When Zelda first was released on the NES in the mid-80's this was something that nobody in the world had ever seen the likes of before. I think it was quite a gamble on the part of Nintendo back in those days because they didn't really have any reason to think that it would be successful but then gain, the Nintendo in general was a gamble as well because up to that point videogames were mostly arcade style games that were short and had replay value based on getting high scores. In Zelda, there was no score, which seems just normal now but back in those times it was still a major part of gameplay.
So when a game came out that was complete with a very odd and mysterious ad campaign, we didn't really know what to make of it.
The Zelda game that we got with our cold cartridge was for most of us, something we had never experienced before and for me and everyone else that I knew, this was a wonderful turning of the page as far as gaming in general was concerned.
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A lot can change over the course of 30 years and the image above comes from an article in the Japan Times that I think many older gamers would really enjoy reading. You can check it out here if you want a trip down gaming history lane.
But I don't want to get into analyzing the work of someone else. I want to look at my own experience and how massive the original Zelda game was and how amazingly small that world was compared to more recent Zelda games, even the ones that existed in the past 20 years.
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Take a look at this map that I actually had as a paper copy when I was a young kid. This, compared to other games I had played up to that point, was absolutely huge. Now, looking back on it, that is pathetically small in comparison to the wildly huge worlds we are dealing with in games like Tears of the Kingdom.
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The above is an original paper map that came with all of the original Zelda games and I know that this is an important piece of history because that piece of relative trash, which isn't even in very good shape, is regularly selling for $50 to $100 on ebay. An original and unopened NES Zelda game is a very rare treat and in 2021 one of these was sold at auction for a staggering $870,000. Wow! There are some collectors out there with some serious money.
Getting back to how massive the game worlds are these days, I think that the scope of something like Tears of the Kingdom would have given Zelda's brainchild, Shigeru Miyamoto, an aneurism of delight to think that his invention would grow to something so huge in the future. When the game was first designed, this tiny world of Hyrule was something so massive that it hadn't really been attempted before in gaming, and I think that is the reason why NES' Zelda will forever be in the history books as something extremely important. It is easy to assume that someone else would have made something similar had it not been for Miyamoto, but someone had to be first and in this case, it was him.
The original NES game is estimated and agree by gaming historians to represent about 225 square kilometers. The Hyrule that we see in Tears of the Kingdom on the other hand, is estimated by those same historians to be 86,000 square kilometers... and this is just the area on the ground. Once we factor in the depths and the sky kingdom, it is significantly larger.
Creating something on that scale in 1986 technically would have been possible, but when you consider that the cartridge was already pushing the limits of storage space available at the time, it wouldn't have been commercially possible to create something that huge at the time. If someone had tried to do so using the tech that was available in the 80's they would probably still be in development to this day. The dev time of NES' Zelda was already several years, even though by comparison to today, it was a very small world indeed.
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Some extreme gamer did some complicated math to determine how long it would take for Link to walk from the north west of the map to the south east of the map and it was determined this would take about 2 and a half hours if there were no barriers. There are barriers in the game so it would actually take substantially longer than that. I wouldn't suggest anyone actually try to do that and I am certainly not going to do so but isn't it just wild that the game is this magnificently huge?
Looking back on the original Zelda game, we had absolutely zero concept of how massive games were going to become in the future. Hell, the original Zelda had a way of fast traveling and looking back that just seems absurd when you consider how minute the map is in comparison to the most recent Zelda game. There are other games whose world map is substantially larger than Hyrule is by a lot as well.
When you exclude games that are theoretically infinite such as Minecraft or No Man's SKy, the largest map in any game is Elite Dangerous whose map cannot be specifically determined, but is estimated to be around 400 billion star systems that all contain various planets with their own landmass that is largely explorable. In my mind that is too big and it is part of the reason why I have never played any of those games.
It was really fun to be alive when gaming took off in the 80's. If you are younger, and I presume a lot of you are, you have probably never known the extreme limitations that we had in the mid 80's or even worse, in the early 80's. We didn't mind it at the time because we didn't know any better. The way that games are now though has me wondering what sort of wonders we will see in 20 years from now. I think "how can the games possibly get any bigger?" but that is a silly way to think because we said the exact same thing back in the 80's.
I hope I live long enough to see what the next step is because at the way that technology is growing, it is likely going to be something inconceivable to us right now.
What is interesting about the NES Zelda game is that it only used half the space allotted to it. The development team misunderstood something while working on it and only made the game half as big as expected. This led to the second quest as they had all this extra room available.
Quite cool that something that was HEAVILY promoted on playgrounds of the time was a last minute patch for the dev team making up for a mistake.
The dungeon layouts just happened to feature at least one questionable one - which honestly, is easily written off as happenstance due to the number of screens and layout of those screens limiting variety quite a bit.
I was a much, much, bigger fan of Zelda II. I just kept getting stuck in Zelda 1. I got the game used at a yard sale, cart only, for like $15 (over $40 today) and I felt like I got a deal. Only after I realized I had no clue what to do and my friends at school were not interested in helping a newb, it became clear I needed to offload this one while I could get most of my money back (sold it to a friend for $10 and lunch money for a week).
I was totally unaware of this and that is really cool to know.
I recall that dungeon that you are talking about that was shaped like a Swastika, people need to remember that this symbol means something very different in Asian countries and that the Nazis actually committed copyright infringement by adopting it :)
It is surprising to hear that you were a bigger fan of Zelda 2 as that one got a lot of flack for not being as good because of the side-scrolling and random encounters in the wild that were pretty repetitive. Who can forget "I am Error" as well. I read that this was a translation issue but it is likely the only bit of dialogue that anyone remembers from that game.
This is part of why gaming was so amazing in the 80's. If you got stuck, you had no choice but to simply figure it out or ask someone on the playground. The concept of an internet wasn't something we could even fathom at the time. I remember facing some sort of spider looking boss that would just wipe the floor with me until one time I simply tried shooting an arrow at him. Turns out that was what they were trying to force you to do but with no indication that this was the case. After that the boss fight was easy.
I am not sure what I enjoyed more about Zelda II than I did the original. Maybe it was the side scrolling sections, it felt like a different game, I felt more in control probably seeing Link swing his sword, duck, and jump, etc. I remember beating it without any help but that was after I got Zelda III on SNES (absolutely loved that one and it was the first Zelda game I ever beat).
Oddly enough, I also prefer Castlevania II over the original. The first one was just too unforgiving for me - those Medusa heads were the death of me and my interest in that game. My friends could almost one man that game though, I know I got past the bat boss but not sure how much farther I was able to make it - I don't think I ever saw the second boss. If I did, it was rare and I don't remember it now.
It didn't help that 99% of my NES/Atari gaming was done on a black and white TV either. I missed out on so much just from colors on screen. We were in the 90s before I saw Asteroids on Atari 2600 had different color asteroids to shoot.
I loved Robowarrior too, another game most people hated. That game is so much survival horror it is sad to know hardly anyone else sees it.
I agree about the Swastika looking level layout. People in the United States tend to think the whole world revolves around our country. I never understood that myself. I learned about the religious and other meanings behind the inspiration for the Swastika before I learned about what Nazis did with it. I had a history teacher actually get mad over that, apparently the other meanings behind it was one of his "key points" in the course to help keep students interested.
Those still haunt me to this day. There were several other games, most notably Ninja Gaiden that had something similarly infuriating. I can still hear the sound of the death music from NG in my head right now despite having not played that game for over 30 years.
I loved the arcade version of Ninja Gaiden but just could not get into the NES version, I can't even call it a port it is a completely different game.
I had a friend that loved that series on NES and could not stand the arcade game. He would play it relentlessly when I would visit. He let me try maybe once per his three to five game overs so I never really had a chance to learn it. I just knew enough that I wasn't spending my allowance on a copy of my own.
Later when I saw the Atari Lynx port of the arcade game, I contemplated getting a Lynx (I was working a part time job at the time) but after some basic math I decided that would be a bad investment (I was making like $4 an hour and the Lynx was $180).
To put that in perspective to today, I was making just under $10 an hour and the Lynx was $450. No brainer that I would get tired of the game LONG before I saved versus going to the arcade on the weekends and playing $3 to $5 in quarters.
There were lots of reasons to not buy and Atari Lynx. I was one of the few people that purchased and Atari Jaguar and that was one of the biggest letdowns of my entire gaming life.
A friend of mine purchased the TG-16 portable for something crazy like $400. That thing was very ahead of its time but the price tag basically ensured that not many people were going to buy it.
For me, the only reason to get a Lynx was Ninja Gaiden as everything else on that portable was available in a better iteration on something I already owned. I wasn't into After Burner style shooters so no need to bother with Blue Lightning. I was burned out on basic maze games and the Pac family titles that showed up were just that - ports of nearly a decade old arcade games with nothing new or interesting (and those games were on other platforms).
There just wasn't much interesting, at least to me, exclusive to the Lynx. Even today, the few I have seen come up for sale locally are priced quite a bit higher than I care to pay.
Oh man, the TG-16 was definitely on my radar for a while. I wanted Splatterhouse and to play Blazing Lazers but the local EB only ever had games like Tricky Kick, JJ and Jeff, and similar titles in stock. They only received 1 copy of Splatterhouse, it was apparently a low print run as NEC had little faith in it in North America. To think they pushed JJ and Jeff HARD just makes it worse.
It was expensive though. I got one on clearance after TTI pulled the plug on the Turbo Duo. I think I got the TG-16 and 5 games (China Warrior is the only one I remember, I think I got Vigilante as well) for $100. I remember the EB I bought it from had the Japan version of Splatterhouse but it was $89, not marked down, and they were sold out of the card adapter so basically useless to me (even if I had the $129 they were charging for the adapter - I did not). $200 to play Splatterhouse was just out of my budget.
This zelda game is very expensive, is this Nintendo version as most of thier games are always expensive if not all
it was $20 or so when it was first released but they didn't know at the time that it would end up being one of the most famous games of all time.
Ohh that was why the price escalated. The higher the demand the higher the price