he got hired they were like we we see it we remember it's all one thing having fun it is very cool that like one of the biggest video game companies in the world started in the 1800s yeah there's something very neat about that and yeah and then a.g.aunuma is part of most all the zelda games that people listening to this have played he initially worked on a golf game for Nintendo, and then also directed a game called Marvelous Mojitotsu no Takarajima.

And off of his work on that, they put him in charge of Ocarina of Time in 1998. And to this day, he's the lead producer and manager for the upcoming Breath of the Wild sequel. So from 98 to now, he manages that part of the company. Wow. I really want to see his marionettes now because I feel like they must be like incredibly complex. Yeah. It's like thousands of pixels somehow. Like it's just the human eye can't take it in. The human eye can't take it in.

And yeah, and then there's a couple other people who are key Nintendo people, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, who co-created it. Also, Takahashi Tezuka was his other co-creator, who apparently led the writing and was very into fantasy novels, especially Tolkien. It's a very collaborative company, it seems like, as much as people will get big in it. Again, I'm just some sort of weird spokesman. They do real good work and have a good thing going on. They do. They really do. And speaking of them, last takeaway for the main episode, takeaway number three. The latest Zelda game might have changed the entire future of video games and there's a little

speculative but the info i've got suggests that the breath of the wild game specifically it made the switch a hit console and it kind of kept nintendo going financially and also it might kind of guide gaming toward a almost smartphone style way of gaming but in a very like robust advanced way yeah i play it i mean i've i usually play it on on the tv when i'm when i'm playing it but yeah like laying in bed and playing in handheld mode it's still it it plays great um it's it's still a lot of fun i'm in bed bed right now. I got this right here. Hana brought a handheld Switch. So appropriate.

It was great. Yeah. I didn't know the scale of how important this single game was to them. But there's an amazing piece for The Guardian by Alex Hearn where he says says that in the run up to Breath of the Wild coming out and the Switch coming out, quote, the Switch was Nintendo's last roll of the dice. By the beginning of 2017, the company was in dire straits, because a decade on from the breakout success of the Wii, its follow up called the Wii U had failed to take the world by storm, end quote. Because the Wii U came out in 2012,

and apparently it went so poorly, felt they kind of lost all the momentum of the Wii. And then separately, they tried to get into mobile gaming, but their only hit was Pokemon Go. And everybody assumed that was making them a bunch of money, but it was mostly a third party. And then apparently, according to alex hern nintendo put out a press statement making clear that they just got a licensing fee for pokemon go and when they did that their stock price dropped 17 oh my god like all of the traders were like oh that's not really yours out done maybe don't put out that statement to the press too nice yeah don't tell but yeah so they spent most of the 2010s having like a pretty hard time and then they needed a

hit console and they also needed it fast so they released it the switch with not very many games other than breath of the wilds and they were kind of just banking on people to buy the entire thing to play Zelda. I did. And then everyone did. It worked out, yeah. Yeah, I mean... And yeah, they also didn't even offer a new Mario game for it until about half a year after the console came out. It was just a huge bet on it.

But apparently, for a brief period after launch they were selling more copies of breath of the wild than they were selling nintendo switches because everyone who bought a switch bought the game and then some people who had the switch but didn't get the game were like oh yeah that sounds great like they it flipped at one point it was that successful i think it was it was on wii u as well i think but i i can't imagine playing it on the wii u compared to the i mean it's just it's perfect for the switch like like i said like playing it in handheld mode it still feels like just as good as playing it on uh on like a big tv or something and you can lay down or whatever yeah exactly you can switch to resting really good yeah and uh also according to

steven kent who wrote the book the ultimate history of video games volume two he says that breath of the wild is one of very few games in all of gaming history that was so popular it basically sold its own console like it didn't go the other way he says other examples are the first halo game selling the xbox and then super mario 64 selling the n64 like that hasn't really happened very often and not for a long time yeah both of those games i was a child for i mean maybe a teenager for halo but yeah, that was a while ago. Yeah, there really wasn't on the 360, there wasn't the one game that you needed the console for.

Whereas, yeah, I mean, Breath of the Wild is 100% that game for the Switch. I think I play, like I have a lot of games on my Switch and I play a lot of games on my Switch, but like I think that's number one by far for me and it's just it's like a perfect game it's so much fun and the fact that it comes with somewhat built-in old nintendo games where you can play a lot of the old zelda games that we grew up with that's that's also probably a huge that's exactly probably a huge... That's exactly right, because it seems like if the Switch didn't go well, they wouldn't have totally gone out of business or anything, just because they have such a library and such franchises that people love. But this really launched them back into being highly successful.

They'd been losing money for a lot of the years in the 2010s, and then this flipped it. And then also, the Switch has grown its footprint in the pandemic. It was, I guess the most in demand console. Then, uh, I'm going to, I'm going to link an article from fortune in May, 2021,

because the headline is Nintendo won the pandemic. I don't think that's how they think of it. It's pretty gross, but, uh, but that is a phenomenon that happened uh and then alex hearn points out that the switch runs on an arm processor that's a type of processor that's more common in smartphones than like traditional consoles and that's one reason people think this

might kind of between that and smartphones becoming better every year that might kind of be where things go uh really all because all because Zelda propped up the switch. Yeah. Cause it's not one of those games where like, it, it looks good, obviously, like it has very nice graphics and everything, but that's not like the biggest selling point necessarily. Like it doesn't need to look like it's a, like, you know, playable on like a high end PC or like a PS five game. Like it, it looks, it looks good.

And that's kind of all it needs to look because the gameplay itself is just so much fun. Yeah. It seems like there's tons of, think of the PS5, like there's tons of games on that, where the selling point is you can see every hair on somebody's head and that's fine, It's fine. But I don't play the hair. So. Yeah. I know someone who quit Disney after being on the team that just designed the hair for one character in Moana.

They were like, this is too much. Yeah. What a slug, man. I don't want to do that. Stop asking me, Disney. They're not asking. No one's here. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Stefan Heck and Hannah Michaels for assembling a triforce

of podcasters, right? Threes. Threes are a big thing in the game. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is three astounding impacts of the Zelda franchise on music, featuring a clip that will boggle your mind. a clip that will boggle your mind. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than six dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the Legend of Zelda franchise with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Nintendo has made a few special adjustments to North American Zelda releases, with fun and funny results every time. Takeaway number two, the longtime head of the Zelda franchise started working at Nintendo before he'd ever played video games.

And takeaway number three, Breath of the Wild might have changed the entire future of video games, technologically and business-wise. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Stefan Heck and Hannah Michaels are two name, at Hannah Michaels, and that is spelled H-A-N-A-M-I-C-H-E-L-S. And, you know, you don't need to rapidly write down that spelling. There are links, like always, in the show links. Further links in the show links are a bunch of Hannah's comedy writing for places like Reductress, also Stefan's podcast co-hosted with John Cullen, it is called Blocked Party, Actress. Also, Stefan's podcast co-hosted with John Cullen. It is called Blocked Party. And then the Go Off Kings Twitch channel, where you can see Stefan and friends make video games as funny as possible. It's just great. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones.

A great article from Mental Floss by Michael Arbeiter. Also a piece from The Guardian by Alex Hearn. Also leaned on a couple of books this week. One of them is called A History of Video Games. That's by Ian Simons, James Newman, and Ian Livingstone. Also used The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2 by Stephen Kent. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus

show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.