About This “Email” Blog

“Why Is it The Zelda Email Blog?”
Well, for that question, you’ve earned yourself a backstory! Yaaaaay!

About three years ago, a group of my friends got together and begged me to play a game that, as kids, they’d all known and loved – a game that, amidst all of the games I’d played in my own childhood, I had never played. That game? The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

I had been curious about it from some time before – even as a kid, when I didn’t really know how big of a deal Zelda really was. However, I’d never owned an N64, and as I became more acquainted with the puzzle-action premise, it just didn’t seem quite like my kind of game. So I’d passed it up for quite awhile.

Well, until then. Finally being convinced that I should try it, I downloaded it off of Virtual Console and onto my Wii, and started playing. I don’t often do anything just because other people recommend (or demand, depending on the person…) that I do (so much it’s a bit of a running gag/inside joke), but I was kind of curious to see what everybody had been talking about.

I’ve always been a writer, so I thought it would be fun to chronicle the beginning of my quest in the form of short emails that I’d send out to a bunch of my friends. Since they’d all played it, they’d know where I was, what I was going through, and -unknown to me – what I was about to go through. My intention was to create little stories and commentary about the game from the beginning in Kokiri Village up to arriving at Hyrule Castle, and then play through the rest of the game normally. Along with writing about the game, I took pictures of the screen, attaching those images to the email and then highlighting text to which the pictures corresponded. The file names were captions.

The whole thing was only going to be two emails long.
Only problem: It was a huge hit.

After those two emails, I got a massive influx of positive feedback and compliments. With those compliments, of course, came feverish demands for more emails!

So in the summer of ’09 (and for a little bit after), I wrote about my adventures from the beginning of the game, all the way to the end of the Shadow Temple; at that point, it finally became too much of a burden to finish the rest, and I left the series as it was.

But what started as a two email short series written for the fun of it turned into a long-running series enthusiastically describing my reactions and thoughts to the various levels, plot points, and events in the game, along with my own experiences.

Since then, I’ve had people here and there ask me about starting another series for a different Zelda game. Every once in awhile for the past three years, the email series would get brought up, and someone might ask “Why don’t you do another one of those?”

I decided awhile ago that if I did in fact do another series, I would use a blog instead of using emails – Yahoo Mail always liked to mess with the order of my attached pictures, and make things complicated and irritating in general. Also, in the time between the end of the series and now, I got a capture card. So instead of taking pictures of my screen, I can capture images directly from the TV screen. And finally, out of all the other Zelda games out currently, the one I’ve personally been most interested in is Wind Waker.

So now, in the summer of ’12 – again, having never played the game before – I start my second Zelda “email” series – The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker!

First Post >>