How Legend of Zelda Broke My Dad
So back in the day my dad was at the arcade near my house constantly. He used to brag about having long lines waiting to play the Indiana Jones game he used to play all the time. Of course what they were probably complaining about is a late 20s guy taking over the arcade booth for hours on end because he had a disposable income. Either way, he considered himself the master when it came to video games. He kept his household title for a bit, until Legend of Zelda just about broke him.
It’s a level I’m never going to forget. The 5th underworld/dungeon or whatever you want to call it in the original Zelda. It had a secret area you had to navigate,which to get into and through was surrounded by a bunch of stronger darknuts. For those not familiar with the game, darknuts were knights who you couldn’t hit from the front and you had to hit from the sides and back. Their spastic movements made this really tough, especially in these rooms considering blocks made it tough to maneuver. Oh yea, hits from these darknuts would take off 3 hearts at a time, which was pretty big.
For my dad this was too much. For two nights he stayed up cursing and screaming at the TV all night. He told my mom it took him something like 12 hours to finish the two rooms. Since he knew I was right behind him in the game, that I would be doing that level soon. So he couldn’t wait to find out how long it would take me to do it. When I got to the area I breezed through it, and a few days later my mom asked me and I told her I had finished it.
That weekend my dad found out from my mom, and he didn’t believe me at all that I had finished the level in under half a hour. He actually made me go back and play the level again so he could watch me beat it. Apparently he never thought of using bombs on the darknuts. He also complained that I cheated by using bombs, but that has more to do with his ocd. Thankfully my mom defnded me and said I didn’t cheat and he stormed off.
After that he never really played the NES that much. At one point he bought a joystick controller because he complained that the directional pad was screwing him up. That lasted for one day before he threw the controller into the wall. His ocd continued though. He used to claim we were cheating at games if we didn’t beat everything on screen. Don’t forget these were the days of the NES in which enemies would respawn if you moved offscreen. There were games that took me days to beat instead of hours cause I would try killing everything instead of running past it.
You sound like a momma boy