For the past quarter century, Anita Feng has been hand-crafting ocarinas, obscure musical instruments more familiar to ancient civilizations than to modern Americans.

These days, though, she doesn't have to explain to quite so many people what these glazed clay objects are. Her business is booming, thanks to Nintendo, which 2 1/2 months ago introduced what has become the fastest-selling video game ever, "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time."

In its first six weeks on the market, Redmond-based Nintendo of America sold nearly 2.5 million copies of Zelda. Gross sales were $150 million - well above receipts from Hollywood's most popular holiday feature, "A Bug's Life."

At the core of the Zelda story is the Ocarina of Time, described by Nintendo marketers as the "legendary musical instrument of power coveted by many but hidden to all but the most worthy."

Suddenly, millions of adolescents and young adults were punching the keys of their Nintendo 64 game consoles to play different tunes on the blue, egg-shaped flute that showed up on their TV screens.

Many of those game players wanted real ocarinas, and they found them on the "Anita's Ocarinas" Web site. Feng, who makes stoneware ocarinas in the basement of her split-level house in Issaquah, has stepped up production to keep up with the orders that are pouring in by e-mail, snail mail and phone.

She's getting so many orders that for the first time in her 25 years as a potter she may not bother to go to any craft fairs this year. She's so busy, she's had to suspend work on the book she's writing about ocarinas and her life as a craftsperson.

Feng, who works while her three children are in school, has never kept an exact count of how many ocarinas she makes. But she's now making about 60 a month, an increase of perhaps 50 percent. She's also shifted her product line to make fewer of the $16 to $20 four-hole instruments popular at craft fairs to the 10-hole ocarinas that resemble the flute in "Zelda" and sell for $30 to $40 each.

So far Feng is keeping up with orders, but she's concerned she may be overwhelmed if the pace of orders continues to rise.

"Zelda" remained the nation's top-selling video game in the first two weeks of January, although sales have slowed since the holiday season when Nintendo couldn't ship the game fast enough to keep it on store shelves.

Sales of ocarinas, meanwhile, still seem to be gathering steam. At Kennelly Keys Music in Bellevue Square, salesman Nathan Spicer said he had never received a request for an ocarina until last week. "Yesterday I got my first phone call," he said. "We ended up special ordering three yesterday. That's three more than we've ever ordered."

At Mills Music in Redmond, ocarina sales also were rare until the past two weeks, when the entire stock of six to eight instruments sold out, said manager Larry Baumgartner.

Plastic ocarinas sold by most music stores are a far cry from the concert-quality instruments produced by potters like Feng.

Throwing clay on a potter's wheel, Feng creates her painted flutes much the same way craftspeople have done for more than 6,000 years. Ocarinas, which make a rich, flutelike sound, are indigenous to India, China, Africa and Central and South America. Some of the early ones were shaped like birds, reptiles or other animals.

A wave of interest swept Europe after Aztecs from the New World demonstrated them in 1527 in the Spanish court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The ocarina (which means "little goose"in Italian) became a more serious instrument in the 1860s, when an Italian baker and musician, Giuseppe Donati, produced a 10-hole version with Western-style tuning.

The instrument is also known as the sweet potato, a name which, like the little goose, apparently derives from its egglike shape.

Feng, who grew up in a musical household, had learned to play the standard concert flute when her mother gave her a German-made ocarina. "It was love at first sight," she says.

The Feng family moved from the East Coast to Issaquah three years ago when her husband Nick accepted a job with Microsoft. (He now works for Universal Avionics in Redmond.) In 1995, the University of Akron published "Internal Strategies," a book of poetry by Anita Feng based on Nick's childhood experience of being sent to a re-education camp in Manchuria during China's Cultural Revolution.

Anita Feng makes standard ocarinas in the Donati style, simple four-hole necklace versions, and more complex double ocarinas that can play two notes simultaneously. One of a small number of ocarina makers in the world, she produces them in batches of 10 to 20 that take about a week to complete.

Feng's children are following in her musical footsteps. Her oldest child, Matty Noble, 16, plays fiddle in a folk ensemble called Balkanarama.

Feng's new customers tell her they want ocarinas that look and sound just like the one in "Zelda." She tells them they don't want one exactly like the video version; its finger holes are arranged in a pattern that's physically impossible to play.

"Zelda" fans generally choose the alto traditional ocarina. "It has the more magical, mystical sound," Feng explains.

For her, there is magic in the instrument. When she played an ocarina on a camping trip with her husband and three children on the Olympic Peninsula, a group of deer stood and listened until she finished playing.

At a craft fair, a man once stopped abruptly in front of her booth, startled to see an instrument that he said had been banned from his village in South America. "They outlawed it," he told her, "because the sound is so sad and so mournful that it provoked too many people to commit suicide."

Now Feng receives upbeat letters and e-mail messages from fans of both "Zelda" and the ocarina.

"I had no idea that they were real! I thought that they were an instrument of legend," one wrote.

"This will be my first ocarina ever, and I'm very excited to be getting one," a child wrote in pencil. "Please send it to me as soon as you possibly can. I'm very eager to learn to play."

For those notes, Feng is grateful to Nintendo and the music-loving designer of "Zelda," Japan's Shigeru Miyamoto.

"It's definitely gotten a lot of kids interested in music in this backwards way, about the magic of music," says Feng. "They think there are magic powers. They're right. There is magic, but it doesn't have to do with dungeons and castles and demons. It has to do with being a person."

Keith Ervin's phone: 206-515-5632. E-mail: kervin@seattletimes.com