A while back I had an idle thought about how many gamers out there who were raised on the imaginative stories of games like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. now have children of their own and are telling those tales to today's kids as classic bedtime stories.  Is "Once upon a time in the land of Hyrule..." really so far-fetched?  Maybe not, as one of the NeoGAF forum posters who goes by the name of GhostlyJoe explains.

"Daddy?"

"Shhhhh." I cradled her in the crook of my arm and gently pushed her head against my shoulder. She'll go right back to sleep, I thought.

"Daddy, what is this?"

"It's Zelda," I said. "It's a story about a little boy named link and a princess named Zelda, and they go on a long adventure."

So I started reading the storybook opening to her in soft voice, stopping on occasion to explain about the lost kingdom of Hyrule and the hero Link and the evil Gannondorf. I could see right away she was fascinated. As a veteran of Disney films, she was quite familiar with the archetypes at work in the Wind Waker, and, as I had suspected, she took right to the story.

There are so many grand stories in video gaming that go unread and unknown by the non-gaming public, and that's a shame because while many people have no interest in picking up a controller, they do love a good story.  As Taishi of NeoGAF says, "Passing on a lifetime of games that we grew up with is our duty to the world."  If everybody knew about the Mushroom Kingdom, then maybe the world would be a better place.  Or, at the very least, more kids would go to sleep with a smile.