38 years ago this week, The Legend of Zelda was released in the United States. Today, people are divided on what kind of game it was, but in 1987, no one cared. It was the first time anyone had seen anything like it on a game console. And it was a sensation.
Zelda was revolutionary because it gave a large world to explore, with RPG elements, even if you argue it was not a true role-playing game in the sense that games like Ultima, Wizardry, or The Bard’s Tale were. The Atari 2600 had Adventure, but Zelda had a much larger world, more detailed graphics, and an element that blew people’s minds in 1987, lengthening a game well beyond just a single session.
The plot of The Legend of Zelda
Designed by the legendary Japanese game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, the player plays Link, a young boy exploring the kingdom of Hyrule. The prince of darkness, Ganon, invaded Hyrule with his army and stole the Triforce of Power, one part of a magical artifact which alone bestows great strength. In an attempt to prevent him from acquiring the Triforce of Wisdom, Princess Zelda split it into eight fragments and hid them in secret underground dungeons.
Before being kidnapped by Ganon, she commanded her nursemaid Impa to find someone courageous enough to save the kingdom. While wandering the land, Ganon’s henchmen surrounded her. Link appeared and rescued her. Link then resolved to save Zelda, reassemble the scattered fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom, and then defeat Ganon.
The game world consists of 600 screens to explore and has a great deal of flexibility in gameplay.
I think it helped sell the console. It was a different experience than Mario. Mario was a casual game you could just as easily play for 15 minutes or two hours. Zelda was a more immersive experience that took longer sessions. If you really got into Zelda, you wanted your own console so you could play it without relying on your friends.
The mind-blowing element: You could save your game
The Nintendo NES didn’t have any permanent storage. The original Famicom version from Japan used the Famicom disk system, but Nintendo didn’t release that elsewhere in the world. Instead, Nintendo built a memory management chip into the cartridge that allowed much more memory than previously possible, as well as a bit of nonvolatile RAM, powered by a small lithium coin cell. The battery was good for 10 years, and that seemed like forever. Who would be wanting to play a 10-year-old game in 1997 anyway?
They were kind of right. There weren’t necessarily a lot of people wanting to play it in 1997, but by 2007 there certainly were.
It was a clever solution, but also bit of a hack. The NES was not originally designed to work that way, so that was why the game warned you to hold down reset while powering the console off. That way you didn’t corrupt your save.
Adding the ability to save and continue your game to the NES was revolutionary. Computers with disk drives had that ability for years. The NES gaining that ability blurred the lines between what games you could play on a console and what games required a more powerful computer.
Nintendo’s brilliant timing of the Legend of Zelda’s release
The timing of the release was brilliant. Coming out in late August, kids were starting back to school, so the game received plenty of free advertising on the schoolyard. Someone would read about it or see it in a store and buy it, and then talk non-stop about it. Other kids would come over, play it, and then get their own copies. Within 30 to 60 days, it was the talk of the town. And in the town I was living in at least, it was still a big deal a year later.
Nintendo was able to keep the buzz going by alternating Mario and Zelda titles, ensuring they had a must-have first-party title to offer even after the Sega Genesis came along, ushering in a new generation of consoles.
Legacy
Zelda went on to become a franchise title, with one sequel on the NES and multiple sequels on each subsequent console. Furthermore, early Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda received a bit of a revival starting with the Wii, when Nintendo started offering its retro titles on its current consoles. This introduced the game to a whole new generation.
Current generations expect the elements that were new and wondrous in 1987 like the ability to save the game and having a large world to explore. But the excellent story and gameplay make the game timeless, even today, when the newness has all worn off.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I remember finding it very difficult, the first few times I couldn’t even get past the name screen, but then I discovered it was one of the best games of the era.
And together with Super Mario Bros, they completely broke the limits of arcade gaming, black background, all actions concentrated on one screen, no background music, the NES really redefined and extrapolated the limits.
From 1986/87 onwards, NES games, thanks to memory mapping, showed a preview of 16 Bits, at the same time showing their age, since soon the PC Engine and especially the Sega Genesis were arriving