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 began conceptualizing a second game in parallel. The Famicom Disk system, an add-on peripheral for the Famicom that was capable of writing data, was about to release, and Nintendo needed to develop a game for the device. Miyamoto felt that it would be interesting to create a game that allowed two players to create labyrinths and then explore each other's creations. A prototype was created, but the overall sentiment was that exploring dungeons was more fun than actually creating them.

This game, Miyamoto 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. Namco's maze-like RPG, The Tower of Druaga, was popular in Japan at the time, and it's possible that it served as a point of reference for Nintendo. The team working on both Super Mario Bros. and this new game was the same, and brainstormed 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: The Adventure of Link
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.

A Link to the Past
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 was brought on to serve as director halfway through development revealed that the team initially 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.

"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.

Eiji Aonuma Joins Nintendo
While technological innovations like Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country were still a few years away, 1991 was an eventful year for Nintendo. A Link to the Past had been successfully released to critical acclaim, and had cemented itself as one of best games on the Super Famicom alongside Super Mario World. Projects like Super Metroid were entering development, and third-party brands like Enix's Dragon Quest and Square's Final Fantasy were immensely popular. Videogames were now an established, mainstream entertainment medium.

All throughout their success with the Famicom and Super Famicom, Nintendo had remained on the lookout for promising new talent, and a number of capable designers had joined their ranks since. These included stalwarts such as Kensuke Tanabe and Yoshiaki Koizumi—designers that had helped shape the company's games in new and interesting ways, and proved the importance of nurturing young, passionate talent.

A number of these talented developers had also graduated from the same university—the Osaka University of Arts, which was situated close to Nintendo's headquarters at the time and made for a convenient connection between the two. Even so, Nintendo had made a habit of hiring interesting talent regardless of background, and one of their up-and-coming hires had neither been a fan of videogames nor an Osaka University of Arts graduate prior to joining the company.

In fact, he had never really played a videogame prior to being hired by Nintendo. What got him hired was his love for creating puppets.

Eiji Aonuma graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1988, where he had completed a masters in composition design, working on Japanese Karakuri puppets. Aonuma's grandfather and uncle were carpenters, and he had grown up watching them make things, which had inspired him to do the same as a young boy. Whenever there was drafting or craft homework from school, Aonuma would pick up a piece of work and put nails on it to create something. Since his parents weren't in the habit of buying him toys as a child, he would create his own.

Aonuma's talent for wood cutting would guide him through university. It so happened that one of the alumni that had attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music was Yoichi Kotabe, an animator that had provided key animation for the Heidi: Girl of the Alps animated show by Toei Animation. Kotabe had then gone on to join Nintendo, where he had helped create package designs for Super Mario Bros. While he was searching for a job, Aonuma exhibited his puppet creations at an exhibition where he ran into members of the games industry, and began to take an interest in companies that made videogames. Subseuquently, his university provided him with Kotabe's business card, and the two established contact. Kotabe recommended Aonuma to Shigeru Miyamoto, who interviewed him and was impressed by his work.

After he began working at Nintendo, Aonuma was assigned to the department that made games and served as a graphic designer on NES Open Tournament Golf. Since he had never been interested in videogames prior to joining the company, he turned to his girlfriend at the time upon landing the job, and asked her to provide him with an introduction to games. In response, she lent him a copy of the first Dragon Quest and the PC version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, both of which were designed by a rising star at Enix named Yuji Horii.

"I stayed up all night to play it and she kept by my side the whole time, coaching me like, 'You need to go south five steps' and 'Now go to the east four steps,'" Aonuma would recall in an interview years later.

Over time, Aonuma began to appreciate the fun of playing videogames and found himself particularly fond of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. After working on a number of projects in collaboration with external developers—including an unreleased game with one Satoru Iwata of HAL Laboratory—he eventually developed a game of his own: Marvelous: Another Treasure Island—which was released in 1996 and drew inspiration from the SNES Zelda. Upon playing the game, Miyamoto invited Aonuma to work with him and the Zelda team on a project they were developing for the Nintendo 64.

Link's Awakening
While development on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the Famicom and A Link to the Past on the Super Famicom was in progress, a different team at Nintendo released the Game Boy, a portable system capable of playing black-and-white games using physical cartridges that the user could slot into the the device.

The Game Boy was released in 1989, and launched alongside Super Mario Land—the first Mario game to be developed without the involvement of Shigeru Miyamoto, whose teams were occupied developing games for the Famicom and Super Famicom. After development wrapped on A Link to the Past in 1991, the game's chief programmer, Kazuaki Morita, managed to acquire a development kit for the Game Boy and began experimenting with it as a hobby project of sorts. At the time, the department responsible for Zelda only had access to a single Game Boy development kit and Morita used to it to create a prototype for a Zelda-like game.

"We weren't particularly planning to make a Zelda game for Game Boy, but we thought we'd try it out to see how it will work," Takashi Tezuka would recall in an Iwata Asks interview. "So at first there was no official project. We'd do our regular work during normal work hours, and then work on it sort of like an afterschool club activity."



As the team discovered what the Game Boy was capable of, Tezuka suggested they attempt porting A Link to the Past to the device, and requested they be issued a second development kit. Because Tezuka had only joined development of the SNES game halfway through, he wanted to do more and realize ideas that couldn't be implemented in that project. As a result, the Game Boy game eventually began to morph into an original title. Kensuke Tanabe, who had written the story for A Link to the Past, joined the team early in development. Tanabe began working on sub-events for the game, and Yoshiaki Koizumi, who had worked on the manual for A Link to the Past, was invited to join the team as well.

This time around, Koizumi was put in charge of the game's main story, as well as its opening cinematic. Tezuka was fond of an American television show named Twin Peaks by a director named David Lynch, and wanted to design a Zelda game that was similar in scope and feel. In particular, Tezuka wanted the characters to convey a suspicious vibe similar to the Twin Peaks show, and requested that the team work toward this. "At the time, Twin Peaks was rather popular. The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town," Tezuka would recall. "So when it came to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, I wanted to make something that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics."

Shigeru Miyamoto was focused on other projects at the time, and so the team was largely free to do as it pleased. Miyamoto had mentored his developers to prioritize fun, intuitiveness, and game flow above all else, which is why Mario and Zelda games were often light on storytelling. Koizumi, however, was a romantic and viewed videogames as a medium through which you could experience a kind of drama that was different from films and television. Without Miyamoto's oversight, Morita, Koizumi, Tanabe, and Tezuka began to turn their Zelda into a character-driven adventure filled with engaging side events and subplots.

The team spared no effort in surprising the player, even breaking established boundaries by featuring characters from the Mario and Kirby games—sometimes without the explicit permission of the handlers of those franchises. One of these elements was the inclusion of a fishing minigame. Kazuaki Morita, who had originally kicked off the Game Boy Zelda project, was fond of fishing and programmed a fishing activity into the game—something that would be present in nearly every Legend of Zelda game going forward. Without realizing it, Morita, Koizumi, Tanabe, and Tezuka were establishing the template for all Legend of Zelda games that would follow, particularly the tendency to draw inspiration from Twin Peaks and the idea of characters with an air of mystery about them.

"I'm certain it was an important element in the series making a breakthrough," Eiji Aonuma would say years later. "If we had proceeded from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past straight to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time without The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening in between, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time would have been different."

"The first real game work that I did was on Link’s Awakening," Koizumi would recall in an interview. "But at the same time, I came in to write the manual, as I did on the previous game. But they had nothing in place. So I ended up making an entire story to go along with the game. The dream, the island, that was all mine. And so that was my first experience doing the kind of work that we would now call 'event design'. But there were not too many people at the time with expertise in that area, so I really had free reign to do what I wanted, so long as I didn’t make Miyamoto angry."

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening took a year-and-a-half to complete and was released in 1993 for the Game Boy. The game went on to sell over 3.83 million units worldwide and is credited as being the first Legend of Zelda game to tell a proper story. It is directly responsible for the stronger story focus in future Zelda games, beginning with the game developed immediately after it.

Ocarina of Time
Following the release of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Shigeru Miyamoto and Yoshiaki Koizumi had been working on a version of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for the Super Famicom designed using polygons. The two had been experimenting with a thin, polygonal Link viewed from a side-scrolling perspective similar to the original game. Plans to turn this into a full game fell through, and both developers moved on to other projects, but the team maintained a desire to create another Zelda with swordfighting as its focus.

In the interim, two important events that would help shape the future of Zelda had transpired. The first was the rise of Eiji Aonuma, an artist that had joined Nintendo in 1988, into a game director. Aonuma worked on games such as NES Open Tournament Golf, and eventually began working on his own game—one heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The second was the development of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, which would help set the tone and aspirations for Nintendo's next Zelda game.

1995 was when the very first signs of this game emerged. Nintendo revealed their next game videogame system, the Nintendo 64, to the public. Along with the console, the company announced an add-on peripheral for the device, similar to the Famicom Disk System. Dubbed the "64DD," this a disk drive that would provide the Nintendo 64 with additional RAM, as well as rewritable memory that would allow for user-created content to be saved to the disk. Nintendo's first game for the Nintendo 64 was going to be Super Mario 64—the first fully 3D Mario game the company had worked on—but following its release, Nintendo intended to release a new 3D Legend of Zelda as well. A tech demo presenting Link rendered in 3D using the Nintendo 64 hardware was shown off in 1995, prior to the release of the system.

This tech demo was designed by Takao Shimizu, who, after completing work on the project, went on to direct the next Star Fox game, Star Fox 64. At the time, Toru Osawa, a Nintendo employee was asked by Miyamoto if he would like to direct the company's upcoming Zelda project. Osawa agreed, and picked up where Shimizu had left off. The desire to create a Zelda game based around swordfighting persisted, and Osawa began penning a script for the game with this in mind.

The following year, the Nintendo 64 was released alongisde Super Mario 64. Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Yoshiaki Koizumi had been spearheading that game's development, and successfully released it to critical acclaim in 1996. As development on Super Mario 64 wrapped, Koizumi and a programmer named Jin Ikeda joined Osawa, and began to experiment with how they could use their learnings to develop a new Zelda game in 3D. Similar to the way the original Legend of Zelda was conceived for the Famicom Disk System, the initial goal for this game was to make full use of the 64DD, utilizing its hardware for tricks to create a persistent world with lasting effects such as trees remaining cut once the player had chopped them down. The small team began experimenting with the hardware, using the game engine used for Super Mario 64 and modifying it as required to help build their new Zelda. Koizumi would be in charge of creating the character model and animations for Link, owing to his experience serving as one of the character animators on Super Mario 64 in addition to serving as that game's assistant director.

The first half of development would be spent on a this phase of experimentation. One of the initial ideas Miyamoto had was that the game would take place entirely within the confines of a castle. Similar to the castle in Super Mario 64, each room would have led to a different kind of environment, such as a meadow or an ocean. Link wouldn't have been able to venture outside the castle at all. This idea was quickly abandoned. Another suggestion from Miyamoto involved having the game play out from a first-person perspective, and when you'd encounter an enemy, the camera would shift to a side-scrolling viewpoint, similar to Zelda II and other role-playing games. This suggestion was ignored by Koizumi, who was putting a great deal of effort into the character model for Link and wished for it to be visible to the player at all times. Unfortunately, like a hard disk, the 64DD consisted of mechanical moving parts, and depending on where on the disk the data was stored, it would take longer to retrieve. This limited the number of movements and animations that could be programmed for Link, and the idea of using the 64DD was shelved as a result. However, the Nintendo 64 itself only had access to 4MB of RAM without the 64DD add-on, and the team would now need to account for the drop in available memory.

One of the other challenges that the team would need to solve was how combat would control. Since the game was going to be in 3D, choosing the appropriate camera angle was one of the earliest issues they had to contend with. And so, since this new Zelda was to be based around the idea of swordfighting, Osawa, Koizumi and Ikeda decided to visit Toei Kyoto Studio park to seek inspiration.

"As we went along looking at everything, it was so hot that we ducked into a playhouse to cool off," Osawa would recall in an Iwata Asks interview years later. "They were doing a ninja show. A number of ninja were surrounding the main samurai and one lashed out with a kusarigama (sickle-and-chain). The lead samurai caught it with his left arm, the chain stretched tight, and the ninja moved in a circle around him."

This show led the team to conceive of Z-targeting, or what is more commonly known as a "lock-on" in videogames—an invisible line connecting the player character and the enemy, which would cause you to circle around your opponent once you had locked on to them. It would ensure that the enemy remained within the player's line of sight, providing a practical solution to camera perspective. A similar concept had appeared in Super Mario 64 where, if the player tried to read a signpost, they would sometimes end up going around it in circles. Additionally, the ninja show at Toei Kyoto Studio Park also demonstrated to the team that, in staged swordfights, enemies would attack the protagonist one at a time so that he could engage them one-on-on. The combination of this knowledge and the idea for Z-targeting gave the developers a foundation upon which they could begin building the game's swordfighting system. Koizumi designed a lock-on marker that could be used to indicate what the player was locked on to, and created it in the shape of a simple fairy, which Osawa named "Navi"—referring to someone that would help navigate Link through the world. Without meaning to, Osawa, Koizumi, and Ikeda had provided Link with his first companion character—something Miyamoto had originally wanted to do in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

The conception of Navi also allowed the developers to deal with some of the memory challenges they were facing. It was decided that, in the world of this new Zelda, every character in Link's village would have their own personal fairy. This made it so you could get away with just displaying someone's fairy (which consisted of a simple round model) if the player was standing far away from them, and have the actual character model appear as the player got closer. This system, in turn, led to a story idea whereby Link wouldn't have his own fairy companion at the start, meet one during his adventure, and have to part with her at the end of the game. It was a trademark example of Nintendo allowing practical game mechanics to dictate story ideas. And as ideas for the game's story began to expand, so did the team and its ambitions.

During the development of the original Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda, the team working on the games would brainstorm ideas for both, and categorize them into "Mario ideas" and "Zelda ideas" as they deemed appropriate. During the development of Super Mario 64, Yoshiaki Koizumi had been doing the same, and would often refer to his notes while working on this new Zelda. One of the ideas that had been discussed for Mario 64 was the inclusion of a horse that the player would be able to ride. While that idea hadn't made it into Mario, Miyamoto wanted to include it in Zelda, and so the team began working on implementing it. They started by photographing horses for reference and even discussed bringing an actual horse into the studio to help with planning. (Although, eventually, they had to settle for balancing a plank across two footstools) As a result of the horse's inclusion, the game would need larger fields that the player could ride across, and so designer Makoto Miyanaga began creating Hyrule Field—a large central area that would connect the game's other locales.

Hyrule Field was initially densely populated with trees, but the team discovered that this led to the player having to slow down too often while on horseback, and so the number of obstacles in the player's path was reduced. Routes were included across the enormous field to help steer players towards places of consequence, and to prevent them from getting lost. The team also began implementing weather effects and a day-and-night cycle, in addition to littering the field with hidden secrets and discoverable items.

"It created quite a fuss when I first made [Hyrule Field]," Miyanaga would recall. "People were like, 'You can't make it that big!' Even riding a horse, it was so big that you would get bored riding around it, so we had to add something. Then lots of people took a hand in it, having enemies appear and putting holes here and there. We'd be like, 'This area's a bit empty, so I'll make a hole and put something in it.'"

In parallel, attention was being heaped on the character model for Link, and no expense was being spared to animate the character in a convincing fashion. This Zelda, like Zelda II, featured a more grown-up Link and Koizumi had designed him to look more "handsome" than in prior games at the request of his wife. The character's sideburns were reduced and he was given a sharper nose. Additionally, Koizumi pierced Link's ears to give him a more striking appearance. (Although, he noted it wouldn't have suited Nintendo's style to have Link appear "too cool," and so he also gave Link his trademark long, white underwear.)

"We’d been fussing over how Link should open a treasure chest for three years," Miyamoto would recall in an interview in 1998. "When we got the idea of using motion capture, there were some in the staff who were against it. We ended up deciding that just a little would be okay. My company is sometimes worried about losing money, so when motion capture was suggested we were met with a 'Do you really need that much equipment? Isn’t what you’re doing now okay?' sort of reaction. We started out using wireframe motion capture, but soon we made our own method which actually cost twice as much. But what’s the point of doing something that’s already been done before? When we were photographing horses, we even went as far as discussing how to bring a real horse into the studio. In the end we got two footstools and a plank and making our own horse like that."

"On the day I went to the studio, there was a fantastic iron-frame treasure chest with a sword and shield inside. It clearly had cost a lot of money. When I asked 'What is all this for?' the triumphant reply was 'We figured out how to open a treasure chest!' Their conclusion was that before you opened the chest you needed to kick the hinge first or there’s no way the action looked realistic. I wonder if the motion capture team made that, too… It was really good stuff."

Partway through development, it occurred to Miyamoto that he would like to see a younger version of Link appear in the game. He was against the idea of Link being "just another cool hero" and noted that he had remained a playful, childish character in most of the Zelda games he had personally worked on. At Miyamoto's insistence, the team began exploring the idea of a younger Link and Koizumi began testing the idea of applying the same animations to two separate character models—one older and one younger. The presence of two Links was justified by adjusting the game's story. At some point in the game, the younger Link would withdraw the Master Sword from its pedestal and would be transported several years into the future, where he would be an adult.

"Link's archenemy is Ganon, so I thought they should meet once when he's a child," Miyamoto would recall. "The innocent eyes of a child are able to see through to the truth, so Young Link knows instinctively that Ganon is a bad guy. When Adult Link meets him again, and Ganon says he's that boy from years before, it really hits you. You think to yourself, 'That's right. I'm that child from before.' Putting in that scene was really fun for me."

As development on progressed, Miyamoto began adding more members to the team. The year prior, Nintendo had released Marvelous: Another Treasure Island for the Super Famicom. The game had been directed by Eiji Aonuma, an artist that Miyamoto had personally had a hand in hiring, and was heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Aonuma had also worked on a number of games in collaboration with external developers such as HAL Laboratory, but wanted to create more in-house titles with teams at Nintendo. Noting his interest in games that were similar to Zelda, Miyamoto invited him to join his team.

The Zelda team lacked someone that was capable of designing the game's dungeons in three dimensions. Despite having no prior experience with work of that nature, Aonuma was assigned the task and began brainstorming ideas on paper, trying to maintain a sense of logic within his dungeons while striving to constantly surprise the player. The first dungeon he worked on was the Forest Temple, where the path would twist and warp as Link traversed it. Aonuma would later state that the Forest Temple was his favourite dungeon in the game. "While playing the previous [Legend of Zelda game], I tried to put in elements to solve the questions that I had for those games," Aonuma would recall in an interview years later. "For example, it is a terrible rule to restart from the entrance if the player fell inside the a dungeon. I made it clear for the player to see the entrance of the room where the boss is as he walks into the dungeon. You can say I put baits."

Aonuma's talent as a puppet designer helped him visualize the logic and moving parts for complex, three-dimensional dungeons, including the game's infamous Water Temple. He collaborated with other members of the development team, routinely tweaking his dungeons to be able to accommodate different items such as the Hookshot and so on, ensuring that none of them would disrupt progress within any of the dungeons. Eventually, Aonuma grew into the role of a systems director and was made one of several sub-directors that would lead different aspects of development.

One of the programmers assisting Aonuma with the creation of his dungeons was Kazuaki Morita, who had spearheaded development of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening when he had begun experimenting with a development kit for the original Game Boy. Morita was fond of fishing and had included a fishing minigame in Link's Awakening, among other complex side events. Whilst working on the boss for Aonuma's Water Temple dungeon, Morita noted the presence of a pool-like water body. He happened to have the model of a fish on hand, and began experimenting by having the fish swim around inside the pool. This led to the creation of Morita's second fishing game for a Zelda title, and he began fleshing it out, even handling elements such as the sound and the music by himself.

Meanwhile, other parts of the game had begun to grow in scope and detail as well. Miyamoto was of the opinion that if Link could ride a horse, the team should include mounted archery and one-on-one duels. The team was able to include the former, but not the latter. One-on-one duels would later be implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which would serve as a spiritual successor to this game. Additionally, Miyamoto's fondness for including realistic logic in his games had persisted, and the team was working on adding minute details to objects in the game, such as wooden signboards. At Miyamoto's behest, the team had designed it so that swinging your sword horizontally would cut planks in half, while swinging it diagonally would cut it a different way. If the resulting pieces of wood happened to fall into a body of water, they would float. Just as with A Link to the Past, Miyamoto believed in a strong sense of interactivity, and other members of the team such as Aonuma and Morita shared his obsession with detail, leading to constant iteration and polish.

This attention to detail spilled over into the game's story and characters as well. Yoshiaki Koizumi and Kazuaki Morita had been in charge of the story and events for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. Inspired by the characters and atmosphere of an American TV named show Twin Peaks, Link's Awakening had featured a cast of peculiar and memorable characters. Since the team for this new Zelda consisted of members of the Link's Awakening team, the staff pushed further in that direction. An owl-like character similar to the one in Link's Awakening was included, as were others inspired by those in the prior game—most notably Talon and Malon, a father-daughter pair that bore a striking resemblance to Tarin and Marin from the Game Boy game.

"When we decided to handle Link growing up from a 9-year-old child to a more mature 16-year-old, I wanted lots of characters to fulfill various roles," Miyamoto would recall. "For example, [the owl] Kaepora Gaebora is a grandfather figure who gives Link all kinds of advice and looks out for him. And since Link is a boy, I wanted girls besides Princess Zelda to show up."

The latter half of development on the new Zelda was spent almost exclusively on adding content to the game, in the form of dungeons, events involving the ocarina and music mechanic, and other sub-events. At its peak size, the development team for the game reached about 120 people—forty or fifty of which were in-house Nintendo employees, with the remaining staff comprised of people from external companies. Following multiple days to ensure the game was the best it could be, the team was determined to send it out into the world by fall of 1998. The Nintendo 64 was facing stiff competition from the PlayStation, and Nintendo needed a major title release to keep their platform competitive.

After close to three years of development, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in November 1998 and would go on to sell over 7.6 million units. While it couldn't turn the fortunes of the Nintendo 64 around, it is generally considered the best and most memorable game in the series. It created the template for a number of 3D action-adventure games and for a number of 3D Zelda games after it. Ocarina of Time also became the benchmark by which all future Zelda games would be measured for years to come. Its immense success and cultural importance would cast a long shadow over the Zelda development team for years thereafter, and would lead to the retooling of The Legend of Zelda a number of times, as Nintendo would attempt to create a game that could surpass Ocarina of Time.