The Legend of Zelda

Overview

The Legend of Zelda is the 1986 Nintendo adventure in which a boy named Link crosses the ruined kingdom of Hyrule, recovers the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom from eight underground labyrinths, and descends into Death Mountain to destroy Ganon, the prince of darkness, and rescue Princess Zelda. It was designed and directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, and it came out in Japan on February 21, 1986, as a launch title for the Famicom Disk System. North America received it on the NES on August 22, 1987, with Europe following in November.

Nintendo calls it an action-adventure, and Miyamoto himself refused the RPG label — he preferred "a real-time adventure game," with no experience levels and no statistics deciding the outcome of a sword swing. Yet its open overworld, hidden dungeons, and power that grows through found equipment rather than reflexes alone made it the acknowledged forerunner of the action RPG, and one of the pillars of the Japanese line of console role-playing.

Origins

Development began in the fall of 1984, alongside Super Mario Bros., and the two projects were deliberately pulled apart: Mario would be linear, a strict sequence of obstacles; Zelda would be the opposite, a world that forced players to decide what to do next. Miyamoto has said he wanted to give players "a miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer," and traced the feeling to his childhood around Kyoto, stumbling on a lake while hiking and getting lost among the sliding doors of his family's house in Sonobe.

He also looked at computer role-playing games. Miyamoto cited The Black Onyx — Henk Rogers's 1984 Japanese RPG — and Ultima as influences, saying he enjoyed the way a character grew stronger. Tezuka, who wrote the story and script, framed it as a fairy-tale adventure and drew on fantasy literature including J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Early concepts mixed in technology and time travel, with Triforce pieces as electronic circuits; the finished game settled into straightforward sword and sorcery. The princess was named after Zelda Fitzgerald, because Miyamoto liked the sound of the name.

The Famicom Disk System made the scale possible. Its disks held 128 kilobytes, expensive to match on cartridge at the time, and they could be rewritten, so progress was saved to the disk instead of through passwords. The Japanese version even used the Famicom controller's microphone: shouting defeats the rabbit-eared Pols Voice. For the West, Nintendo moved the game to a cartridge with an MMC1 memory-management chip and battery-backed RAM, making it one of the first home console games to save progress on the cartridge itself.

How it plays

Seen from overhead, Link moves screen by screen across an overworld of forests, lakes, graveyards and mountains. He begins with only a small shield; in the first cave an old man hands him a sword with the line "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." Everything after that is discovery. Caves hide merchants, gamblers and heart containers that lengthen Link's life meter; bombs blow open cracked walls; a candle burns bushes to reveal stairways. Rupees, the currency, buy rings, potions and arrows.

The nine dungeons are mazes of rooms linked by locked doors, pushable blocks and secret passages, each guarded by a boss and each yielding an item — boomerang, raft, ladder, magical recorder — that opens new parts of the map. The order is loose: several labyrinths can be tackled in different sequences, and it is even possible to finish without collecting the starting sword. Completing the game unlocks the "Second Quest," a harder remix with rearranged secrets and entirely different dungeons, in an era when few games offered new levels on a second playthrough.

Miyamoto resisted making it easier when Japanese testers got lost. Instead he wanted players to swap discoveries with one another, turning the hunt for hidden rooms into a playground conversation — the start of Zelda's culture of shared secrets.

Reception & impact

The game sold 1 million copies in Japan on its first day and 1.69 million on the Disk System there. In the United States it became the first NES game to sell more than a million cartridges in 1987, passed 2 million by 1988 and 3 million by 1990, and eventually reached about 6.51 million worldwide. Computer Gaming World named it the best adventure of 1988 and later suggested it had persuaded computer RPG players who dismissed consoles as "mere arcade toys" to buy an NES. Sandy Petersen reviewed it in Dragon #198 in 1993, awarding four stars out of five.

Its hidden rooms also helped create Nintendo's American fan media. Tips were the most prized content of the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter, and by early 1988 the club's membership passed a million, which led Nintendo of America to launch Nintendo Power.

Legacy

The Legend of Zelda established Link, Zelda, Ganon, Impa and the Triforce, and began one of Nintendo's longest-running series; Zelda II: The Adventure of Link followed in Japan on January 21, 1987. Its freedom, fantasy setting and action combat became a model for the action RPG, and its success helped pave the way for games such as Square's Seiken Densetsu line, including Secret of Mana. It sits beside Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy as a founding game of Japanese console fantasy, and beside Hydlide as an early experiment in real-time role-play. GameSpot counted it among the most influential games ever made for its non-linear open world and battery saving, and in 2016 The Strong National Museum of Play inducted it into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Did you know?

The Japanese logo carries the subtitle "THE HYRULE FANTASY." Nintendo later broadcast a remixed version, BS Zelda no Densetsu, over the Satellaview satellite service for the Super Famicom starting in August 1995.