Then came Ocarina of Time. OK, it had been out for a couple of years by the time I finally played it. Regardless, I thought it was the best game I ever played. It still might be. About mid-way through the game Link is given an item called The Stone of Agony. It's shaped exactly like a Rumble Pak and, you guessed it, causes the controller to vibrate every time you're near a secret.

"Those bastards at Nintendo" was my reaction. They were taunting me "Sure, you don't need the Rumble Pak to finish the game. You can play without out it if you don't want to find all the secrets. But you want to find everything, don't you?" I surrendered a small piece of my free will that day and bought a Nintendo Rumble Pak.

I popped it into the controller and immediately noticed a difference. When the Ocarina of Time title loaded there was a slight vibration as Epona galloped across the screen. It started light and built as she ran closer. "OK, that's kinda cool" I thought. As I started playing the novelty wore off though. Every hit, bomb blast, fall, bump into a tree, and of course horse ride jostled the controller. It got old pretty fast. Yet, I stuck with it. After all, I just had to find all the secrets in the game. Over time it became like a background noise, something that was always there that I largely ignored.

Yet, I never removed it when playing other games. My original rationale for buying it was because Ocarina of Time semi-required it. Either I was too lazy or just reasoned that it somehow made the games "better". I never considered that developers just added rumble support because everyone else was doing it.

Hell, I was writing code at Mercator Software at the time and saw other developers do the same (albeit in a non-gaming industry). I remember someone wanting to add SOAP to one of our programs just because it was the latest new buzz technology. Maybe I thought game companies, with their notoriously aggressive deadlines, would avoid adding unnecessary features like this. Whatever the case, I now accepted the rumble feature to be a standard piece of the gaming experience.