The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) – Nintendo 64
I was a bit late in getting the Nintendo 64, and by the time I got it Ocarina of Time was already out. I hadn’t had the opportunity to play Super Mario 64 yet, so Ocarina of Time was my first truly 3D game. When people talk about how the current console generation didn’t seem to make much of a leap since the last one, it’s because the N64 and games like this set the bar so high.
I thought I had played games with fully realized worlds — I had played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid, and they had big open spaces to explore. Nobody could possibly improve upon that, right? I had never been so happy to be so wrong. Playing Ocarina of Time for the first time felt like something out of science fiction. I wasn’t just looking at a character in a world, I was actually in that world. I could look anywhere I wanted, go anywhere I pleased, and make high-pitch karate grunts in any direction. These things seem trivial now, but at the time they were mind blowing, and something I could not have imagined before seeing it for myself.
Also, there’s the unfortunate fact that Ocarina of Time was so perfect that every other game on the N64 seemed mediocre by comparison. So… good job, Nintendo?
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