The instruction manual for The Legend of Zelda says, "Link, the hero of The Legend of Zelda, does not yet exist. You create Link by first registering your player name".

I remember thinking this was some powerful juju indeed. By speaking his name, I would somehow pull Link into existence from out the dark of nothingness.

Similar to the Childlike Empress's power to crap out a universe if you scream "Moon Child' at her, I had been granted the power to create one of the greatest video game heroes ever... if only I could give him a name.

That's a lot of responsibility for a 10 year old.

I was desperate to begin the game. But first I needed to make Link exist. The burden of choosing a name that he would be stuck with for the duration of this epic adventure was just too much for me to deal with.



Finally I copped out and just called him "ZELDA" since it seemed like a path of least resistance.

Little did I realize... it was not. As some of you may know, if you name your character "ZELDA" you start on the game on the extremely difficult Second Quest rather than the moderately difficult first quest.

And so it was unwittingly that I embarked on the second quest only to have my impish ass handed to me repeatedly in the first dungeon.

I was really dismayed to find that none of the tips for the first part of the game that I'd seen in Nintendo Power seemed to be accurate. And the map that came with the game seemed to be totally incorrect as well. It was like I wasn't playing the same game as everyone else.

After stressing about it for awhile, I decided to start over from the beginning. With time to decompress and deliberate I came up with an appropriately epic name. Calling the character "SNARF", a new Link was born into the world - one that, strangely, wasn't holding a sword on the character selection screen, as he had been before.



Once I got to the first dungeon I found it was completely different, and a lot easier. This led to my long held and mistaken belief that Hyrule was random every time you played.

SNARF ultimately defeated Ganon, got the Triforce of Power, made out with Zelda, and earned a sword on the character selection screen.

By that time I had forgotten all about the other, harder, world that I had accidentally discovered the first time I played. It wasn't until years later that I learned about the ZELDA cheat to jump straight to the second quest.

This experience just reinforced my idea that The Legend of Zelda was the biggest, most mysterious, and completely unknowable game ever.