The Legend of Zelda - Series Sales

Shigeru Miyamoto Joins Nintendo
In 1977, a young artist and toy designer named Shigeru Miyamoto joined Japanese-based toy maker Nintendo. Having impressed company president Hiroshi Yamauchi with his toy creations, Miyamoto was assigned to create art work for an arcade game named Sheriff, where the player found themselves surrounded by bandits and needed to fend them off, saving a young woman they had captured in the process.

Sheriff was Nintendo's first "damsel-in-distress" game, and this was a concept Miyamoto would subsequently re-use across many of his own products. The first of these was an arcade unit named Donkey Kong, which Miyamoto conceptualized when discussions around Nintendo creating a game based on the Popeye license ran into complications. Drawing inspiration from the trio of Bluto, Popeye, and Olive Oyl, he conceptualized three characters of his own—Donkey Kong (a large ape), Jumpman (the protagonist of the game and player character), and a female character that would later be given the name "Pauline" (the damsel in distress that Jumpman would need to rescue). Nintendo repurposed the circuit board of Radar Scope, one of their earlier arcade units, to produce Donkey Kong, and the game was released in 1981 to critical acclaim.

By the time Donkey Kong saw release in July of 1981, the Jumpman character had been renamed "Mario" by Nintendo's American division. The game went on to be popular in the North American market and Miyamoto got started on his next project, a sequel titled Donkey Kong Jr., where the characters' roles were reversed. Donkey Kong, the ape from the first game, had been imprisoned by Mario, who was standing guard over his cage. The player would assume the role of Donkey Kong Jr. and attempt to rescue the character's father from his plight. By 1983, Mario had proven popular enough to receive his own game, co-starring a brother, Luigi. Miyamoto titled the new game Mario Bros. and the development team allowed for the game to be played by two players in parallel.

The Famicom and Takashi Tezuka
By 1980, Nintendo wanted to branch out of the arcade business and had begun researching the possibility of developing a device on which users could play games at home. Inspired by Atari 2600 and ColecoVision (to which the company later ported their Donkey Kong game), Nintendo's goal was to create a piece of hardware that would be cheaper than the competition, less intimidating to those unfamiliar with technology, and more appealing to children. They dubbed it the "Family Computer".

The "Famicom" was released in July 1983, and launched with ports of Donkey Kong, its sequel Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye. The following year, Nintendo found itself another employee that would prove to be a valued collaborator of Shigeru Miyamoto's and make immense contributions to the company's Famicom library: an Osaka University of Arts graduate, Takashi Tezuka. Tezuka's first project in collaboration with Miyamoto was Devil World, a Pac-Man styled maze game where the player controlled a green dragon. It was Miyamoto's first game that was designed specifically for the Famicom and Tezuka served as co-designer on the project.

Super Mario Bros.
Through working alongside one another in 1984, Miyamoto and Tezuka had established a comfortable working relationship and were keen to continue pushing the boundaries of what Nintendo called the "athletic game" (later dubbed "platform game") genre established by its prior titles. Noting that the company's Mario Bros. game continued to be popular, Tezuka suggested their next project make use of Mario and Luigi as well. Alongside Miyamoto, he began design work on the game, and the two began to rethink a lot of the logic that had been established in the original Mario Bros. project, such as the consequences of making contact with various enemy types, the game's setting, and how to work around the Famicom's hardware limitations.

Titled Super Mario Bros., the game was designed to be a culmination of everything Miyamoto and his team had learnt about game design and the possibilities afforded by the Famicom technology. The player would take on the role of Mario and Luigi, running and jumping past an invasion of turtle-like creatures knowns as the Koopa Troopas, led by their king, Bowser. The game was set in the "Mushroom Kingdom" and began after Bowser kidnapped its princess, Toadstool. Mario set out to rescue Princess Toadstool and defeat Bowser and his army, marking a return to the familiar damsel-in-distress concept.

Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985 in Japan. When the Famicom was launched in North America the following year as the Nintendo Entertainment System, it debuted alongside Super Mario Bros., making it one of the system's most popular launch games.

In 1984, while Super Mario Bros. was in development, Miyamoto and Tezuka began conceptualizing a second game in parallel. This game, they felt, should be the polar opposite of Mario. Where Super Mario Bros. was linear and it would always be obvious to the player what their next step should be, Miyamoto wanted the other game to make players think about where to go next. The team working on both Super Mario Bros. and this new game was the same, and so a conscious effort was made to brainstorm appropriate ideas for each.

"As with the Mario series, I came up with the concept for the Zelda series from my adventures as a child exploring the wide variety of places around my home," Miyamoto would recall in an interview with Superplay magazine years later. "There were plenty of caves and mountains. We didn't have that many toys to play with, so I would make slingshots or use sticks and twigs to make puppets and keep myself amused."

The initial design for Nintendo's new game—which they had codenamed "Adventure Title" in their design documents—called for the player to enter labyrinths right from the game's title screen. Since the game originated from Miyamoto's experiences exploring underground caverns as a young boy, it was originally meant to be about the exploration of caves. Over time, this idea of exploring caverns evolved into the player exploring a number of labyrinthine areas connected by an open field. The player would be able to traverse this open environment, and would be required to think on their feet about where to go and what to do next.



"We basically decided to do a real time adventure game," Tezuka recalled in an interview many years later. "No one wants to do physical things like pushing and pulling by selecting them from a menu [like in command-based RPGs]. If they’re going to push something, they want to put some force behind it."

During development, Miyamoto and his team also began forming an image of just what their new adventure game was about. They named the main character "Link," as he was to be emblematic of the game's setting—a combination of the past and the future, with the player being able to travel between the two settings and serve as a link between them.

Link was initially designed to be right-handed, but in order to aid in the creation of the game's pixel art and the way he would appear in in-game screens, he was altered to be left-handed instead.

At some point, Nintendo enlisted the aid of Keiji Terui, a screenwriter that had worked on anime shows such as Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball, to create the game's backstory. This story would be included in the game's manual, and would give the player better context as to just what their character's motivations were. Sometime during this process, the idea of time-travel was dropped, and Terui instead penned a much more straightforward story inspired by medieval conflicts in Europe. Miyamoto's fondness for the damsel-in-distress setup also worked its way into the tale, and the game's damsel was named "Zelda," after the wife of famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald whose name Miyamoto took a liking to. It was her name that would also help solidify the game's title: "The Legend of Zelda".

Miyamoto wanted The Legend of Zelda to evoke a sense of mystery in the player. "I remember he had me make a lot of different sounds for when you use the flute (when you warp)," the game's composer, Koji Kondo, would recall years later. "He was very particular about that one sound. 'It shouldn’t just be ‘pretty’. I want it to evoke something more mysterious', he told me."

As development progressed on Zelda, Miyamoto and Tezuka began encountering limitations to do with the Famicom hardware. As with Super Mario Bros., the development team worked around these in creative ways, but certain ideas needed to scrapped entirely. "Back then, there were a lot of things we intended to do but weren’t able to because of hardware constraints," Miyamoto would reveal a few years later. "For example, for the Level 7 dungeon entrance, we just changed the colour of the ground when the water drained, but we intended to have the water actually disappear. And you can burn small trees, but we intended for you to be able to burn down big ones."

Mistakes were made during the development process as well. Labyrinths (later known as dungeons) in The Legend of Zelda were mapped out on graph paper first. Each square on the graph represented a single room, and the pieces were laid out like a jigsaw puzzle. Tezuka, having created the entire map for the game, handed it off to programmer Toshihiko Nakago, who put the map data together exactly as it had been provided to him. Unfortunately, due to an error on his part, Tezuka only used half the data Nakago had coded, and the game ended up being half its original size. As luck would have it, Miyamoto felt the reduced map size made for a better game, and suggested that the other half of the data be used to create an unlockable "Second Quest" for the player to discover.

Difficulties were encountered with the game's soundtrack, too. Composer Koji Kondo had composed a total of five musical tracks for the game, and had intended to use the classical piece "Bolero" by Maurice Ravel for the game's opening title screen. Unfortunately, just as development was wrapping, Kondo was informed that the copyright to Bolero hadn't expired yet, which meant Nintendo couldn't use it and he was forced to re-arrange the overworld theme for the game's title screen.

Despite difficulties during development, The Legend of Zelda was an immense success following its release. It went on to sell well over 6.5 million units over the course of its life and served as the template for a whole brand of Nintendo games going forward. It birthed an entire genre and still serves as the inspiration behind a number of modern videogames today.

Zelda II:
Zelda II was developed by a different team than the first game, partly because it initially wasn't intended to be a Zelda game. Development began with Shigeru Miyamoto postulating that a side-scrolling action game that used "up and down movements" for attacking and defending could be an interesting endeavor. Miyamoto wanted to include the kinds of actions that couldn't be incorporated in the original Legend of Zelda, and Tadashi Sugiyama, a graphic designer at Nintendo that had contributed to games such as Ice Climber, Baseball, and Pinball, was attached to direct.

Joining Sugiyama as co-director was Yasuhisa Yamamura, while Takashi Tezuka came up with the concept for the game's story. Tezuka did not, however, contribute map design as he had to the first Zelda game, and was instead working on Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3. Meanwhile, replacing Koji Kondo as composer was Akito Nakatsuka, who had composed music for Ice Climbers two years prior.

Games with a high degree of difficulty were popular at the time. In the late '80s, a higher difficulty often helped games last longer, and also appealed to those that were fond of videogames as a hobby. And so Sugiyama and his team approached Zelda II the same way—by designing it to be something they would personally find interesting and challenging. "One thing I remember is a call from a client at the time saying 'I just can't seem to beat the last boss.' When I asked more about his progress in the game, he was already fully equipped," Sugiyama would reveal. "Meaning that there was nothing to do but to beat the boss with his own skill, which was rather hard to say straight out. It seemed that he was playing the game for his son... so I felt bad for him."

Zelda II borrowed elements from role-playing games, which is something that subsequent Zelda titles would do as well. In Zelda II, this took the shape of a stat growth system, meant to encourage players to fight monsters over and over. Link could gain experience points and upgrade his life, attack, and magic stats, and each of these attributes could be raised to a maximum of 8 levels. The game also made use of symbol encounters, since routes on the overworld map were fairly narrow and this would add an element of luck to encountering enemies.



This wasn't the only idea the game borrowed from role-playing games, though. At this point, Miyamoto was already planning the third Zelda game, which was to be produced by the team responsible for the original. In Zelda 3, Miyamoto wanted to introduce a party system, where the player's party would consist of a fighter-like elf character, a magic user, and a fairy. This fairy character was actually designed, and while she wasn't used in the third Zelda, her design was utilized for a "Fairy Spell" in Zelda II, which would cause Link to turn into a fairy and allow him to access smaller spaces.

Zelda II played out from two different viewpoints: a top-down overworld like the original Legend of Zelda, serving as a hub to other areas, and a side-scrolling perspective, which is how most of the game is played and how combat encounters take place. Miyamoto has stated that the hardware limitations of the Famicom had a hand in influencing what the team could achieve, and would express his regret that the game hadn't been more surprising or interesting.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link went on to sell over 4.3 million units and introduced a number of new features that would later be used throughout the series, including magic, the Triforce of Courage, the towns of Rauru, Ruto, Saria, Nabooru, and Darunia (which would later serve as the names of the Sages in Ocarina of Time), as well as Dark Link. Nintendo would also later investigate the possibility of remaking Zelda II using polygons on the Super Famicom, but this idea would be shelved and indirectly lead to the creation of an entirely new Zelda game instead.

Two games in, Shigeru Miyamoto had determined that interactivity was of paramount importance to The Legend of Zelda. What defined a Zelda, he felt, was the freedom to try different things and fail, until the solution clicked inside your head. The game's logic, above all, needed to make sense.

As the Famicom was reaching the end of its tenure, Nintendo released the Super Famicom. Work on a new Zelda game for the system had begun while Zelda II was still in development, and was being undertaken by the team responsible for the original Legend of Zelda. Unlike Zelda II, Miyamoto wanted a return to the familiar top-down perspective for this third Zelda. The primary concern, however, was that games had come a long way since the original Legend of Zelda game and features such as fantasy settings and puzzle-solving were no longer surprising or particularly original.

Instead, with this game Miyamoto wanted to place an even greater emphasis on players interacting with the world and performing different kinds of actions that would have different effects. For instance, the player would be able to stand in front of a switch and push or pull it, by holding down the A button in tandem with a direction. This, Miyamoto felt, would require thinking and was a much more deliberate action on the part of the player. It would lead to a greater sense of satisfaction than simply standing in front of an object, pressing A, and having the game perform the appropriate action for you.

A small team began work on the new game, experimenting with different ideas along these lines for the Super Famicom hardware, with the goal being to add more staff once the basic systems had been worked out. The idea was to utilize development staff as efficiently as possible, and not end up with a team that was larger than it needed to be. One of the specific ideas Miyamoto wanted to experiment with early on was the idea of diagonal sword swings—being able to attack enemies at an angle. Upon experimenting with this concept, the team concluded that it was perhaps too difficult an action to ask of the player and circumvented the issue by creating an attack where Link would swing his sword in a 360-degree arc around himself. This move was dubbed the "Spin Attack".

The team also wanted to revisit ideas they couldn't use in the original Legend of Zelda. That game was originally conceived as a time-travel adventure where Link would be able to move between the past and the future, and the same idea was seemingly discussed once again for the new Zelda. Takashi Tezuka, who served as the game's director revealed that the team experimented with a multi-world structure, where events in the hub world would have an effect on the other overlapping worlds. Three worlds were initially conceived, and concept art from Hyrule Historia suggests that one of them might have involved a sci-fi setting. Unfortunately, the team feared that three worlds might get confusing for players and the idea was shelved. The number of worlds was cut down to just two, and Kensuke Tanabe, the director behind Super Mario Bros. 2 thought up the idea of a "Light World" and a "Dark World". "Kensuke Tanabe already had an idea for a truly memorable hero-awakening scene when we started this project," Tezuka would recall. "In the midst of a forest, with light filtering down through the leaves, the [Master Sword] stood waiting for someone worthy of wielding it to arrive. Link draws the sword out as the light trickles through the leaves."



The team wanted A Link to the Past to be a moving adventure, and one that would appeal to Nintendo's foreign fans. To aid this, they redesigned Link to appear more mature than he did in Zelda II. Miyamoto had never wanted Link to appear overly cool and serious, though, so the character retained elements of playfulness.

The team was also careful not to have Link begin the game with his sword in hand. The way Tezuka and Tanabe envisioned the game, players would feel an emotional connection with Link as they guided him through his adventure, culminating in the aforementioned hero-awakening scene when Link would find and draw the Master Sword from its resting place. To accommodate this goal, a number of adjustments was made to the placement and ordering of weapons and items, so that players would sense Link's growth throughout, no matter their play style. They also wanted the player to be able to use weapons other than a sword and shield, and also to combine weapons, so you would be able to set the Bow & Arrows to the one button and a bomb to another button. Pressing both buttons in tandem would then cause Link to shoot an arrow with a bomb attached to it.

In contrast, Miyamoto felt that Link should always have his sword equipped, and so this idea was shelved until the next game in the series. What he did want to include, though, was an RPG-like party where Link would be accompanied by companion characters. Miyamoto had been telling his team that he wanted the third Zelda to include a mix of characters—a fighter-like elf, a magic user, and a fairy whose role would consist of reconnaissance. This idea was shelved during development as well, and the design for the fairy was instead utilized in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which was being developed in parallel.

Another idea that was scrapped during development included multiple paths through the world, so that the player's experience would be more open-ended. This idea was abandoned due to memory constraints (with Miyamoto hypothesizing that it would have required 150% more memory than the Super Famicom possessed) and the complications it would have caused in terms of game structure. Time and memory constraints also called for the team to scale back some of the ambitions they had for the game's level of interactivity. For instance, they had wanted to make it so using the lantern on a grassy area would cause an "endlessly expanding fire" or bombing the swamp breakwater would cause water to rush into the hole.

Such ideas would later be utilized in games such as Four Swords Adventures and Breath of the Wild, with the latter realizing them to their full potential.

"Our game designers had a pretty good idea of what could be done on the hardware back then, so I don’t believe we had any unexpected implementations," Tezuka would say in an interview with RetroGamer magazine years later. "Having said that, though, we had a long battle with the memory size, and I remember very clearly that the engineering team worked extremely hard to optimize it."

While the game was in development, a new member of Nintendo's staff, Yoshiaki Koizumi, was assigned to work on the game's manual. A graduate from the Osaka University of Arts—the same university Takashi Tezuka had graduated from—Koizumi was interested in telling dramatic stories. Games, he felt, afforded an opportunity to create the kind of drama one couldn't get from films and so, when the opportunity arose to be hired at Nintendo, Koizumi took it. As the years would go by, Koizumi would take every opportunity to sneak as much story into Nintendo's games as he could, and that habit began with Zelda.

"What was funny was that at the time, it didn’t seem like they’d really figured out what most of the game elements meant," Koizumi would reveal. "So it was up to me to come up with story and things while I was working on the manual. So, for example, the design of the goddesses as well as the star sign associated with them."



Once all the pieces were in place and development was nearing its end, the team needed to decide on a title for their new game. In Japan, the game was given the title "Triforce of the Gods," but Nintendo of America had this changed to A Link to the Past for the game's western release. The American division wanted to avoid any overt religious references and also had the development team make changes to characters and text within the game along these lines. For example; the Hylian script was originally created for A Link to the Past, and it initially contained alphabets that looked like an ankh and other Egyptian hieroglyphs.

During their localization process of A Link to the Past, Nintendo of America also contracted Seattle-based design firm Girvin to create a logo for the game. Girvin had already worked with NOA to create packaging for the Nintendo Entertainment System (the American variant of the Famicom) and designed the logo that would be used for all subsequent Legend of Zelda games in the West.

A Link to the Past was released in Japan in November 1991, and a western release followed in '92. The game would go on to sell 4.6 million copies worldwide. It is often considered one of the best Legend of Zelda games, and formed the basis for a number of elements that would appear in later Zeldas.