40th Zelda Anniversary
Of all the Zelda titles, this is the one we know the MOST about; they've discussed it in interviews for years. For the 40th anniversary let's go down memory lane with some fun quotes
The most important people during development of Zelda 1:
Shigeru Miyamoto: Producer, Co-Director
Takashi Tezuka: Co-Director
Toshihiko Nakago: Programming lead
Koji Kondo: Music and sound
Miyamoto, Tezuka, and Nakago have been described as the "golden triangle" by Satoru Iwata.
Shigeru Miyamoto is of course commonly touted as the creator of the Zelda series, but I think Takashi Tezuka deserves neaerly as much credit; I've labelled him the co-creator of the series in my posts before.
This same group also made Super Mario Bros together at the same time.
So let's look at the very beginnings of Zelda!
For instance: it started off as a game for the Nintendo Vs System, NOT the Famicom Disk System.
The details of how this would have worked are pretty unclear!
At one point it was also planned to be a dungeon maker game with no overworld component: one player would design dungeons, the other would play them. Unclear if this was before or after the swap to the Famicom Disk System.
Zelda was at one point planned to be a time-traveling game with sci-fi elements. The Triforce pieces would have been computer chips! This story also explains where Link's name comes from.
I think this brings us to the natural next topic: What were the inspirations and influences on the Zelda 1 team, especially MIyamoto? Some of these are well-known, some less so.
The famous stories of Miyamoto finding a cave and exploring as a kid:
Miyamoto would later describe the Zelda series as being "all about hiking":
Miyamoto was inspired in part by the way that characters could grow in RPGs, in games like Ultima and Black Onyx, but he didn't like the turn-based combat. He was also influenced by the treasure hunting adventure of Indiana Jones.
It seems LIKELY to me that Zelda was also influenced by action RPGs like Hydlide, Dragon Slayer 1 and Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu, and Tower of Druaga. Those were all noteworthy pre-Zelda titles. But I have never seen explicit acknowledgement of this.
So some goals for Zelda 1 included sensations of growth, hiking, and treasure hunting. Remember that this was developed at the SAME TIME as Super Mario Bros., so some goals in Zelda were specifically designed to be Mario's opposite. Mario was linear, Zelda was not.
They were afraid that gamers would be "bored and stressed" by Zelda 1's non-linearity!:
There are some other fun anecdotes from the production.
For instance, Miyamoto and Tezuka each drew one half of the Zelda 1 world each.
During development they simply called it "Adventure Title", but they eventually settled on the name "The Legend of Zelda: The Hyrule Fantasy". The initial plan was to use "The Hyrule Fantasy" as the name of the series.
And of course we can't forget the Copyright Incident:
This is only scratching the surface! There is a whole realm of interviews about this game out there. This is our page for Zelda 1 if you want to do more reading!:
https://www.notion.so/hyruleinterviews/The-Legend-of-Zelda-fabdf1ba33ba46d6aae4da8b362870c8
I hope you enjoyed the thread!