No Zelda game is closer to Breath of the Wild than the NES original

In the mid-1980s, in Kyoto, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and their team were working on two game designs in parallel that were intended to be two sides of the same coin. The linear one would represent a course that is difficult and a rush to reach a goal. Nonlinear would be the other. It’s a mystery maze and an unpredicted world that allows for exploration. As opposed to the arcade games that defined the medium at that point, both would deemphasize the player’s skill in favor of an immersive experience with a beginning and an end. Miyamoto carefully considered each of the new ideas from the team before assigning it to one of his games. He was probably not aware that he was creating two iconic series and some of the fundamental precepts in videogame design. It was the first game. Super Mario Bros.Second game Legend of Zelda.

Polygon has announced a Zeldathon for 2023. Follow us as we journey through The Legend of Zelda, starting with the 1986 original game and ending in The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

Super Mario Bros. The game was hugely popular and it is still one the top-selling video games. Legend of ZeldaAlthough it was an instant hit, the book sold only a third of its original copies. Zelda was to become somewhat more like her more famous twin. Sequels kept the spirit of adventure alive, but used meticulous gear-gating systems — essentially a series of locks and keys — to enforce order on the player’s progress through their labyrinthine worlds. It was probably a better game than it and definitely easier to play.

2017’s The Wild Breath was a shock to that system: an incredibly free-form reinvention of role-playing and open-world conventions, and a return to Zelda’s original nonlinear philosophy. It would sell more than any of its predecessors and become the first Zelda game to surpass a Mario. Finally, the world was ready to enjoy the type of adventure Miyamoto & Tezuka had dreamed 31 years earlier.

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Even knowing all this context as I do — and having written about Zelda games for 20 years, and played them for even longer — it has been an equivalent shock to properly play Legend of ZeldaIt’s your first attempt. It’s a very old game now: difficult, inscrutable, and minimalist by modern standards. Honestly, it’s nowhere near as much fun to play as 1991’s An ode to the past, never mind later entries. But it’s also game design genius in the raw. Legend of ZeldaThis is a brilliantly courageous and unbound vision of what an adventure game could be. It’s both deeply familiar as the father of all Zelda games, and almost alien in its distance from what they went on to become — until The Wild BreathThat is it.

First, notice that most Zelda (and other Zelda) games are not (and should be).The Wild Breath included) consciously locate themselves in a tradition — a place with a history, usually one that repeats itself — Legend of ZeldaThis removes all context. There’s a perfunctory setup: Princess Zelda has hidden the eight parts of the Triforce of Wisdom in a series of dungeons, and she needs a hero to gather them and defeat her captor, Ganon. Enter Link. This is Link as a simple man, just standing in the clearing and trying to decide what next. He doesn’t even have a sword.

Nothing has ever been predicted or forgotten on this first adventure. Everything is completely new. There’s a cave over there: What’s in it? An old man, with a wooden sword and a warning: “It’s dangerous to go alone.” But there’s no choice, so alone Link must go. Monsters can be found everywhere. They are unpredictable and skitter about in bizarre patterns. How do you get to Triforce’s next part? In the thorn bush, between the barren rocks and along the shore with its murmuring waves? There are no waypoints, signs, names, or signposts in this world. It’s a mysterious iconography, a living map of which you can only ever see a tiny portion.

Legend of Zelda, the first dungeon you discover won’t necessarily be the game’s first “level.” You might have jumped ahead to the third or fourth. You might also find powerful items if you explore the area and are careful. These can be found later on in the game. If you’re willing to search, there are many riches all around. Buy a candle and burn the right bush, and you can climb underground to meet a secretive Moblin who’ll bestow you with an amount of Rupees that would take hours to grind out. Now you can buy potions, arrows for a bow you don’t have yet, a blue ring that cuts the damage you take by half.

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

This is a daringly bold design, even by modern standards. You can’t wander straight into the end boss’s lair, but you can tumble into great danger or power up Link to the extent the game feels almost broken. The few gates that Nintendo did place in the game’s structure feel like genuine mysteries, arising organically from the landscape — a feeling that Zelda’s designers would become expert at re-creating, but in a way that, over time, became expected and almost ceremonial. Although Zelda fans were reluctant to abandon the more linear progression, diminishing returns meant that few Zelda fans wanted to give up. The Wild Breath’s developers were right to choose to move past them. They sought to recapture something not even Zelda’s best games could have missed over the decades. Legend of Zelda’s Hyrule feels like an actual, unexplored wilderness, or like the countryside that Miyamoto used to explore in his youth, without a map, discovering landmarks as if he were the first to ever go there.

In contrast to its untamed overworld, the first game’s dungeons, which would later become the Zelda series’ most intricate and exacting puzzles, feel a little more contained and more surmountable, even when they’re at their most difficult. That probably wasn’t true at the time of its release. This is the very first word in an ancient language, so solving these riddles for any Zelda veteran will be second-nature. The first game’s basic, ferocious 8-bit combat presents a challenge, but as technically rudimentary as the game is, it’s never less than razor-sharp, responsive, and fair — as slickly playable as you would expect from the team that had shipped Super Mario Bros. just months previously. It was only months ago that I managed to defeat it by spamming the snapshot/rewind options of Nintendo Switch Online.

Legend of ZeldaThe game is so uninformed, so minimalistic in its explanations and so secretive that even a novice player will struggle to find the solution. If you do look for assistance, don’t feel bad: Miyamoto may not have foreseen online walkthroughs, but he always intended players of the game to talk to one another, share secrets, and collaborate, getting to the end through communal effort.

Unless you’re playing Legend of Zelda in some kind of cultural vacuum, it’s no longer possible to experience the game in all the formidable mystery it possessed in 1986. It’s a known quantity now, and has passed into a modern version of folk memory: a tale already told, a map already drawn. In some ways, that’s a fitting end for this early masterpiece. We can still see this tiny, primitive microcosm from the sky and marvel at its beauty. It was so liberating and ahead of its time it took 30 years for its creators to catch up.