Retro Gamer Magazine Issue No. 284 | Charlotte Street Magazine

They say the best legends are destined to be retold, and over the past four decades, the stories behind the creation of The Legend Of Zelda series have been shared countless times. Its primary creator and torchbearer, Shigeru Miyamoto, is not shy when it comes to talking about the series. Back in 1997/8, in the long lead up to the release of Ocarina Of Time, he was in full PR mode, giving enough interviews to fill a tome or two. You might argue that the voices of Miyamoto and his team have been exhausted on the subject of Zelda. Yet, the various interviews often throw up fascinating tales and obscure details that deserve spotlighting – particularly as many were conducted in Japanese and not translated until years later.

To tell the story of Zelda, we have sought the insights of three people who are integral to its continued success: Miyamoto, series co-creator Takashi Tezuka, and current series producer Eiji Aonuma. Let’s go back to the beginning, and start with Miyamoto’s memories of the original game, The Legend Of Zelda. Establishing a trend that many Zelda games would follow in the future, it was developed to take advantage of new Nintendo hardware. “Development began on The Legend Of Zelda in 1984, as a launch game for the Famicom Disk System,” he said, in a Q&A included with the 1994 audio CD The Legend Of Zelda: Sound And Drama. “We had started development on Super Mario Bros shortly before, so we were extremely busy with planning, with the two projects progressing simultaneously. It was very difficult to finish Mario and then get the Mario programmers involved in the final push to finish The Legend Of Zelda.” It’s quite amazing to think that both games – titles of such significance – were in development at the same time by largely the same team. Even more so as the two games were very different: Mario was a linear platformer, Zelda was a sprawling adventure with roleplaying elements.

The difference in approach was dictated by cost. Famicom cartridges were durable and loaded instantly, but they were expensive to produce. And bigger games meant larger ROMs and higher costs. Hence why the eight worlds of Super Mario Bros were crammed into a 40KB cart. Famicom floppies were cheaper to produce and offered 112KB of storage per disk, which allowed for more expansive games. This opened the door to the Kingdom Of Hyrule, with its large overworld and nine distinct dungeons to explore. There were other technical benefits too. “We were eager to take advantage of the Disk System’s features,” said Miyamoto. “We were able to register names, add better sound, save the player’s progress, and incorporate other new ideas, which made the game a lot of fun to make.” But because the game drops players into a hostile world, with enemies on nearly every screen and minimal signposting, Miyamoto and his team were nervous. “We were worried that people wouldn’t know what to do, even at the beginning of the game, and the game wouldn’t be well received. We were also concerned about the puzzle-solving element and whether we’d pitched the difficulty level correctly. Solving a puzzle could be difficult…”

“WE WERE CONCERNED SOLVING ELEMENT AND WHETHER WE'D PICTCHED THE DIFFICULTY LEVEL CORRECTLY”
SHIGERU MIYAMOTO

Indeed it could. We all know how progression in Zelda games works, where inaccessible areas are unlocked using items retrieved from dungeons (and the dungeons themselves have their own rulebook, learnt through trial and error), but back then it was all brand-new. There were clues of course, but they were often cryptic – and doubly so, when translated (somewhat loosely) from Japanese to English. Through gated progression, players were actively encouraged to explore the world, mentally map it out, and yes, get a little lost. “I wanted to create a game where the player understands the history and nature of the land, and it feels like they’re exploring,” said Miyamoto. “In traditional RPGs the game progresses solely through dialogue, but we wanted the player to interact with the game world using the controller, and conquer dungeons using a simple mapping system.” In another 1994 interview given to Total! magazine, Miyamoto shared a story about his love of exploring which beautifully encapsulated his entire approach to the series. “I like to explore on my own,” he revealed. “When I visit a new town, like New York, I like to walk alone at night, simply exploring the back streets and hidden places. I explore on foot for a while, then sometimes I buy a bicycle and cycle around town. Only when I know my way around a little will I buy a map. Zelda games are very much like this. First you explore, then you gain a useful tool – like my bicycle – and then you get a map. The map is not essential, it just makes things easier.”

The Legend Of Zelda launched in Japan alongside the Disk System in February 1986. Players were absorbed in Link’s quest to rescue Princess Zelda and defeat the dark prince Ganon, and sales were strong, topping 1.7m – impressive, when you factor in that new hardware was required to play it. The Disk System was not released outside of Japan, so for its 1987 worldwide release Nintendo had to revert its approach and issue the game on cartridge. This required a large (for its time) 128KB ROM and an additional 8KB of battery-backed RAM to save progress. It proved to be a wise move as the game would sell a further 4.8m copies on cart.

While Western gamers were exploring Hyrule for the first time, in Japan the second instalment was already old news. Released in January 1987, Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link was turned around quickly, but this wasn’t a simple rehash like the Japanese Super Mario Bros 2. Instead, Nintendo went back to the drawing board to create a new adventure that was more of a side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements. NPCs played a greater role in the game and Link could now earn experience points to upgrade his abilities. The sequel was another commercial hit, but its departure from the original (and what would follow) has led to it being known as the ‘oddball’ entry of the series.

“ZELDA II WAS SORT OF A FAILUER… WE ACTUALLY SEE A LINK TO THE PAST AS THE REAL SEQUEL”
SHIGERU MIYAMOTO

Speaking about the game in a 1992 issue of Famicom Tsushin, Miyamoto, who moved to the producer role for the sequel, explained the reasoning behind the changes. “The Adventure Of Link was created with the premise that the player will grow and improve as they play. But there are also people who just aren’t very good at the game, so we made it so that even those people can progress if they work hard and earn enough experience points. The good thing about RPGs is that even if you’re not great at the game, you’ll be rewarded if you put in the effort.” A decade later, speaking to the Swedish Super Play magazine, he was more reflective – and less forgiving. “It was my original idea, but the actual game was developed by another team,” he said, mitigating. “The games I make usually get better in the development process, since we keep coming up with good ideas, but Zelda II stayed the same. It was sort of a failure… We actually see A Link To The Past as the real sequel to The Legend Of Zelda. Zelda II was more of a side story about what happened to Link after the events of The Legend Of Zelda.”

Let’s follow Miyamoto’s lead and move onto the third game, A Link To The Past, which was initially released for the Japanese Super Famicom in November 1991. Miyamoto retained his producer role while Takashi Tezuka, who co-designed the original alongside Miyamoto and wrote the story for the two previous entries, directed the new game. Speaking to this magazine in 2017, Tezuka remembers being excited by the prospect of bringing Zelda to Nintendo’s new 16-bit console. “The hardware allowed us to do things we hadn’t been able to until that point,” he said. “I’d only been drawing four-colour pixel images up until then, so even just increasing the number of colours available to 16 or 256, as well as being able to use high-quality sounds, was really exciting.” That said, the technical challenges remained. “We had a long battle with the memory size,” he revealed, “and I remember very clearly that the engineering team worked extremely hard to optimise it.”

The game would return to the top-down perspective of the original – a decision that was partly driven by the game’s backstory, which saw Hyrule split into two parallel worlds which Link could flip between. “When we were starting the project, we experimented to see if it was possible to include a multi-world structure,” he continued. “Our plan was that events in the hub world would have an effect on the other, overlapping worlds. In the end, we decided it would be best for us, as well as for players, to have this as two worlds: one light, one dark. We felt the best way to represent this overlap of light and dark, and to represent the changes between them, was to use the same slanted top-down view used in the original The Legend Of Zelda game.”

“WE EXPERIMENTED TO SEE IF IT WAS POSSIBLE TO INCLUDE A MULTIWORLD STRUCTURE”
TAKSHI TEZUKA

The third game placed more emphasis on the plot, and particularly Link’s path to becoming the princess-saving, Ganon-conquering hero of Hyrule. “The game starts with a dark, rainy scene, with Link being just a regular village boy who, in the same situation as the player, doesn’t really know what’s going on,” said Tezuka. “He just follows Princess Zelda’s voice and works to save her. We didn’t have Link start out as a sword-wielding hero, because we wanted him to awaken as a hero when he pulls out the Master Sword. We thought that players would form an emotional connection with Link as they play.” For Miyamoto, however, his oft-repeated maxim of ‘gameplay first, story second’ still rang true. “The most important thing is how comfortable you feel when playing the game,” he said in a 1992 interview with The Super Famicom magazine. “What determines that is not the scenario, but the controls, the sound, the rhythm. No matter how good the story is, if these aspects are neglected, it won’t be a good game.” He felt the same way about the visual enhancements offered by the new hardware. “I’ve never thought about it in terms of aesthetics alone. It’s important to first create the images, words and sounds that are the things you want to express, and then have the attitude of finding something that elevates them further.”

Miyamoto’s design philosophy would reap results. A Link To The Past sold 4.6m copies worldwide, which was more than the second game (4.4m), but short of the original (6.5m). Sales aside, the game is celebrated by many fans as the pinnacle of the traditional 2D Zelda format. In that category it does have competition from a plucky outsider – Link’s Awakening, the Game Boy entry which was released in 1993. While the GB could have conceivably handled a port of A Link To The Past, Miyamoto and Tezuka chose instead to create an exclusive adventure for the handheld. Link’s Awakening truly was a side story, taking place away from Hyrule, on a mysterious island, with Zelda nowhere in sight. 1993 also saw the release of two offshoot entries, The Faces Of Evil and The Wand Of Gamelon, developed under license by Phillips for its CD-i hardware (more on those in RG 27). A third, Zelda’s Adventure, followed in 1995. Many words have been used to describe these CD-i efforts, but ‘misjudged’ is the most apt.

Despite the Phillips deviation, the series remained a vital property for Nintendo, so when the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996, it wasn’t a case of if, but when a Zelda game would grace the new system. And ‘when’ soon became a hot topic. Miyamoto had previously mused on how it was taking longer and longer to develop Zelda games.

The original took a year, Link’s Awakening a year-and-a-half, and A Link To The Past twoand-a-half years. Link’s N64 debut, Ocarina Of Time, would take more than three years. After high-profile delays it was eventually released in November 1998.

In the official Japanese strategy guide for the game, Miyamoto spoke about the challenges of creating complex games requiring multiple development teams. “The hardware keeps changing over the years and consequently the overall work we have to do has blown up,” he said, in an interview translated by shmuplations.com “My work was less about adding my own ideas as it was bringing together and consolidating what everyone else had done. Because a game this large is the combined work of a huge number of people, it’s not my place to come in and try to exert my own control over everything.” Explaining his approach in relation to adding new features to the Zelda formula, he said, “If you just port everything over from the previous game, you can’t really create something new, right? The development staff has largely changed, too, and I wanted them to make the Zelda they wanted to make. The scenes with Epona were the result of long discussions with designer Yoshiaki Koizumi. The reason we chose a horse is because we wanted the mode of transportation to be something that brought you into contact with others. That choice is also a reflection of the staff’s understanding of what ‘Zelda-ness’ means.”

“THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS HOW COMFORTABLE YPU FEEL WHEN PLAYING THE GAME. WHAT DETERMINES THAT IS NOT THE SCENARIO…”
SHIGERU MIYAMOTO

Of course, the biggest shift in Ocarina Of Time was the move to 3D graphics – a change that affected not just the look of the game, but how combat and exploration worked. It meant changes to those famous dungeons too. “For the first time in a Zelda game we didn’t spend as much time on the dungeons. It may be because we were working from completely new ideas this time. The dungeons are not further iterations on the ‘labyrinth’ ideas from A Link To The Past. I don’t think those are very appropriate for a 3D game.” And then there was the game’s approach to jumping – that bane of many early 3D adventures. “I thought if we added jumping, it would be one-too-many gameplay elements. And it would be frustrating if you were in the middle of a dungeon and had to make some pixel-perfect jump to progress.” The solution was to introduce a system where Link automatically jumps at the edge of platforms. Cutscenes were another consideration and Miyamoto looked to limit them, using the in-game camera to add “miniature movies” instead. “When Link approaches a cliff’s edge, the camera swivels upwards and allows you to peer down into the chasm,” he said. “Or when you cross a bridge on horseback, the camera switches to a cinematic side view.

Ocarina Of Time was late but worth the wait. The delay only served to build anticipation and players were not disappointed – it was another series high point, a genuine masterpiece. Sales were the best yet too, hitting 7.6m. Capitalising on its success – and the 3D engine it had built – Nintendo rushed ahead with a direct sequel, Majora’s Mask. The game was directed by Eiji Aonuma and Yoshiaki Koizumi, two of the Ocarina Of Time designers. Aonuma, speaking to former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata for an Iwata Asks interview, revealed the story behind Majora’s Mask and its unusual gameplay, which was based around a repeating three-day cycle. “This all started with Miyamoto-san asking whether we could make a game in one year if we repurposed the 3D models from Ocarina Of Time,” he revealed. “I started thinking about what kind of game I should make. I met Koizumi-san around this time and I asked for his help. He was working on a plan for a different game, one where you would play the same moments in time over and over again. From there, the ‘three-day system’ was born.” Wearing masks to transform Link was also integral to the game. “The development of Ocarina Of Time was so long, we were able to put in a whole lot of different elements. Out of those, there were ideas that weren’t used to their full potential. One of those was the mask salesman. We felt it would be a lot of fun if Link acquired all these abilities by putting on different masks. We felt that would expand the gameplay. Once we decided we were going with the masks, everything just fell into place. Well, we really didn’t have time, so things had to fall in place [laughs].”

“WE UPENDED A LOT OF THINGS WITH THE WIND WAKER, AND WE CONTINUED TO DO SO BEYOND THAT”
EIJI AONUMA

Majora’s Mask was released in 2000, at the beginning of the decade that would see the Zelda release timeline become very busy. There were three separate strands: the exclusive handheld titles (which you can read about in our Side Quests panel); the multiplayer spin-offs, released under the Four Swords banner; and the enduring mainline entries, beginning with The Wind Waker in 2002. This GameCube game, which saw Link navigating an ocean overworld, featured cel-shaded graphics and introduced the world to ‘Toon Link’. This new look proved to be rather controversial at the time. “There was division between those who liked that artistic style and those who didn’t,” Aonuma told Iwata. “We upended a lot of things with The Wind Waker, and we continued to do so beyond that. Twilight Princess [2006] had serious and photorealistic looks, and then Skyward Sword [2011] had a painting-like look with its half cel-shaded animation. It keeps changing with each new release…”

The truth is the ‘look’ has always evolved, just as the plot has repeatedly reset and Link, Zelda, Ganon and the other characters have continually changed over time (Miyamoto confirmed this back in 1994, stating that, “Each character is recreated for every new game.”) The style of game is also fluid. With the release of A Link Between Worlds (2013), and to a greater extent Breath Of The Wild (2017), the series has become less linear with an emphasis on openworld exploration. Its 2D roots are not ignored either – see the remake of Link’s Awakening (2019) and the more recent Echoes Of Wisdom (2024). With Aonuma’s steady hand on the tiller as series producer, and both Miyamoto and Tezuka retaining creative interest, we can be sure that one thing won’t change: The Legend Of Zelda will always inspire warmth and a sense of wonder in everyone who steps into its world.