VIP Video was the kind of small business rental place that I hear so many people talk about when giving game memories. It was the local "we're cheaper than Blockbuster" store and was the first place I was ever able to rent a game from. When we were handed the membership card, the first thing I did was make a line to the video game section and look at what they had. In the early days, I was restricted to what I got on Christmas, and what my cousins owned. So getting to see the "new" games on the wall was really exciting. The first to catch my eye was:
I was almost as happy as I had ever been when I saw that. Legend of Zelda was a game I did not yet own, but I knew plenty of people that did. I was always restricted to maybe an hour of playing it because I only got to play it when I visited relatives. Now here was part 2, something I did not know even existed, and for all I knew none of these people with Zelda 1 did either. There was no deliberation, I took it home.
When I got home... holy crap what was this? The game was like a map without monsters... wait, so you go into the thing and suddenly we're... Mario style? No, more like NES Rambo style. Well maybe it is still good. I was hopeful for my first rental, so I tried. Wow. Wow. This game was bad. This game was so bad, I started inspecting things like the cartridge. Sure it was gold, but I think it was an off color gold, not exactly like Zelda was, right?
I came to the conclusion that the game was a bootleg. Not a true sequel by the people that made the original I know it is hard today to understand how I could think that, but back in the late 80's and early 90's, we could still get the shady junk from the far east. You can now go and download roms of things like Sonic the Hedgehog, hacked into another game and sold as a real Sonic game for the NES. They come on real cartridges. There was also the Tengen games that were not licensed to be sold on the NES and were real sketchy games as well. So that's what I concluded, must be a bootleg.
It wasn't. But thankfully my next run in with Zelda, the SNES "Link to the Past" was exactly what I expected in a Zelda sequel.
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