Game Grumps Wind Waker Series 10th Anniversary: 10 Years of Unfinished Business
Disclaimer: I am not an employee or a representative of Game Grumps, all views and opinions presented in this piece are my own.
The 10th anniversary movie edit of the Game Grumps The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker playthrough, which you may or may not have just watched, is the first time I’ve edited anything dedicated to Wind Waker. This is notable since I’ve been making Game Grumps fan compilations since 2012, and in that time most major longform series have been covered in some fashion with very few failing to make the cut. Infamous clips from Wind Waker have appeared in themed compilations and Zelda related commissions for the official channel that I’ve worked on, such as the Joy Pendant debacle and the selfie with Ganondorf, but truth be told these clips weren’t hard to seek out and never required me to sit down and put time into watching the entire playthrough. Still, the Grumps Wind Waker series has felt familar to me despite never watching it for the past ten years, the osmosis effect from the community and my own comments sections has been inescapable, to the point where it’s always been obvious there’s something significant about the series that goes deeper than people enjoying any of the comedy. It’s been my hottest slab of Unfinished Business for ten years, and the tenth anniversary of the debut episode felt like the perfect opportunity to close up shop.
Sadly there’s no interesting or, to be honest, good reason for why I didn’t make a contemporary Wind Waker compilation in 2013 or 2014; I made myself a suspicious promise that I was going to play the game myself first. I didn’t even have a Wii U console yet when the first Grumps episode of Wind Waker (the 2013 HD remaster) was uploaded to Youtube, but I told myself I probably would have one at some point, right? Back then I was under no pretense about approaching any of this “professionally” nor had I built up enough of a reputation yet to feel like I would be disappointing people by not covering the Wind Waker series via a compilation. Six months later I did buy a Wii U for my birthday and making good on my promise to noone in particular the first game I bought was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. I booted it up that night, played for about two hours and after doing a couple of laps of Windfall Island not talking to people I lost interest and turned it off promising myself I’d get back to it sometime. This is the promise that I didn’t keep.
There wasn’t any one thing wrong with Wind Waker for me, in retrospect it may have been more an issue with my life at the time being so uneventful that I wasn’t in the right state of mind to hang out with such a chill game. Soon after this I managed to get a hold of Super Mario 3D World, where I grabbed the biggest bag of Doritos I could find, sank six feet deep into my metamorphical bean bag chair and devoured that entire goofball game as every character in under a week. I made a compilation of the Super Mario 3D World Game Grumps series in 2014, I watched many of those episodes long before I ever touched the game, I still had not seen a single episode of The Wind Waker.
Back here in 2023, I’m working with Game Grumps on an official basis to create movie style longform edits of classic series so they can re-emerge on the channel in a new form. During one of my “oh my god this happened 10 years ago…and I was already an adult!” freakout sessions that every person in their early 30s has on a regular basis it occured to me that the 10th anniversary of the Wind Waker series was coming up, and I realised that Wind Waker simply had to be one of the movie edits that went up this year. After proposing this idea to the team and pushing hard for it to have a specific spot in the upload schedule to sync up with the anniversary, knowing full well what a pain in the arse that is to organise, I get the green light and it’s time to get cooking. Only there was still the matter of my old promise; ten years later I still hadn’t played Wind Waker.
My Wii U was already retired to a cosy spot under my bed years ago, I dug it out of its grave and hooked it up terrified there was something wrong as I watchined it painfully churn through an all too long startup and boot sequence…then I remembered the Wii U was always like that. I picked up my surprisingly comfortable Wii U tablet controller, which is the special Zelda bundle one that’s stylish enough to somewhat counteract the Fisher Price vibe the controller usually gives off, and I committed then and there that I would complete the entire game before I started work on the Grumps edit. This wasn’t only for silly sentimental reasons; I went into every other movie edit I’ve done for the Game Grumps channel with some familiarity with the series I was working on, which helps identify which segments are essentials to keep which leads to better (and easier) edits. Outside of three fondly remembered segments and the fact there was an hour long episode dedicated to the horrors of the Wind Temple I didn’t know anything about Wind Waker or the playthrough.
I completed The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in three chunky sittings and enjoyed the experience. 3D Zeldas from this era often feel laborious to me through constant item switching for basic functions and errands cosplaying as adventures, but Wind Waker smooths this out with a easy-going vibe and a literal ocean full of charm. Much of the game’s dungeon design is still guilty of presenting you a parade of locked doors with keys placed neatly in front of them, but for the most part those keys feel good to turn. The Wii U’s welcome enhancement of transforming the Great Sea into a singular interconnected space with no loading transitions does expose the fact the scale of the game’s open world is about on par with a moderately-sized golf course with a similar population count, but the sailing still hits home as a landmark feature of the game and the music is an all-timer track. It’s an adorable, breezy lil gem of a game that I didn’t die once during my playthrough, so I’m appreciative to the Game Grumps playthrough for showing me what the “Game Over” screen looks like (although I only needed to see it once, Arin).
The true ace in the hole for Wind Waker and the source of its endurance in the hearts of fans is its personality. The art style is a top five all-time videogame aesthetic, absolutely no question about it do not leave a comment do not subscribe. Even the HD version’s full-tilt bloom slider as if the Hyrule’s planet is orbited by a giant ringlight fails to drown this out. The incarnation of Princess Zelda is a fun, proactive character with buckets of personality…or at least she is until the moment we find out she is Zelda, at which point she gets a double-barrel blast from Homer Simpson’s makeup gun and forced into hiding in a dumpster under the sea only to end up kidnapped anyway, oh well. The real star of the show though is this game’s Link, or “Buttlet” as he was named in the Game Grumps playthrough, is also oozing with personality to the point where it’s difficult to compare any other Link in the series to him. His huge range of emotions and ever changing comedic facial expresses also contributed to another reason I’ve never had to watch the Wind Waker series before, as even when I needed footage for the “Link Showdown” video on the Grumps channel it took me about 20 minutes to find enough usable footage to express his personality for the pre-match trailer skimming through episodes at random.
This may come as a huge surprise to those not old enough to remember, but the initial reveal of Wind Waker was not met with the Nintendo Direct livetweet levels of screaming; a lot of people were mad. People didn’t want this cutesy, cartoon baby stuff, they were big boys now and they wanted those polygons to be pumped into Zelda: Lord of the Rings. Expectations were shunted in this direction by a 2000 Gamecube tech demo that showed a pseudo-realistic Link squaring off with Ganondorf, which today looks more like a Cool 3D World video that something that would have ever appeared in an official Nintendo product, but wobbly-ass plastic 3D was IN at the time and many of the fans would accept nothing less. For some reason, this reminds me of another time where fans rebelled against a sudden change which they slowly learned to embrace over time…
Dan Avidan joined Game Grumps founder Arin Hanson as cohost of the show in June 2013, replacing the original cohost JonTron (Jon Jafari). This change came out of nowhere and had a richter scale shattering impact on the fanbase. Back then Game Grumps was a twice-per-day show that thrived on its “just two guys on a couch” vibe, so to the audience replacing one of the hosts was akin to losing a friend, only with a pre-determined new friend sitting in their old seat and touching their stuff. Nobody was sure what to think, some fans bailed from the channel on the spot and never came back, but most were at least willing to see where this was going. Fortunately, Dan’s first recording session went well and many were won over early by a “fine day for mayoring”, but this still ushered in an awkard transitional phase for the channel.
Arin and Dan obviously had chemistry off the bat personally but it took a while to polish their on-screen rapport. There’s still good moments in Dan’s first six months on the channel and early Grumps still has its charms through anarchic energy from two funny people recording at their house and still figuring all this out, but going back to videos from that era today you can’t help but notice the missing ten years of experience. Arin is often overreaching for comedic bits that aren’t quite cooked, and Dan was prone to running off on personal tangents with little prompting possibly as a way to put them into a conversational safe space as he hadn’t settled into the format of a Let’s Play yet, or maybe even out of anxiety that he was sitting in someone else’s seat. Even in the Wind Waker playthrough, which was almost a year into the Dan era by the time it was completed, there’s a layer of anxiety to the series that hasn’t existed on the channel in years.
Longform series were not commonplace for the show yet, and during Wind Waker the Grumps express concern multiple times that the audience might not be interested in watching an entire game of this scale and there was a constant pressure to make hasty progress. Much of the sea commuting and progress boosting sidequests are cut out of the original episodes entirely, and much of the story essential dialogue is skipped over in fear of losing the audience’s attention. Note that the Wind Waker series is barely 18 hours long in total, contrast with today where at time of writing they’ve already played Tears of the Kingdom for over double that amount of time and they’re (maybe) about halfway through the game, indictating that there’s been a major shift in the relationship between the Grumps and the audience.
There is a moment in the Wind Waker playthrough where you can feel this shift; the infamous Episode 19 where both Dan and Arin have an intimate, honest conversation about their previous mental health struggles and their positive experiences with therapy. This is the episode that I still see people bringing up in comments and message boards to this day as their all time favourite episode and there’s barely any jokes in the entire video. Looking back now, it’s obvious this was a landmark moment in Grumps history and marks the era where Dan was truly accepted by the fanbase as their own. People come to Grumps for the commentary, the comedy and sometimes for the stories, but what this episode cemented is that people come to Game Grumps for the Game Grumps. With no words the Wind Waker series made a contract with the audience that Arin and Dan would eventually play every Zelda game on the channel, because the audience genuinely likes them as people and wants to join them on all these journeys, unedited with boring commutes, Game Over screens and tedious fetch quests all included.
In the years following the Wind Waker series there were concerns about whether let’s playing as a business would even have a future legally. Nintendo tried to get a piece of the pie at one point with their content partnership program, and there were fears the copyright hammer from major games publishers would dunk the whole genre off Youtube due to fictitious fears of lost sales. What these people didn’t understand then, and hopefully understand now, is the games have never been the show; the people playing them are the show. While it’s true that the algorithms that script our lives will funnel many creators into playing specific games over others for visibility and advertising purposes because the bad guys already won and We Live In Hell ; but nobody can bear to watch a gamer commentary video for more than two minutes if they can’t stand the host. Game Grumps has always understood the hosts were the draw and not the games, but the embrace they received from the audience for that slab of pure unguarded honesty in Wind Waker Episode 19 was perhaps the tipping point for Arin and Dan feeling confident in themselves and their chemistry that the audience accepted them as they were, and that they could be funny as themselves rather than having to “create content”.
See, this movie edit isn’t just a Wind Waker 10th Anniversary celebration, it’s also secretly been a Dan 10th Anniversary celebration this whole time! Let’s see someone put a spoiler tag on that twist.
I heard about Episode 19 of Wind Waker at the time and got the gist of what it was about but again I never sat down and watched the whole episode. I can’t help but wonder how I would have reacted to it at the time. Back in June 2013 I was one of the few fans who accepted Dan before his first episode ever aired. I subscribed to the Ninja Sex Party channel when they were only at about 10,000 subscribers and I remember the precise moment I smashed that button; it was the part in the No Reason Boner music video where Dan falls to his knees on the basketball court and the guy running past trips over his dong. With material like that I knew the channel was going to be in safe hands going forward. So with that early acceptance, it was possible that some emotional honesty from a man who I respected for singing about dinosaurs in space would have got through to me back then.
During Easter 2011 I had a complete emotional breakdown, I barely have any coherent memories left from before this incident. They’re all in there somewhere, but it’s all books on a shelf and I’m not looking.
Throughout 2012, I managed to build up the best circle of friends I had ever had in my life up. All I had to do was avoid alienating these people and I would have good folks in my life for the foreseeable future.
By the end of 2013, I was more alone that I’ve ever been before or since.
I made my first Game Grumps compilation in 2012 for no other reason than I was studying journalism at university and I wanted to learn how to edit video, so I smashed some random clips together in Windows Movie Maker and declared that Good Enough. I graduated in Summer 2013, I didn’t go to my graduation, I don’t even remember what my grade was, I moved in with my dad who lived in the most remote little cottage possible. There was one shop over a mile away, two buses that passed through the village and only one other house within 100 feet with no streetlights, so if you went outside at night you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face. Everything from my previous life disappeared with nothing to replace it…except for those silly Game Grumps compilations I had been making that were beginning to get positive reactions. So I kept doing it. Now I’ve been doing it so long it’s efficiently integrated into my other work and life commitments, and since I have so few memories from before I started it’s now hard to imagine ever not doing it.
The years out in that little cottage were uneventful and unfulfilling, but while it was far too long that time in isolation did offer the space and peace required for a hard mental reset. My time in that cottage was certainly too quiet to appreciate the easy-going vibes of Wind Waker as any form of escapism, and maybe I never watched Episode 19 of the Game Grumps playthrough because instinctively I knew I wasn’t ready to listen to its message yet. Ten years later I have completed The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I have watched the Game Grumps playthrough in full including Episode 19, and while I left that message in its bottle for all this I’m still inspired by it today that replicating some of that emotional honesty might boost my own confidence that I’ll be accepted as I am.
My Wii U is now packed up and returned to its mattress-topped grave, where it will probably remain forever unless someone in this house gets a sudden craving for some Game & Wario. The Wii U console had (let’s be nice) a solid two years of quality life in it, but that limited period of relevance interconnects those experiences with a hyperspecific period in my life which happens to include the also popular Game Grumps playthroughs of Sonic Boom, Devil’s Third and Super Mario Maker. Looking back, the Wii U was a surprisingly significant part of Grumps history, but with all its main features turned off and its best games evacuated to greener pastures, firing up the console today feels like a window into an unreplicable past. Those of us who were there remember it though, and the console will always remind me of the longest, most uneventful time of my life which quietly prepared me for the best time of my life (so far). If you wanted to be a weirdo, you could say it’s a Link to the Past…alright that’s enough let’s take this home — -
Massive thanks to the Game Grumps team for continuing to give me opportunities to use my otherwise useless expertise for something worthwhile on their channel. Happy 10th Anniversary to the Wind Waker series, Dan on Game Grumps, and to me finally fulfilling a long forgotten obligation.
