by Kathryn Hemmann
It’s difficult to remember a time before internet use was widespread. For better or worse, you can look up just about anything these days. Back in the 1990s, though, rumors were absolute. You couldn’t prove any given whisper you heard on the playground; but, then again, you couldn’t disprove it either.
For me, Ocarina of Time wasn’t so much a video game as it was an uncharted wilderness. I wasn’t old enough to play the game properly, and I had to ask older kids for help. I didn’t understand their advice any better than I understood the game itself, but a passing comment made by a friend’s brother stuck with me: the chickens will kill you.
He didn’t offer any explanation, so my mind filled in the blanks with the worst possible scenarios. The seemingly idyllic Kakariko Village became a place of horror, filled as it was with free-roaming fluffy white chickens. I imagined them to be hypervigilant as they waited for an opportunity to dart forward and tear Link to shreds.
There are plenty of monsters in Ocarina of Time, but they all made a certain type of sense. If there were giant spiders in the dungeons, then of course there were. Where else are giant spiders supposed to live? If there were desiccated zombies dragging their broken limbs through the dark sludge at the bottom of the village well, that was fine with me. Is a subterranean torture chamber not a reasonable place to find zombies?
But those chickens really scared me. They just seemed so normal, and that was the problem. What were they hiding? What sort of malice lurked behind their vacant little eyes? How would one of these fat waddling birds manage to kill a human child?
A decade later, I watched a video showing what happens if the player attacks a chicken enough times to make it angry. The bird squawks to the heavens, summoning a flurry of its fellows to descend on Link, clucking and cooing as they chase him around the screen. It’s very cute and extremely silly.
The absurdity of the situation managed to dispel whatever lingering fear I might have harbored regarding the killer chickens. Still, I’m haunted by the memory of taking a playground rumor so seriously that it gave me nightmares, and to this day I make a point of giving video game animals the respect they deserve.
Kathryn Hemmann lives at the center of a labyrinth of bookshelves in Philadelphia, where they write stories about the gentle horrors and hidden mysteries of everyday life. They post about comics and video games as @kathrynthehuman.