I asked Santa for Majora's Mask.
I was a kid. I wrote the letter. I meant it. And somehow, he delivered — cartridge, manual, and everything. I remember the box. I remember the weight of it. I remember putting it in the N64 and hearing that opening music and feeling like I was stepping into something that wasn't quite for me but was somehow mine anyway.
The moon. That moon. I'm a grown adult and that moon still creeps me out. That's design. That's intention. Miyamoto's team built something that was supposed to make you feel wrong, feel like time was running out, feel like the world was ending — and it worked on a child who had no critical vocabulary for what was happening to him. I just knew something felt different about this game.
The N64 era was unrepeatable and I'll die on that hill.
It was the first generation of 3D games built by people who had no reference points for what 3D games were supposed to be. There were no conventions. No genre templates. They were just figuring it out. Mario 64 invented the 3D platformer in real time. Ocarina of Time invented the targeting system that every action-adventure game still uses. GoldenEye invented the console FPS. They were building the vocabulary while writing the sentence.
That energy — that genuine discovery — is gone from mainstream gaming now. Replaced by refinement. Which is fine. Refinement produces polished things. But it doesn't produce Majora's Mask.
My collection has grown over the years. I've got real carts. I've got full ROM sets. I've got a RetroAchievements account where I'm slowly going back and finishing games I never completed as a kid. It's not nostalgia tourism. It's archaeology. Going back to understand what these games actually were, separate from what childhood memory turned them into.
Sometimes a game holds up and is genuinely brilliant. Sometimes it was always kind of broken and your 8-year-old brain filled in the gaps with imagination.
Both outcomes are interesting.
The N64 years were when games learned they could make you feel things. I haven't forgotten that lesson.