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.
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As evident from early concept art, players 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.