“Rumors are spreading that the moon is falling, but you can breathe easier as long as I’m in town,” says a swordsman who can be found in the opening minutes of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
Like other Clock Town residents you meet early on, the swordsman expresses disbelief at an increasing number of “the weak and frightened” who believe that the moon above is about to slowly crush the world. But his sense of superiority vanishes as the earth quakes just seconds before lunar impact. The swordsman retreats to the storeroom behind his dojo, shaking with fear. “I’m scared!” he cries out. “I can’t take it! I don’t want to die!”
Majora’s Mask, which was released 25 years ago on the Nintendo 64, is filled with such unsettling encounters. The sixth entry in The Legend of Zelda franchise expanded the scope of narrative storytelling in video games by packing side quests with emotional depth.
Characters were not just asking the player to fetch items. They were asking for help reconnecting with estranged family members, finding a missing groom and learning to accept death. Players went through the same three days on repeat, completing small tasks to improve the lives of Clock Town residents who were in various stages of denial, anger, bargaining and depression.
Nintendo now spends upward of six years developing new games for its marquee franchises, but executives gave Majora’s Mask designers a one-year deadline after the successful release of Ocarina of Time.
The designers, who are Japanese, borrowed assets and character models from their previous game, pursuing an idea concocted at a wedding party of friends who got married shortly after the 1998 missile crisis, when North Korea fired a rocket across Japanese territory.
Majora’s Mask is filled with similarly frightening circumstances, including a couple doomed to marry on the same day a moon crashes into Earth.
Over the past 25 years, many players have theorized that the inhabitants of Clock Town and the surrounding region of Termina are already dead — or even that the entire game is a hallucinated purgatory for its protagonist, Link, who sees familiar people and places remixed in his brain during his final minutes.
Majora’s Mask turned the concept of a side quest on its head, asking players to imagine if the characters populating the background of their adventures had lives of their own. Completing their requests granted players access to masks that sometimes transformed Link’s appearance and abilities. A handful were central to the plot and used in gameplay, each with a mandatory scene of Link screaming as the mask contorts to his face.
Why does Link scream? Nintendo answered that question 15 years later under the guise of the Happy Mask Salesman, an otherworldly character who players meet early in Majora’s Mask.
“It’s very simple!” the salesman wrote online. “The boundless sorrow surrounding each mask comes rushing inside the wearer when they put it on, so the urge to scream is quite understandable, really.”
Note: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was released in North America in October 2000.
Produced by Alice Fang, Maridelis Morales Rosado and Rumsey Taylor.
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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