The origins of The Legend of Zelda goes all
the way back to 1984, when Nintendo was experiencing massive success with their very first home
console, the Famicom, better known as the NES outside of Japan. To capitalize on its popularity, Nintendo
started looking for a way to create bigger and better games without having to introduce
a brand new console. They quickly found their solution while looking
into the home computer market. Floppy disks were quickly becoming the new
standard for storing data and provided twice the storage space compared to cartridges at
the time. Additionally, they were cheaper to produce,
offered better sound quality and allowed players to save their game directly onto the disk. A big step forward from having to rely on
writing down passwords. The Japanese company therefore decided to
create their own version of the floppy disk and named it Disk Card. Famicom consoles of course weren’t compatible
with this new media format so Nintendo started developing an add-on called the Famicom Disk
System. This way, the millions of people that already
owned the base console, could simply upgrade it and enjoy the new exclusive games. Nintendo knew they had to develop a flagship
title that could showcase the Disk System’s capabilities and to accomplish this, the company
looked towards one of their most talented developers, Shigeru Miyamoto, who had recently
proven himself by directing the Donkey Kong arcade games. Miyamoto agreed to help create the Disk System’s
flagship title and teamed up with designer Takashi Tezuka. They were the only designers on the team and
produced all the sketches, concept art and pixel art. Shortly after starting development on Zelda,
both Miyamoto and Tezuka also began to work on Super Mario Bros. The main inspiration for The Legend of Zelda
came from the idea of capturing the essence of what it’s like to go on an adventure,
something Miyamoto remembers very well from his childhood. “As with the Mario series, I came up with
the concept for the Zelda series from my adventures as a child exploring the wide variety of places
around my home. There were plenty of caves and mountains. We didn't have that many toys to play with,
so I would make slingshots or use sticks and twigs to make puppets and keep myself amused. When I traveled around the country without
a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it
felt to go on an adventure like this.” The official design documents were aptly codenamed
“Adventure Title”. Miyamoto’s and Tezuka’s first idea for
a premise involved the game’s setting to be split between the future and the past. The team even imagined the fragments of the
Triforce as electronic microchips in order to better fit the technologically advanced
futuristic setting. The player would be able to time-travel and
serve as the “link” between both time periods, which is why they named the main
character Link. However, seeing Tezuka was a huge fan of fantasy
books, especially The Lord of The Rings, the premise and setting began to lean towards
something more medieval inspired. The first iteration of the actual gameplay
involved a two player mode where each player had to design their own labyrinth. Once completed, they could explore each other’s
creation. After creating a prototype, Miyamoto and Tezuka
agreed that the exploration aspect was a lot more fun than the building aspect. As a result, they shifted their focus towards
creating a more puzzle-oriented exploration game. The second iteration more closely resembled
the final product, although there was no overworld yet. Instead, players had to select a stage through
a first-person perspective and would instantly enter it. Miyamoto made a sketch of this concept and
an in-engine mockup was even developed using Family BASIC, a consumer product that made
it possible to create small programs and games for the Famicom. Miyamoto later confirmed the first-person
view was directly inspired by games like The Black Onyx and Ultima. Before we move on, I’d like to talk about
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were originally meant to mainly explore cave-like areas, which, as mentioned before, originated
from Miyamoto’s childhood memories when he ventured into many caves in the wider Kyoto
region. Early on during development, it was decided
that the game mechanics needed to be the polar opposite of those of Super Mario Bros. Mario
was all about getting from point A to point B in a very linear fashion and mostly required
good reflexes. In The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto wanted players
to think about where to go next and not hold their hand throughout the whole experience. This is one of the main reasons why the team
abandoned the idea of selecting a stage from a title screen and instead opted to create
a big overworld that connects all areas. Miyamoto wanted the game to feel like a “miniature
garden that players can put inside their drawer” and really emphasize the sense of going on
a big adventure with endless possibilities. This new direction did make the team very
nervous, as they were afraid gamers would quickly become bored and stressed out from
the game not telling them where to go or what to do. The new overworld inspired the developers
to design more than just caves and also add proper dungeons to the mix. The dungeon designs were once again inspired
by Miyamoto’s childhood, specifically his family home in Sonobe and remembers it as
being “a maze of sliding doors” that he frequently got lost in. Another good example of not holding the player’s
hand are some of the original designs where every player starts their journey with the
sword already in their inventory. When Miyamoto saw these designs, he decided
against it and instead came up with the idea of having to find and talk to the Old Man
NPC who only then gives you the sword. More of these sorts of riddles and puzzles
were added to the game and while the team realized not every player might pick up on
every clue and find every secret, they thought it might encourage people to share their discoveries
with friends and help them progress. Since both The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario
Bros. were being developed simultaneously, Miyamoto found himself labeling all their
ideas and concepts as either Mario ideas or Zelda ideas. There was only one idea that was shared between
both games: to place less value on earning a high score, which was very popular at the
time thanks to arcade machines, and instead offer more incentives to simply complete the
game. While Miyamoto and Tezuka had moved on from
the time-travel concept, they kept the name Link for the player character, although the
meaning behind it had changed. Link needed to increase immersion and connect,
or link players with the game. Miyamoto wanted there to be a strong relationship
between the one who holds the controller and the person who is on the screen. This is why the Hero of Hyrule starts out
as an ordinary young boy, as a way for the target audience to connect more closely to
the main character's coming-of-age tale. It’s also for this reason that Link never
speaks in The Legend of Zelda: Miyamoto wanted players to be able to feel as if they were
Link, and having a speaking protagonist would break this illusion. Even with the increased storage space of the
Famicom Disk System, Miyamoto and Tezuka were still very limited in regards to the use of
colors and the amount of pixels for a single character. They had to use clever tricks to make Link
recognizable on the screen. For instance, either Link’s shield or sword
are always visible and they gave him big ears and a long hat to make him stand out from
the background. It reminded them of a fairy character so they
went into the direction of an elf. Miyamoto, being a big Disney fan, also took
some inspiration from Peter Pan, specifically his green outfit. In early art examples, Link was depicted as
being right-handed, but in order to aid in the creation of the pixel art, he was altered
to be left-handed. The idea for Princess Zelda on the other hand
came from someone unexpected. Miyamoto knew he wanted the title to be “The
Legend of something”, but he had a hard time figuring out what that something should
be. That’s when the game’s PR planner said,
“Why don't you make a storybook for this game?". He suggested an illustrated story where Link
rescues a princess who is a timeless beauty with classic appeal, and mentioned famous
author F. Scott Fitzgerald whose wife’s name is Zelda. The PR planner suggested giving the princess
that name and Miyamoto ended up really liking it. The storybook idea would later take the shape
of the game’s detailed instruction manual. Nintendo enlisted the help of Keiji Terui,
a screenwriter who’s worked on animated shows like Dragon Ball. He wrote the backstory for the game’s characters
and the land of Hyrule, which was all included in the manual along with some artwork. Miyamoto’s most important condition was
that the story had to be immersive, but also easy to understand. Though he recognized the importance of a great
story, he feared a complicated plot could get in the way of the game being straightforward
and coherent. Terui was inspired by medieval European battles
while writing the backstory for the legend of the Triforce. Speaking of the Triforce, while most people
associate it with the Zelda series nowadays, the symbol originated almost a 1000 years
ago in medieval Japan. Around the 12th century, the Hōjō clan,
a powerful family that took control of Japan using politics, used a similar looking emblem
called the Mitsu uroko or "three scales". In the 1800s, the symbol was used as a publisher’s
seal and it’s currently still prominent in Japanese graphic design. As the team continued to build the world of
Hyrule, Miyamoto and Tezuka started encountering the limitations of the Famicom Disk hardware. Despite the best efforts of the team to work
around these limitations in creative ways, certain things needed to be scrapped entirely. An example of this is the level 7 dungeon
entrance: initially, the team had intended to have the water physically disappear when
it drained from the room. Instead they had to settle for simply changing
the color of the ground. Furthermore, the developers wanted players
to not only be able to burn down small trees, but also big ones. The team also encountered obstacles during
the creation of the dungeons. Graph paper was used to map out all the dungeons
and each square represented one room. Afterwards, the square pieces were laid out
like a jigsaw puzzle. Once Tezuka had completed the entire game’s
map, he handed all the pieces over to programmer Toshihiko Nakago who then closely recreated
the dungeons in the actual game. Unfortunately, Tezuka had made a mistake and
only used half of the dungeon pieces while creating the whole map. Luckily, Miyamoto said it looked good as is
and the team decided to use half of the memory that was still left to create the game’s
Second Quest, which is unlocked after completing the game. Composer Koji Kondo made sure the game’s
soundtrack wasn’t just pretty, but also evoked a sense of mystery, something Miyamoto
requested. Unfortunately, something so bad happened with
the soundtrack that the developers gave the incident its own name, The Copyright Incident. For most of the game’s development duration,
Kondo used Maurice Ravel’s musical piece “Boléro” for the title screen because
it perfectly matched with the speed of the opening crawl. In Japan, music usually enters the public
domain 50 years after the death of the composer and the team was sure they could use Ravel’s
music by now. However, just before the game was finished
and was set to go into production, they found out that it had been 49 years and 11 months
since Ravel’s death. With the copyright still intact, Kondo had
exactly one day to replace it with something new. He ended up writing a new arrangement of the
overworld theme overnight, which ended up becoming the iconic motif echoing throughout
the entire Zelda franchise. The team ended up working simultaneously on
Mario and Zelda for about seven months, which made for a very busy development journey. Once Mario was finished, Miyamoto and Tezuka
asked the Mario programmers to join them for The Legend of Zelda in a final programming
sprint, which Miyamoto admitted was very intense. During the entire development process of The
Legend of Zelda, the game was never beta tested by players. Miyamoto preferred to determine himself whether
or not the game worked, reasoning that if he enjoyed it, others would too. Miyamoto wanted players to experience kyokan:
for the players to feel about the game what the developers felt themselves while developing
it. In February 1986, after two years of development,
The Legend of Zelda was released in Japan. It received very positive reviews from critics
and sold one million copies on its first day of release. A total of 1.69 million copies were sold in
Japan alone. When the time came to release The Legend of
Zelda on the NES, it was no longer necessary to create its own Disk System ad-on. Not long after the release of the Famicom
Disk System, chips and cartridges had become much cheaper to produce which gave companies
the option to make cartridges with more memory, as well as built-in battery-powered RAM, making
it possible for players to save their progress. Therefore, Zelda could simply be ported to
an NES cartridge, although the lack of certain Famicom Disk System features did lead to small
differences. For example, due to the NES’s lack of an
extra sound channel, certain sound effects had to be altered, like Link's sword beam
at full health, roars and growls of dungeon bosses and those of defeated enemies. Additionally, the Famicom version took advantage
of the system’s second controller that comes with a built-in microphone, something the
NES controllers did not have. By talking into the controller, you’re able
to defeat the enemy Pols Voice. In the NES version, they’re not so easily
defeated. Funnily enough, the English version of the
manual wasn’t updated to reflect this and states Pols Voices hate loud noises, causing
confusion. Many players assumed the recorder item could
be used as a way to defeat them. The Legend of Zelda topped the global gaming
charts and became the first NES game to sell over one million copies in the United States. It went on to sell over 6.5 million units
worldwide. Together with Super Mario Bros, The Legend
of Zelda helped Nintendo to dominate the console game market and was re-released many times
over for multiple consoles. It served as a template for the action role-playing
genre and launched one of the biggest franchises in the history of gaming. The first Zelda was even used as inspiration
for Breath of The Wild and the developers went as far as creating a 2D prototype based
on the original game and used it to test out ideas for open-world gameplay mechanics. Breath of The Wild’s director said he wanted
to develop a game where the player could truly experience freedom and a sense of adventure
in the land of Hyrule, something that reminded him of Zelda on the NES. The Zelda franchise now counts numerous mainline
games and plenty of spin-offs. With Tears of The Kingdom’s recent success,
the Zelda franchise will undoubtedly continue to make its mark on the gaming industry and
fascinate players for many years to come.
