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Born on the Game Boy, Part 4: Link's Awakening, Marin and the Wind Fish

Marcel Pflug

1 day ago

3 min read

You might expect the first portable Zelda to be a cautious thing, a trimmed-down Hyrule squeezed onto a smaller screen. Instead it turned out to be one of the boldest and most personal games in the whole series, set somewhere entirely new and populated by characters who exist nowhere else. Part four of Born on the Game Boy is about The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and the original world it dreamed up.

Game Boy Link's Awakening cartridge in the collection — Koholint Island, a world that exists only in a dream.

A Zelda with no Hyrule

Link's Awakening, released in 1993, famously grew out of an after-hours passion project among Nintendo staff, and that freedom shows. There is no Hyrule here, no Princess Zelda to rescue, no Ganon to defeat. Instead, Link is shipwrecked and washes up on Koholint Island, a small, self-contained world with its own villages, characters and secrets. To get home he must wake the island's sleeping guardian, and the game slowly, gently reveals the catch: Koholint and everyone on it exist only within a dream, and waking the guardian means the whole island, and everyone Link has come to care about, will simply cease to be. It is a startlingly melancholy idea for a handheld adventure, and it gives the game an emotional weight the series had never reached before.

Game Boy The Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening cartridge and box — The Zelda that invented its own world, and then let it go.

Because this world was built from scratch rather than borrowed, it also gave the team room to play. Koholint is dotted with affectionate cameos from other Nintendo games, from Goombas and Chain Chomps to a certain frog prince borrowed from another Game Boy title, all reframed as part of a dream. But the cameos are the garnish. The real invention is the island's own cast, and three of them in particular have outlived the cartridge entirely.

Marin, Tarin and the dream of the Wind Fish

The first face Link sees is Marin, the girl who finds him washed up on the beach and nurses him back to health. She looks strikingly like Princess Zelda, but she is her own character: warm, curious, and quietly aching to leave the little island and see the wider world, a wish that becomes heartbreaking once you understand what Koholint really is. She sings the Ballad of the Wind Fish, the melody that threads through the whole game, and she has remained a beloved figure ever since, remembered far more fondly than most one-game characters and returning in cameos and later remakes.

Her father, Tarin, debuts alongside her, a good-natured, slightly bumbling man whose round face and moustache are a clear, affectionate nod to Mario. And at the centre of it all sleeps the Wind Fish, the enormous whale-like being dreaming the entire island into existence, whose awakening is the game's goal and its quiet tragedy. All three, Marin, Tarin and the Wind Fish, appeared here for the first time, invented for a Game Boy cartridge rather than carried over from any console Zelda.

The game's reputation has only grown with time. It was reissued in colour later in the Game Boy's life and lovingly remade for a modern console decades on, introducing Marin and the Wind Fish to players who were not even born when the original appeared. That endurance is the point of this series: a story and a cast created for the small grey handheld proved strong enough to last for generations. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.