Nerd Rush: The Legend of Zelda's horrible (and not so horrible) advertising schemes, part 1.

Hey, team. No more progress on Zelda II - after a three-hour attempt at getting through the Grand Palace to beat the game, we only got as far as turning the Thunder Bird blue and didn't score a single hit on him. It's going to be a little while before any of us has the strength to make the attempt again.

Master Quest, on the other hand, is going fairly well - at about three hours of playtime, I've just entered Jabu Jabu's belly (the third dungeon,) which is slower than my usual runthrough time by about half an hour but I'm pretty happy with my time so far. I'll try to get an update up sometime this week.

For now, though, I want to share with you a very special part of Zelda history: commercials. Zelda was one of the first games popular enough to afford its own television commercials, and boy, were they ever special.

Walk with me now back through the ages to a strange and distant land called the 1980s...

I hope you'll pardon the horrendous quality. As far as I'm aware, this is the first Zelda commercial ever released. They're really advertising Nintendo Power more than the game itself. Look how cool those kids are. Also, they've clearly never actually played the original Zelda, since if they had, they wouldn't be smiling. I guess it's better than doing whatever else kids in the 1980s did, like starting fires with rocks and building grass huts or whatever.

That commercial was followed by this one, exclusively for Zelda this time. I always think this says a lot about who Nintendo thought their demographic was in the 1980s.

"It's fine, Earl, just have somebody shout out random keywords and they'll get the picture. Everybody knows gamers have a vocabulary of fifty words maximum."
"Okay, well, I guess I'll go down to the theatre school and see if we can find some kid to do it..."
"No way! My cousin Tony just got out of rehab, he'll do it for free!"

Now we zoom forward to the exciting release of Zelda II. Let's compare the Japanese Zelda II commercial and the North American one.

Let's analyze what each of these games are saying about Zelda II.

Japanese:
- If you play this game, you will become Link.
- The lady who runs your corner store is a fucking wizard and has a portal to Hyrule. 
- Even the Japanese think Link looks like a girl.
- This game looks pretty fun. Ha! Ha! Ha!

North American:
- You will run around a lot screaming ZELDA! ZELDAAAAA!
- Mostly you will be in dark passages.
- Mostly you will fall down pits and people won't be able to help you.
- You will eventually end up pounding the screen in anguish and despair, praying your psychic angst will be enough to rouse the pixelated princess from her sleep so you can please sweet Jesus stop playing this game.

I really feel like the North American commercial captured the spirit of the game better.

Now we escape the 1980s and emerge in a gentler, kinder time - a time not so different from our own called the 1990s. With the disappearance of neon and leotard from the wardrobes of the youth, the world was finally cool enough to allow the SNES to appear from the void of quintessence.

Let's talk about Nintendo's advertising scheme for A Link to the Past. North Americans got this:

Apparently Link is a 40-year-old extra from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves who is also an Immortal Highlander-style. This has nothing to do with the game.

What about the Japanese commercial, you ask?

Dance party. Also, Link is still a chick. Maybe we've been missing something in translation all along over here. Basically, this is the greatest commercial ever made by anyone, and almost twenty years on I'm still waiting for Dance Dance Revolution Zelda Megamix seriously Nintendo email me and we can talk about it.

Fast forward three years later to 1993 and the first Zelda title for the Gameboy, Link's Awakening. Nintendo had to do something awesome. Something revolutionary. Something...

...With, um, scary puppets. Well, it certainly is...modern. 

Nintendo America decided to take a leaf out of Nintendo Japan's book and go with a rapping dude to advertise the game, proving two things forever: that Nintendo was hip with the kids, and that Japanese people are just really better at rap than North Americans are.

So, that takes us up to the awkward Zelda gap years, spanning from 1993-1998. This seems like a natural gap to leave you with these enjoyable little nuggets of gamer history until next time.