In the ever-evolving landscape of gaming, few franchises have captured the imaginations of players as profoundly as The Legend of Zelda, with its rich tapestry of heroic quests in enchanted realms. From its humble beginnings on the NES, created by the visionary Shigeru Miyamoto, the franchise shaped the gaming landscape for decades to come, spawning sequels, spin-offs and countless imitators. But how did it get from concept to console?
By 1984, Nintendo was already enjoying success with their first home console the Famicom, later released overseas as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Keen to push boundaries, the company began looking into a means to increase the scope of their games without developing a wholly new game system, seemingly finding an answer in floppy discs.
While designing this new disc system, Nintendo knew that they would need to create a flagship title for the new product to make it a must-buy. When considering who would develop this new game, only one man came to mind – the one responsible for their smash hit Donkey Kong and the one who was currently working on Super Mario Bros for the NES at the same time. Kyoto-born game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, only just in his 30s, was once again ready to prove his creative prowess, though this time it would be on a level that nobody at Nintendo could have predicted.
“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”- Shigeru Miyamoto, from the book Game Over by David Sheff
When working on this new concept, the central theme that Miyamoto and fellow lead designer Takashi Tezuka wanted to capture was the feeling of adventure, embarking onto new horizons, similar to the team behind the game itself. Fittingly, these early design documents were labelled simply as “adventure title”, with the early premise being about an adventurer that would travel between the past and the future, acting as a “link” between the two worlds.
Though eventually dropped for a more standard fantasy setting inspired by Tezuka’s love of The Lord of The Rings series, his early concept not only provided the protagonist’s name Link, but would also go on to inspire concepts found in later Zelda titles, including A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. While many concepts would be toyed with early in development, such as a dungeon creator and a first-person perspective, these ideas would be ultimately scrapped as Miyamoto drifted towards a new vision, one that would be the antithesis of everything he had worked on with Mario.
“I wanted the game to feel like a miniature garden you could fit inside your drawer” – Shigeru Miyamoto
Super Mario Bros had a very linear objective typical of many games at the time, simply moving from point A to point B along a set path while avoiding obstacles. With Zelda, Miyamoto dreamed of a vast, expansive overworld that the players would explore with no clearly laid-out objective, conjuring up memories of his childhood home in Sonobe, Kyoto (now the city of Nantan) in which he would run through the various sliding doors and find himself lost, as if in a maze. This would go on to inspire the dungeon layouts of Zelda, as well as the puzzle aspect that is so core to its gameplay.
To Miyamoto, it was important that almost every part of the game rewarded player exploration, to the point that players wouldn’t even begin with many of the weapons and would have to locate them within the world through various hints and clues. Though initially concerned with Miyamoto’s ambitious design goals, the team slowly began to see the merit in his concepts, citing that the game’s replayability would be dramatically increased, and the open ended nature of it would encourage children to talk about their discoveries with friends, as if drawing out a map to buried treasure.
“We basically decided to do a real-time adventure game”- Takashi Tezuka
These complex maps would be drawn out on paper, then connected together like a jigsaw puzzle before being recreated within the game by the development team. In order to save on space within the disc system, the map was split in half and further developed into the primary game, and the additional “second quest” unlocked after beating it.
One aspect of development almost unheard of in modern gaming is that Zelda never had any internal playtesters. So confident was Miyamoto with his vision of what the game would be, he didn’t feel the need to ask others whether or not it “worked”, as it already worked for him.
In spite of this, he was not too proud to not admit when certain concepts for the game didn’t pan out in the ways he wanted due to the limited nature of the system they were designing for, and many complex sequences would be removed from the game long before its final release. For example, during an entrance to a dungeon previously hidden by water, Miyamoto had actually intended for the water to slowly disappear on screen when you arrived. He would later have to settle for a simple recolouring of the water to make it appear like sand.
When rethinking the storyline from the original concept, Miyamoto wanted to keep things simple, evoking classic fairy tale stories of a warrior rescuing a princess, similar to Mario saving Princess Toadstool in Zelda’s sister project. Keji Terui, a prolific Japanese screenwriter responsible for many episodes of the Dragonball anime series was brought in to create a storybook tie-in for the game that would better explain its story without adding the complexity to the game itself. This concept of a storybook would be re-imagined within the game’s manual, introducing the antagonist Ganon, as well as the princess that Link was attempting to save.
When coming up with a name for this character, Miyamoto was encouraged to look into the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife was called Zelda. This name struck a chord with Miyamoto, and would ultimately go on to christen not only the heroine, but the entire series itself after her.
While Miyamoto’s absolute control over the project was present throughout every aspect of game design, he was especially keen for the music of the series to capture his creative vision. Koji Kondo, a pioneering figure in video game sound design was tasked in bringing Zelda’s music to life, with Miyamoto wanting the game’s score to embody the mystery of exploration, going into dungeons and instantly being made aware of the staggering difference in location and mood.
In order to capture this, Kondo employed a technique he had previously used in the production of Super Mario Bros, giving underground areas a slower, more ominous soundtrack than the more upbeat surface levels to emphasise the difference in environment.
What has become one of the most famous sounds in all of video gaming, the puzzle jingle, makes its first appearance within this game, with Kondo wanting it to signal simple euphoria for making progress. When listening to the jingle, the player instantly gets the same feeling of accomplishment Miyamoto had strived so hard to make the game embody, as well as a feeling of anticipation for what may come next. Open one door, walk through and suddenly you’re surrounded by other doors.
“’It shouldn’t just be ‘pretty’. I want it to evoke something more mysterious’, he told me” – Koji Kondo, on Miyamoto’s instructions for the sound design.
Though Kondo’s score was remarkable, it resulted in a now-infamous incident that nearly destroyed the game’s development, remembered by Nintendo staff as the “copyright incident”. Kondo, a massive fan of Maurice Ravel had initially intended Zelda’s title screen to use the composer’s most famous work Bolero as its backing theme, noting that it perfectly matched the crawl of the game’s title screen. At the time, Kondo believed the track was within public domain, as Japanese law ruled that music entered free use 50 years after its composer’s death.
But after two years of development and just before the game was ready to go into proper production, they discovered it had been exactly 49 years and 11 months since Ravel’s death, meaning they were still liable. The now timeless opening theme for The Legend of Zelda that has been ever-present throughout the series was recorded by a desperate Konjo in a single day which saw him working into the early hours of the next morning.
Despite its many setbacks, The Legend of Zelda was a huge success for Nintendo on release, released in Japan as part of the Disc system and as a regular cartridge within its international release due to advances within cartridge design that would ultimately result in the Disc system becoming superfluous in the NES’ western release. In order to make it stand out among the dozens of other titles as a true testament to its groundbreaking technology, Zelda was given a gold cartridge that would instantly make it stand out on any gamer’s shelf. Its combined sales would go on to exceed 6.5 million units, and would become responsible for the creation of the Nintendo Power magazine in order to popularise hints and tips for the game.
Today, Zelda is rightly known as the progenitor of the action-adventure genre of video games and has gone on to inspire an endless cavalcade of games that evoke its sense of scope that is condensed into such a small cartridge. Though spawning many sequels and spin-off titles over the years, The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of The Wild and its sequel Tears Of The Kingdom are the closest in Miyamoto’s eyes to reviving the original sense of wonder he wished for the original game to capture, acting as true spiritual successors despite the many decades between their releases.