The Legend of Zelda (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo's game about a boy named Link, began, by its designer's own account, with a lake. Shigeru Miyamoto remembered it this way: "When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it." He said that travelling the country without a map taught him what an adventure feels like. He wanted players to feel the same thing. How do you turn one stumbled-upon lake into a world of hundreds of screens? Why did the designers want this game to be the opposite of another project running beside it? Where did the princess get her name? And why did a message in a game manual leave so many players blowing into the wrong object?

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• 2. Mario's Opposite

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  Development began in the fall of 1984, and the same team was building Super Mario Bros. at the same moment. The designers tried to keep the two sets of ideas apart. Super Mario Bros. would be linear, with action in a strict sequence. The Legend of Zelda would be the reverse. Miyamoto took charge of deciding which ideas belonged to Zelda and which belonged to Mario. In Mario he had already played down the high score, favoring simply finishing the game. That attitude carried over to Zelda.

  Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka directed and designed the game, and the closing credits list them as S. Miyahon and Ten Ten. Miyamoto also produced it, while Tezuka wrote the story and script. Much of the programming came from Toshihiko Nakago of Nintendo's partner SRD. Keiji Terui, a screenwriter on anime such as Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball, wrote the backstory printed in the manual. He drew on conflicts in medieval Europe.

  A non-linear design meant players had to work out their own next step. According to Miyamoto, players in Japan were confused and struggled to find their way through the multi-path dungeons. Early designs would have handed Link a sword from the very start. Miyamoto chose instead to make players listen to the old man who gives them the sword. He also hoped players would talk to each other and trade ideas to find hidden secrets. He saw this as a new form of gaming communication. Miyamoto said the same idea later became the inspiration for Animal Crossing, a game based solely on communication.

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• 3. Borrowed Pieces

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  As a boy near Kyoto, Miyamoto explored the nearby fields, woods and caves, and he wanted players to feel some of that limitless wonder. He described the game as a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer". Another memory shaped the dungeons. He had once been lost in the maze of sliding doors in his family's home in Sonobe, and Zelda's labyrinths recreate that feeling.

  Other games left their mark too. Miyamoto said he was influenced by The Black Onyx and Ultima, because he found it fun to watch a character grow stronger. Tezuka wrote the setting as a fairytale adventure. He took inspiration from fantasy books such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

  According to Miyamoto, early concepts looked very different. The Triforce fragments were electronic circuits, and the game moved between the past and the future. The hero was named Link because he would connect the two. The finished game, like those that followed, settled into a more traditional medieval world of swords and sorcery.

  The princess took her name from real life. Miyamoto explained: "Zelda was the wife of famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using it for the very first title."

  Koji Kondo, credited as Konchan, composed the game's five music tracks. He had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme, since its speed suited the game perfectly. In November 1985, late in development, he learned that the piece was not yet in the public domain under Japanese law. Kondo wrote a new arrangement of the overworld theme within one day. That melody became an iconic motif that echoes through later entries in the series.

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• 4. Inside Hyrule

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  The prologue that plays after the title screen begins with an army led by Ganon, the prince of darkness, invading the small kingdom of Hyrule. Ganon steals the Triforce of Power. To stop him taking the Triforce of Wisdom as well, Princess Zelda splits it into eight fragments and hides them in underground dungeons. Before Ganon kidnaps her, she orders her nursemaid Impa to find someone brave enough to save the kingdom. Henchmen surround the old woman as she wanders the land, and a young boy named Link rescues her.

  Link starts out with nothing but a small shield and travels across the overworld, a large outdoor map seen from overhead in flip-screen style. Heart containers raise his life meter, and magic rings reduce the damage enemies deal. Most of these items sit in caves scattered across the land. Some are hidden under rocks, trees and waterfalls, and merchants sell others. Rupees, the in-game currency, buy equipment, information and upgrades.

  Eight large dungeons hide the pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom. Each is a maze of rooms linked by doors and secret passages, often blocked by monsters that must be beaten or by blocks that must be pushed. Inside, Link finds a boomerang that stuns enemies and fetches distant items. He also finds a magical recorder that teleports him to the entrance of any dungeon he has already cleared. With all eight pieces, Link reaches Ganon's hideout in Death Mountain and destroys him with the Silver Arrow. The Triforce of Power remains in Ganon's ashes. Link returns it, along with the restored Triforce of Wisdom, to the rescued Zelda.

  The world holds 600 separate scenes. The overworld accounts for more than 97 of them, and nine multi-scene labyrinths make up the underworld. Some dungeons have secret entrances that players find only by wandering freely once they own the right items. That freedom offers many routes, and it is even possible to reach the final boss without the sword. Within the official Zelda Chronology, the game falls in the Era of Decline, when Hyrule has shrunk to a small kingdom and its people live in caves.

  Finishing the game unlocks a harder version called the Second Quest. It changes many locations and secrets, adds stronger enemies and brings entirely distinct dungeons. Harder replays were not unique to Zelda, but few games offered completely different levels on a second playthrough.

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• 5. Disk, Cartridge, Microphone

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  In February 1986, The Legend of Zelda became the launch game for the Family Computer's new Disk System. It arrived alongside re-releases of Super Mario Bros., Tennis, Baseball, Golf, Soccer and Mah-Jong. The Disk Card format offered 128 kilobytes, a size that would have been expensive on a cartridge. Rewritable disks saved progress, so players did not need passwords. The system's extra sound channel supplied certain effects, most notably Link's sword beam at full health and the roars and growls of bosses and defeated enemies.

  The Famicom supported only 256 tiles, so all the in-game text used a single syllabary, katakana. Katakana normally serves mainly for foreign words that supplement those written in hiragana and kanji.

  The Famicom controller had a built-in microphone, which the NES controller lacked. In Japan, players could defeat the large-eared, rabbit-like monster Pols Voice by blowing or shouting at it. The U.S. instruction manual still says this enemy "hates loud noise". That line led many players to think the recorder could be used as a weapon. It has no effect on Pols Voice.

  The cartridge version used the MMC1 model of the Memory Management Controller chip. Its bank-switching allowed larger games than before, and its battery-powered RAM let NES players save their data for the first time. Sound effects had to be reworked for this release, which used the Famicom's PCM channel. The US version was one of the first games to carry an internal battery for saving.

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• 6. The Fun Club

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  When Nintendo published the game in North America, the box had a small cutaway that revealed a gold-colored cartridge. The release came more than a year after Japan. Nintendo of America worked to hold on to its fans. Anyone who bought a game and mailed in the warranty card joined the Fun Club and received a newsletter of four, then eight, and eventually 32 pages. Seven hundred copies of the first issue went out free, and the number grew as the list of names grew.

  From the success of magazines in Japan, Nintendo knew that game tips were prized. Players liked the bimonthly newsletter's crossword puzzles and jokes, but they valued the game secrets most. Zelda, with its hidden rooms, secret keys and passageways, was one of the complicated games for which the Fun Club offered tips. By early 1988, membership passed one million. That prompted Minoru Arakawa, then president of Nintendo of America, to start Nintendo Power magazine.

  Bill White, director of advertising and public relations, oversaw one of the first big commercials, the market introduction for Zelda. Nintendo had few products, so it made only a few commercials a year and aimed for high quality. A single commercial could cost as much as US$5 million, four or five times what most companies spent. In the Zelda spot, a wiry-haired, nerdy man played by John Kassir walks through the dark making goofy noises. He yells out the names of enemies and screams for Zelda. The ad drew a great deal of attention in the advertising industry.

  When Nintendo Power published its first issue, its player poll "Top 30" put Zelda in first place, and the game kept dominating that list into the early 1990s.

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• 7. Verdict and Influence

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  On its first day in Japan, the game sold 1 million copies, and it reached 1.69 million on the Famicom Disk System. Reviewers at Famicom Hisshoubon all complimented it. One wrote that the big map, many weapons and many secrets kept it from growing dull. The only negative comment was about the price of 15,000 Japanese yen. The first Famitsu Best Hit Game Awards gave Zelda the prize for best background music and ranked it third for Game of the Year, just below Dragon Quest and Gradius.

  In North America, the game topped the charts on release. It was the first NES game to sell over 1 million cartridges in the United States, during 1987. Sales passed 2 million by 1988 and 3 million by 1990, reaching 6.51 million copies worldwide. Computer Entertainer called it "an incredibly rich, deep gaming experience that goes far beyond the typical cartridge game". Computer Gaming World named it the best adventure of 1988. By 1990 the magazine implied that Zelda had persuaded computer RPG players, who had dismissed consoles as "mere arcade toys", to buy an NES. In Britain, a reviewer for Computer and Video Games criticized the price of 39 pounds.

  Miyamoto did not call it an RPG. He described it as "a real-time adventure game" and said he was "not interested in systems where everything in the game is decided by stats and numbers". What mattered to him was to "preserve as much of that 'live' feeling as possible". Even so, the game became the template for the action role-playing genre, despite lacking experience points. Its commercial success helped lay groundwork for non-linear fantasy games such as Crystalis, Soul Blazer, Square's Seiken Densetsu series, Alundra and Brave Fencer Musashi. Clones also appeared.

  In 2009, Game Informer called it "no less than the greatest game of all time" and "ahead of its time by years if not decades". In 1997, Next Generation listed the North American release among the "Five Greatest Game Packages of All Time", citing its full color manual and fold-out map. In 2016, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted it into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

  The series name also escaped games. An arcade system board called the Triforce, developed jointly by Namco, Sega and Nintendo, had its first games in 2002. The name referenced Zelda and symbolized the three companies' involvement.

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• 8. Many Lives

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  In 1986, Myojo Foods released a version of the game as a promotion for its charumera noodles, titled Zelda no Densetsu: Teikyō Charumera. It plays identically to the original, yet it is one of the rarest games on the second-hand collector's market. Copies have sold for over US$1000.

  The Satellaview, a satellite modem add-on for the Super Famicom, broadcast something far stranger. From the 6th of August to the 2nd of September 1995, Nintendo and the St.GIGA satellite radio network broadcast BS Zelda no Densetsu in four weekly installments. It was the first Satellaview game with a "SoundLink" soundtrack. Every few minutes, a voice actor broadcasting live from the St.GIGA studio gave players plot and gameplay clues. Rebroadcasts ran until January 1997. A second remixed map, BS Zelda no Densetsu MAP 2, aired between the 30th of December 1995 and the 6th of January 1996 as the equivalent of the Second Quest. It was rebroadcast only once, in March 1996.

  The sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, reached Japan for the Famicom Disk System less than a year after the original. The first game returned to the Famicom as a cartridge in 1994, with the number 1 added to the title screen. It then appeared inside the GameCube game Animal Crossing in 2001, in The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition in 2003, and on the Game Boy Advance in 2004 with The Adventure of Link. The Wii Virtual Console version came in 2006, and a timed demo appeared in Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008. Several of these versions corrected unusual grammar in the original, most notably in the intro story.

  Nintendo celebrated the game's 25th anniversary in 2011, much as it had marked Super Mario Bros. the year before. The Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console release came in September 2011 through the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador program. The Nintendo Classics service added the game on the 18th of September 2018, followed by a "Living the life of luxury!" edition on the 10th of October that grants all equipment and extra items at the start. The game was also one of 30 included in the NES Classic Edition. In November 2021, a Zelda edition of the Game & Watch console added a modified version of the original game Vermin, with Link replacing Mr. Game and Watch.

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