Table of Contents | Gameography | Coolest Videos | Embarrassing Moments | Things You Didn't Know | Top 25 Theme Song Covers | Merchandise You Didn't Know Existed | Useless Items | Commercials | Why LTTP is Still Best | Retronauts Podcast
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Originally Released: February 21, 1986
Available On: NES, Famicom Disk System, Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, Wii
The Legend of Zelda marked the beginning of a huge creative shift for the video game industry. Software for home consoles was generally kept linear and straightforward, but Shigeru Miyamoto and his teammate Takashi Tezuka decided from the moment of its inception that Zelda would be an entirely different animal...massive in scope and with unparalleled freedom for the player. Inspired by Miyamoto's boyhood adventures through caves and forests, the game had a heavy focus on exploration and discovery. Players of the time were first intimidated by the challenge, but then resolved to find every one of Zelda's hidden dungeons and solve its often inscrutable puzzles, relying on their friends and Nintendo's team of game counselors to fill in the gaps.
Its daring and ambitious design made The Legend of Zelda one of the most iconic and enduring games in the history of the industry, rivaled only by its Nintendo bunkmate Super Mario Bros. Zelda arrived in the United States in a shining gold cartridge, and quickly proved itself worthy of that lustrous hue by selling a million copies in a year. When the Nintendo Entertainment System was finally retired in 1994, the game had sold over six and a half million copies...and Nintendo went right to work bringing The Legend of Zelda to its successors.
Originally Released: January 14,1987
Available On: NES, Famicom Disk System, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, Wii
Like the American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (adapted from a Famicom title called Doki Doki Panic), The Adventures of Link was an unexpected shift in style from its predecessor. However, while Super Mario Bros. 2 was embraced by the American public for its gorgeous graphics and a sense of whimsy that was largely absent from the official Japanese sequel, Zelda 2 had a more difficult time winning over fans. The game had changed too radically from the original, awkwardly straddling the fence between the turn-based role-playing made popular by Dragon Quest and the side-scrolling action of most NES titles. The free-roaming exploration of The Legend of Zelda was limited to rigid overworld scenes, and the more natural progression of abilities was replaced with an experience point system which forced players to grind to bring Link up to speed.
These differences didn't sit well with many fans of the first game, prompting Nintendo to retreat to more familiar territory in future sequels. However, The Adventures of Link was still popular enough to sell over four million copies, and its design inspired a handful of other NES games released in the late 1980s. Broderbund's The Battle of Olympus is so similar to the black sheep of the Zelda family that it could be considered a sequel...if you ignored all of that Greek mythology stuff.
Originally Released: November 21, 1991
Available On: Super NES, Game Boy Advance, Wii
Nintendo took a four-year break from Zelda, giving Shigeru Miyamoto and his development team plenty of time to bring the series back to its former glory with A Link to the Past. The game was designed to take full advantage of the advanced 16-bit hardware of the Super NES, while offering a true evolution of the series. Gone was the terse and often obtuse dialog from the original, replaced with a more coherent storyline and descriptions that made solving puzzles less of a guessing game and more of a legitimate challenge. The level design was also greatly improved, feeling more natural and organic than in the past two releases.
The four-year delay between Zelda releases, along with the game's debut on the rabidly anticipated Super NES, made A Link to the Past an instant hit both in Japan and here in the United States. The game narrowly outsold its predecessor at over four and a half million copies, an impressive feat considering that Nintendo no longer dominated the home console market as it had in the 1980s. The light and dark worlds in A Link to the Past also had a profound influence on game design, with variations of the concept being used in Sonic CD (the future and past worlds), Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (the upside-down castle), and Metroid Prime 2 (the dark areas of each environment would damage Samus if she dared to enter them).
Table of Contents | Gameography | Coolest Videos | Embarrassing Moments | Things You Didn't Know | Top 25 Theme Song Covers | Merchandise You Didn't Know Existed | Useless Items | Commercials | Why LTTP is Still Best | Retronauts Podcast
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