“Please look up the manual for details,” says the sign Link holds up at the end of The Legend of Zelda’s opening scroll. Nintendo meant it. The game dropped its player into the land of Hyrule with a sword to find, eight labyrinths to locate and almost no directions, and the manual carried the hints, the story and the strategy. It was one of the first games for the Famicom Disk System, and the disk let players save their progress and carry on another day. When it reached America the next year, in a gold-coloured cartridge, the question most often asked of Nintendo’s telephone game counsellors was how to get past a creature on level 7.
Fast facts
- Developer: Nintendo, the development division run by Shigeru Miyamoto from 1984, with Takashi Tezuka.
- Music: Koji Kondo.
- Released: Famicom Disk System, Japan, 21 February 1986, the same day as the Disk System itself; NES, North America, 1987; Britain, 1988.
- Japanese title: Zelda no Densetsu, with the subtitle The Hyrule Fantasy on the logo.
- Saving: to the disk in Japan; to battery-backed memory in the NES cartridge.
- Second Quest: a harder, rearranged game, unlocked by finishing the first.
Made alongside Mario
The Legend of Zelda was started before Super Mario Bros., though it came out five months after it. “First, we started making The Legend of Zelda, and then we started Super Mario Bros.,” Miyamoto said in 2016. “The Legend of Zelda was for the Family Computer Disk System, so we decided to finish up Super Mario Bros. first.” Tezuka still had the paperwork showing the two games in development at once, including his request to Kondo for Zelda’s music, dated 27 September 1985.
Miyamoto said the idea came from two places. The Indiana Jones films were popular, and he wanted that sense of adventure in a game. He had also noticed players of computer role-playing games bragging about how strong their swordsmen had become and phoning each other at night to swap information. So he chose “a world of swords and sorcery” as the theme and built an adventure around treasure-hunting. David Sheff’s Game Over traces the labyrinths further back, to the maze of sliding doors in the house where Miyamoto grew up.
The title music came together at the last minute. Kondo had used an arrangement of Ravel’s Boléro over the opening scroll, until the team found that Ravel’s music was still a month away from leaving copyright in Japan. Kondo wrote the theme that replaced it in a single night, as an arrangement of music already in the game.
Hyrule
The Legend of Zelda has no levels in the usual sense. The player moves Link across the overworld one screen at a time, looking down on it from above, and the world is open from the start. Bill Kunkel’s review in ANALOG Computing described the story: Ganon, “the Prince of Darkness”, had taken Hyrule and captured Princess Zelda, who had split the Triforce into eight pieces and hidden them. Each piece is in one of eight labyrinths; collect them all and a whistle summons a whirlwind to the ninth, where Ganon waits.
Kunkel listed what Link could find or buy from merchants in caves: three swords, two shields, boomerangs, bombs, a bow and two kinds of arrow, two candles, a magic whistle, “enemy bait”, the water of life and a magic wand, besides ladders, rafts, maps, compasses, rings and bracelets. Many of these open the way somewhere new. Computer and Video Games noticed the secrets: “powerups and bonuses hidden in the walls as well as a fair smattering of puzzles to be solved before you can gain entry to parts of the game”. Not every character was an enemy. In one cave a Molblin hands over a pile of rupees and says, “It’s a secret to everybody.” Miyamoto said he “fancied myself a copywriter” when he wrote it, and that the secret had to be kept from the Molblin’s comrades too.
Finishing the game opens the Second Quest. Nintendo Power devoted a feature to it in its first issue in 1988, telling readers that the second game’s labyrinths were “vastly different” from the first.
Saving on disk and cartridge
The Disk System was built for games like this. Its disks held more than the cartridges of the time and could be written to, so a game could save its data without a battery. A player could also take a disk back to a shop and, for 500 yen, have a new game written onto it at a vending machine. That is why the game ends its opening with the note about the manual. Miyamoto said players who rewrote a disk wanted something to show they had bought the game, so Nintendo made the booklet worth having, with instructions, story and hints.
The Disk System never left Japan, so the Western release came on cartridge, with battery-backed memory to hold the save. Electronic Gaming Monthly noted in January 1989 that Ultima had become the third NES cartridge with a battery that could keep a game in progress, “right behind blockbusters The Legend of Zelda and its sequel the Adventures of Link”.
America and the gold cartridge
Kunkel reviewed the NES version for ANALOG Computing in October 1987, at $39.95. He noted that it came “encased in a golden shell, further indicating its singular quality”, that Nintendo had packed it with a thorough manual full of hints, and that television commercials for this one game had been “running heavily in the New York area”, the first single-game video game advertisement on television in years. His verdict: “The game is a high-water mark in terms of video game design and programming,” and “Zelda’s outstanding. It leaves one hoping for more, more, more of the same.” Miyamoto added one more thing to the American box: a map full of hints, sealed with a message saying it should be used only as a last resort. “But everyone breaks the seal,” he said.
The game became part of how Nintendo sold the NES. According to Sheff, Nintendo of America’s president Minoru Arakawa counted on Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda to show American children the system was something new, and the Zelda commercial, with a wiry-haired young man screaming for Zelda in the dark, drew attention in the advertising industry. At Nintendo’s game counselling lines, Sheff writes, the most-asked question for years was how to get past “Grumble Grumble”, a creature on level 7. When Nintendo Power ranked its readers’ favourites in the summer of 1988, The Legend of Zelda was first.
Britain
British players waited until 1988. Computer and Video Games opened its review with “At last Japan’s best selling Nintendo game is available in the UK” and called it “a massive arcade adventure packed full of dragons, imprisoned princesses, traps and pitfalls”. Tony Takoushi found the graphics and sound excellent and the playability “supreme”, which it needed to be, “as the price tag is a bit hefty at £39”. He scored it 9 out of 10 overall. In December the magazine followed up with a guide to “the land of Hyrule” and its labyrinths.
Reception and sales
In November 1988 Computer Gaming World’s video game awards named it the best adventure: Nintendo “took many of the elements commonly found in computer action-adventures and brought them to the videogame universe where they proved to be a sensational success”. Compute! was less impressed in 1989, contrasting “Nintendo’s phenomenally successful Legend of Zelda” with Origin’s Ultima games and calling Nintendo’s version “a quicker, but also a shallower, experience”.
Sheff reports that in 1988 The Legend of Zelda and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! each sold 2 million copies in the United States. The sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, came out on the Disk System in January 1987 and had reached the NES by the end of 1988.
Sources
- Nintendo of America, “The Legend of Zelda: Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, Takeshi Tezuka, and Koji Kondo”, by Akinori Sao, for the NES Classic Edition (2016, web): release alongside the Disk System; Zelda started before Mario; the request dated 27 September; Indiana Jones and computer RPG players; “a world of swords and sorcery”; Boléro and the title theme; “Please look up the manual for details”, the booklet and the 500-yen disk writer; the sealed map; “It’s a secret to everybody”; The Hyrule Fantasy; Zelda II in January 1987. https://web.archive.org/web/2017/https://www.nintendo.com/nes-classic/the-legend-of-zelda-developer-interview/
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., “History”, The Legend of Zelda 40th anniversary site (Japanese, web): the release on 21 February 1986. https://www.nintendo.com/jp/character/zelda/history/index.html
- ANALOG Computing issue 58, October 1987, pp. 64–65, Bill Kunkel, review of The Legend of Zelda for the NES: the story, the Triforce and nine labyrinths, the items, the price, the gold shell, the New York commercials and the verdict.
- Computer and Video Games issue 83, September 1988, “Mean Machines”, Tony Takoushi: the UK release, the review quotations, £39 and the scores. Issue 86, December 1988, “Mean Machines”: map and tips.
- Nintendo Power issue 1, July/August 1988: “Second Quest of Zelda”, p. 26; readers’ top 30, p. 102.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, January 1989, news: battery back-up in Zelda, Zelda II and Ultima.
- Computer Gaming World issue 53, November 1988, p. 56, “Video Gaming World” awards: Best Adventure.
- Compute! issue 110, July 1989: Zelda compared with Ultima.
- Retro Gamer: Videogames Hardware Handbook volume 1, 2009: the Disk System’s February 1986 launch, rewritable disks and saving without a battery.
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 3, “I, Mario” (the labyrinths and the house in Sonobe); chapter 8, “Enter the Dragon” (Arakawa’s reliance on Super Mario Bros. and Zelda, 2 million sales in 1988, the game counsellors and “Grumble Grumble”, the Zelda commercial).