(The Cartridge Lit blog.)
While the tone of both songs is mournful, the story of their unlikely marriage strikes me as comedy, not tragedy. Something about the combination of the raspy masculine wound-licking in “Hard Times” and the bright cartoonish snowboarding in the Ice Cap Zone stages is deeply funny and strangely satisfying.
Underground, of course, is a synonym for cool—out of the mainstream, not quite suitable for polite society. The worlds of video games are often underground, quite literally: Mario’s sewers and Link’s dungeons and Samus’s extraterrestrial underworlds. Playing video games in the real world may require a descent—into Mom’s basement, for instance.
GoldenEye, for a generation of millennial gamers, came during the middle school/high school/college years. It’s more violent and gory, obviously, than the cute cartoony SMB3. And yet it also came out just before Columbine and just before 9/11—the sort of last moment of our collective innocence.
A number of Nintendo’s main franchises have roots in horror films. We get Mario via Donkey Kong, which is of course via King Kong. And we get Metroid via Alien: the boss Ridley is a nod to Ridley Scott; Mother Brain is analogous to Mother, the Nostromo’s onboard computer; the parallels between Samus and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are not negligible.
It’s a song of not knowing what to do with what you’ve just encountered. No matter how obviously meaningful the thing in front of you appears, there is no way you can learn its meaning. Not yet. It’s a tease, a feeling Zelda fans at least tolerate and likely love.
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