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.

The Legend of Zelda
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. 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.