The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

• 1. Introduction

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  The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening reached players in 1993 as the first Zelda adventure ever made for a handheld console. Nintendo developed and published it for the Game Boy, a machine with a monochrome screen that could go anywhere its owner went.

  The hero begins this adventure in an odd position. Link is stranded on Koholint Island, a small, isolated landmass far from the kingdom the series is known for, and he has no obvious way home.

  The island is crowded with secrets, strange neighbors, and visitors from other Nintendo worlds. Three questions run underneath it. How did a project nobody had officially requested grow into one of the most admired games on the system? Why did its makers steer a famous series away from its usual ground? And what is Koholint, really?

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• 2. The Afterschool Club

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  Programmer Kazuaki Morita started the whole thing without permission. He had one of the first Game Boy development kits, and he used it to build a Zelda-like game, simply to find out what the hardware could do.

  Colleagues from the Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development division began joining him after hours. To them the effort felt like an "afterschool club." The experiments soon started to look promising.

  Then came 1991 and the Super NES release of A Link to the Past. Director Takashi Tezuka asked for permission to make a handheld Zelda, and he intended it as a port of that game. It evolved into an original project instead. Most of the A Link to the Past team reassembled for it, and the work took one and a half years.

  Shigeru Miyamoto produced the game, yet he gave the staff no creative input. He did play it as a tester, and his opinions strongly shaped the second half of development.

  Masanao Arimoto and Shigefumi Hino designed the characters, while Yoichi Kotabe worked as illustrator. Arimoto drew every picture in the game except the opening and the ending. Yasahisa Yamamura designed the dungeons, from the rooms and routes to the placement of enemies.

  The music came from three people: Minako Hamano, Kozue Ishikawa, and Kazumi Totaka. Hamano and Ishikawa were working on their first game project. Totaka also handled the sound programming and every sound effect.

  The staff credits theme, "Yume o Miru Shima e," was later arranged for orchestra by Yuka Tsujiyoko. It was performed at the Orchestral Game Music Concert 3 in 1993. A remix of the "Tal Tal Heights" theme later turned up in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and has returned in later Smash games.

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• 3. A Parody of Zelda

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  Tezuka gave scriptwriter Kensuke Tanabe a curious instruction: leave out Princess Zelda, the Triforce relic, and the land of Hyrule. Tezuka wanted a spin-off, not another standard entry.

  Tanabe had written for A Link to the Past, and he joined this project early. His answer to the restrictions was an island with a massive egg resting on top of a mountain.

  That image had been waiting a long time. Tanabe originally meant the idea of a world ending when a giant egg breaks on a mountaintop for A Link to the Past. He badly wanted to see it in a game, and Koholint finally gave it a home as the basic concept.

  Yoshiaki Koizumi, who had already helped with the plot of A Link to the Past, came aboard later. He was responsible for the main story. He also supplied the idea that the island exists in a dream, and he conceived how villagers talk to Link.

  Series producer Eiji Aonuma later described it as the first Zelda game with a proper plot. He credited that to Koizumi's romanticism.

  Tezuka remembered the loose, free-form process differently. To him it felt as though the team was making a "parody of The Legend of Zelda" rather than a real Zelda game. That freedom produced unrestrained content, including cameo appearances that nobody had authorized.

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• 4. Twin Peaks on Koholint

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  Tezuka wanted Koholint to feel like the American television series Twin Peaks, another small town full of unusual people. He suggested the characters be written as "suspicious types." The theme carried over into later Zelda titles.

  Tanabe created the "odd" residents. He was put in charge of the subevents of the story and wrote almost all of the dialogue, apart from the lines spoken by the owl and the Wind Fish.

  The connection to the show was not purely a matter of mood. Back in 1990, Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost had met a Nintendo engineer to talk about a Twin Peaks video game. They discussed how the inspiration of Twin Peaks could help expand the Zelda universe.

  Some of the island's characters fill practical roles. Ulrira is a shy old man who gives Link advice and directions, and he does it exclusively by telephone. Little children explain mechanics such as saving, then admit they do not understand the advice they are giving.

  Visitors from other games wander in as well. Wart, Yoshi, and Kirby all make appearances. So do Dr. Wright, renamed Mr. Write, from the Super NES version of SimCity, and the exiled prince Richard from The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Chomp, an enemy from the Mario series, got in because a programmer gave Link the ability to grab it and take it for a walk. Goombas and Piranha Plants from Super Mario Bros. appear in underground side-scrolling sections. Link can land on them or attack them in the usual way, and the two methods yield different bonuses.

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• 5. The Dream of the Wind Fish

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  A storm at sea destroys Link's boat. He had been traveling to other countries to train for further threats after the events of A Link to the Past. The wreck leaves him on the shore of Koholint, and Marin carries him to the house of her father, Tarin.

  Marin is fascinated by Link and the outside world. She tells him wishfully that if she were a seagull, she would leave and travel across the sea.

  Once Link recovers his sword, a mysterious owl delivers the terms of his escape. He must wake the Wind Fish, Koholint's whale-like guardian. The Wind Fish lies dreaming in a giant egg on top of Mt. Tamaranch, and only the eight Instruments of the Sirens can rouse it.

  On the hunt for the sixth instrument, Link enters the Ancient Ruins. A mural there describes the reality of the island: it is merely a dream world created by the Wind Fish. The owl then dismisses this as a rumor, adding that only the Wind Fish knows the truth.

  Nightmare creatures roam the island and block his path. They want to rule the Wind Fish's dreamworld for themselves.

  With all eight instruments in hand, Link climbs Mt. Tamaranch and plays the Ballad of the Wind Fish. The egg breaks open. Inside waits the last evil being, a Nightmare that takes the form of Ganon and other enemies from Link's past. Its final transformation is "DethI," a cyclopean, dual-tentacled Shadow.

  After Link defeats it, the owl reveals itself as the spirit of the Wind Fish, who confirms that Koholint is all his dream. Link plays the ballad once more. He and the Wind Fish awaken, and the island and everyone on it slowly disappear.

  Link finds himself lying on driftwood from his ship in the middle of the ocean, with the Wind Fish flying overhead. A player who never lost a life sees one last image after the credits: Marin, flying.

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• 6. Borrowed and Invented Tools

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  Two buttons, A and B, carry the whole inventory of Link's Awakening. The player can assign any item to either one, a scheme shared with Ultima: Runes of Virtue, which came out two years earlier. In the Zelda series, it was the first time the two buttons could hold different items, and that made richer puzzles and item combinations possible.

  Link can also jump here. No overhead-perspective Zelda had allowed that before, and it enables sidescrolling sequences like those in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

  Items found in dungeons and through conversations expand what Link can do. Some open up places that were previously unreachable, and some are needed to enter and finish a dungeon.

  The dungeons steadily grow larger and harder. Each ends with a "Nightmare" boss that changes form from dungeon to dungeon and gets tougher every time. Winning earns heart containers and one of the eight instruments. When every heart is empty, the game restarts at the last doorway the character entered.

  Stealing from the shop carries a lasting cost. The character's name changes to "THIEF" for the rest of the game, and the shopkeeper knocks him out on his next visit.

  Side activities fill the margins. Hidden "secret seashells" reward the player with a powerful sword once 20 are found; it fires energy beams when Link is at full health, much like the sword in the original The Legend of Zelda.

  The game also introduced the trading sequence to the series. A character takes one item and hands back another, which can be traded onward to someone else. Tezuka compared it to the Japanese Straw Millionaire folktale, in which a person trades up from a piece of straw to something of greater value. Most sequels reused the concept.

  Fishing and learning songs on an ocarina first appeared here too. Morita's fishing minigame reappeared in Ocarina of Time, where the ocarina is central. Aonuma called Link's Awakening the "quintessential isometric Zelda game," and he said Ocarina of Time would have been very different if this game had not followed A Link to the Past.

  Tezuka went further. He said he prefers it over A Link to the Past, because he enjoyed the challenge of building a similar game on lower-specced hardware.

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• 7. Selling the Pocket Zelda

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  For the North American launch, Nintendo sponsored the Zelda Whistle Stop Tour, a three-day cross-country train competition. Select players raced against the clock to finish the game. The event was meant to show off the Game Boy's battery life and portability, which mattered a great deal for a portable Zelda. The company's own magazine, Nintendo Power, ran a guide to the first three areas in its July 1993 issue.

  In June 1993, the game topped the Famitsu sales chart in Japan. In August, it became the top-selling Game Boy game in North America. It helped lift Game Boy sales by 13 percent in 1993, making it one of Nintendo's most profitable years in North America up to that point.

  It stayed on bestseller lists for more than 90 months and was re-released in the Player's Choice series. By 2004 it had sold 3.83 million units.

  Critics were warm. The game holds an average score of 90% on the aggregate site GameRankings. Four reviewers at Electronic Gaming Monthly weighed in; two called it "probably the best" and "by far one of the most involving and fun games" for the system.

  Looking back, Electronic Gaming Monthly writer Jeremy Parish named it the "best Game Boy game ever" and joked about forgiving one of those "It's all a dream!" fakeouts. Game Informer's Ben Reeves ranked it the third best Game Boy game. Chip Carter of The Washington Post declared that Nintendo had created a "legend that fits in the palm of your hand." A writer for the Mainichi Shimbun enjoyed the music and story.

  The complaints centered on the controls and the monochrome graphics. Some critics found the screen hard to read, and Carter and Bill Provick of the Ottawa Citizen found the two-button scheme awkward, since they had to switch items on almost every screen. Critic William Burrill called the visuals "nothing to write home about." Katherine Monk of the Vancouver Sun called the dialogue "stilted," but found the rest "ever-surprising."

  Awards followed. At the Golden Joystick Awards it won Game of the Year (handheld) and Best Advert of the Year. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it Best Game Boy Game of 1993. In 1997 that magazine ranked it the 28th best console video game of all time.

  IGN's staff placed it 78th on their own list of the greatest games. They argued that "Link's Awakening proves that they can offer just as rich a gameplay experience as their console counterparts." The same list's readers ranked it 40th.

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• 8. Color and Return

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  In 1998, Nintendo reissued the game as The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX to promote the launch of the Game Boy Color. Its graphics were fully colorized, and it remained backward compatible with the original Game Boy.

  DX added an optional dungeon with enemies and puzzles built around color. For that reason, earlier non-color Game Boy models cannot enter it. After finishing the dungeon, the player chooses a red tunic that increases attack or a blue tunic that increases defense.

  A camera shop also appears. Once Link visits it, its owner turns up in certain places, and the player can take twelve photos. Those can be viewed at the shop or printed with the Game Boy Printer accessory.

  Tezuka returned as project supervisor, with Yoshinori Tsuchiyama directing. Nobuo Matsumiya worked with Tsuchiyama on script changes, such as hint messages added to the boss battles. Yuichi Ozaki wrote the music for the new dungeon, based on Kondo's dungeon theme from the original The Legend of Zelda.

  Reviews of DX were positive, with an average of 91% on GameRankings from ten outlets. Adam Cleveland of IGN gave it a perfect score. Cameron Davis of GameSpot applauded the camera support and the care taken with color. Samantha Amjadali of The Daily Telegraph wrote that color made the game easier, by cutting deaths caused by indistinct graphics. Total Games thought the new content added little, yet found the game addictive.

  DX sold another 2.22 million units. In June 2011 it came to the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console and became the top-selling downloadable 3DS game of that year. It sold over 338,700 copies, an estimated US$2.3 million in gross revenue.

  In July 2013, North American Club Nintendo members with "elite status" could redeem DX as a free gift. Grezzo developed a high-definition remake for the Nintendo Switch, released on the 20th of September 2019.

  The story of re-releases did not end there. On the 12th of November 2021, the game arrived in a Zelda-themed Game & Watch console, alongside The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

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