The Legend of Zelda is one of the most famous and successful game series from Nintendo. This year is the 40th anniversary of the original Legend of Zelda, and to celebrate today I’m going to look into some of the development secrets of the original; what went on behind the scenes, early concepts, plus some lesser known secrets from the original Legend of Zelda.

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Two-player Dungeon Creator

The Legend of Zelda dates back to 1984, while Super Mario Bros was in development. Shigeru Miyamoto began design work on a second game in parallel. Early concepts for Zelda were about two players creating dungeons, and then players would explore each others creations. However, it turned out exploring the dungeons was more fun, so the team began to rethink their approach.

Opposite of Mario

As the Nintendo team began to rethink their approach, Miyamoto wanted the Legend of Zelda to be the polar opposite of Super Mario Bros. Mario was linear and made it very clear for what to do next, Miyamoto wanted Zelda to provoke players into thinking what to do, and where to go. The same team that developed Super Mario Bros worked on the Legend of Zelda, and they started brainstorming ideas. Here’s Miyamoto, talking to Superplay Magazine.

“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.”

Early designs and inspiration

The early designs for Nintendo’s new game was code named “Adventure title”. At first the developers had the hero entering a dungeon right from the title screen, similar to Black Oynx, which Miyamoto would cite as inspiration, alongside Ultima. Miyamoto’s childhood of exploring caves was weaved into this design, along with other inspirations popular in Japan at the time including The Tower of Druaga. The ideas of exploring caves and dungeons, all connected by a vast green land would blend together in the early prototypes for the Legend of Zelda.

Here’s Tezuka describing what the team were trying to achieve “We basically decided to do a real-time adventure game. No one wants to do physical things like pushing and pulling by selecting them from a menu [like in command-based RPGs]. If they’re going to push something, they want to put some force behind it.”

Time travel

During the early development and prototyping Miyamoto and the team starting forming ideas for the characters. The hero was called Link, he was to be emblematic of the game’s setting being a combination of past and future, and the hero traveling between them, or “linking” them.

Nintendo hired a screenwriter called Keiji Terui, who had previously worked on Dragon Ball, to create the backstory. This story was included in the original manual for the game and would provide players with the context for their adventure, plus describe what the character’s motivations are. During this process the concept of time travel was dropped, and instead focused on a simpler story inspired by medieval conflict in Europe.

Zelda origin

Miyamoto liked the damsel in distress storyline, similar to Super Mario. In this game she was called Zelda, inspired by the wife of famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her name would also make it into the series title, The Legend of Zelda. This wasn’t the original name for the series though, it released in Japan as The Hyrule Fantasy: Zelda no Densetsu.

Design goals

Here’s Miyamoto describing the design goals of the games in 1989, in an excerpt from a video game history book called “terebi game denshi yuugi taizen”

“I wanted to create a game world that conveyed the same feeling you get when you are exploring a new city for the first time. How fun would it be, I thought, if I could make the player identify with the main character in the game and get completely lost and immersed in that world? The idea of a game in real-time, also, was something I’d been thinking about for awhile, but with such limited memory, it turned out to be a huge challenge to create enough satisfying content for players. I absolutely wanted to avoid half-baked ideas and gameplay. Since Zelda was released, I think the market has seen an increase in mean-spirited, petty games, and I still feel that sense of responsibility.”

Evoke mystery

It was very important to Miyamoto to evoke a sense of mystery. Here’s Koji Kondo describing what Miyamoto would ask him. “I remember he had me make a lot of different sounds for when you use the flute (when you warp). He was very particular about that one sound. ‘It shouldn’t just be ‘pretty’. I want it to evoke something more mysterious’, he told me.”

Hardware limitations

As they created Zelda, Miyamoto and Tezuka started hitting the limits of the hardware. They tried to work around them, but they were hitting brick walls and had to scrap ideas. Here’s Miyamoto describing an example.

“Back then, there were a lot of things we intended to do but weren’t able to because of hardware constraints. For example, for the Level 7 dungeon entrance, we just changed the colour of the ground when the water drained, but we intended to have the water actually disappear. And you can burn small trees, but we intended for you to be able to burn down big ones.”

Miyamoto’s Favourite

Here’s Miyamoto describing his favourite character “I have many favorites, but I really like the Darknut soldier, both for his name and the way he was programmed. In the original Legend of Zelda, he faces Link with his shield, and he can change his speed. For its time it was very elaborate behavior.Because of that, by the way, we had to work hard to make sure there weren’t too many Darknuts on screen at once because it would cause too much slowdown.”

Commerical success

The Legend of Zelda was a huge success for Nintendo, going on to sell more than 6.5million copies on the Famicon Disk System and the Nintendo Entertainment System. This set the scene for future Zelda games, even though Nintendo initially deviated from this formula with Zelda II The Adventure of Link, they would go back to the original formula in A Link To The Past. Years later, Breath of the Wild takes inspiration from the original Legend of Zelda, which redefined the Zelda series on Nintendo Switch.

Second quest accident

There were some mistakes during development. Dungeons were mapped out on graph paper, and each square on the graph represented a single room and all pieces were laid out like a jigsaw puzzle. Tezuka handed off the design document to programmer Toshihiko Nakago who then translated the designs exactly as they had been provided. Due to an error, Tezuka only used half the data Nakago had coded, meaning the game ended up being half it’s original size. Miyamoto actually felt like the smaller dungeons led to a tigher gameplay experience and suggested the other half of the data be used for an unlockable second quest for players to discover, which you can access after you beat Ganon.

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