The second Zelda game was a side-scrolling action RPG.
#THE SILENT SWORDSMAN ZELDA SERIES#
Though Zelda is thought of as a formulaic franchise today, it was still an extremely experimental series at the turn of the century. Majora’s Mask is a strange game that has launched even stranger subcultures and found itself resurfacing, again and again, in unusual and sometimes horrific contexts. And in quiet corners of the web, on blogs and Tumblr pages and DeviantArt accounts, people are using art inspired by this game to express their inner turmoil. On YouTube, the game’s most subtly bizarre elements have been reinterpreted in more explicit ways to create creepypastas, a narrative genre that originated in message boards and email chains in the late 2000s and now serves as the ghost stories of the internet. On Zelda fan sites, gamers plumb the game’s every pixel for symbolism about death or the nature of morality. But online, it’s evolved into something more than a game. In the real world, Majora’s Mask was met with a question mark, then quickly put aside as gamers moved on to the newly launched PlayStation 2. But its peculiar mix of mystery, horror, and apocalyptic dread - all spun through the eyes of a 10-year-old kid and his child adversary - helped it hit a note that few video games even today are able to: It felt strikingly human. As a highly unconventional follow-up to what is often hailed as the best game of all time, Majora’s Mask was always doomed to be something of a black sheep in the Zelda franchise. Rather than having franchise hero Link save Princess Zelda and the land of Hyrule again, the Nintendo 64 title traps him in a bizarro universe known as Termina and gives him three days to stop the moon from crashing into the world and killing everyone. Video games, in particular, have become fertile ground for cult followings, and there is perhaps no game that fits the criteria for cult better than 2000’s The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. On the internet, you can obsess over anything - especially if it’s weird, unsettling, or tragic. And the types of media worthy of intense fixation have expanded dramatically. Today, the gathering place for cult followers has moved from the midnight circuit to message boards, blogs, and social networks. “So the Rocky Horrors, the Pink Flamingos, the Texas Chainsaw Massacres, all of those cult classics wouldn’t have been cult without that alternative exhibition forum.”
#THE SILENT SWORDSMAN ZELDA MOVIE#
“Whereas you had the multiplex for mainstream, you classically had the midnight movie circuit for cult,” says Xavier Mendik, professor of cult cinema studies at Birmingham City University. The Midnight Movie, and the modern interpretation of a “cult following,” was born.Ĭult films had existed before El Topo, but the Midnight Movie presented a new opportunity for like-minded fans to gather, discuss theories about a film, and publicly demonstrate their fandom. The theater began selling out its 600-seat venue every night and played the film for more than a year. Despite its low odds of success, El Topo found an unlikely but unwavering audience at the Elgin. The movie was El Topo, a violent, surrealist Western by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky that had previously been exhibited only in museums. In 1970, the Elgin Theater in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood decided to screen a strange movie at a strange time.