Zelda was Nintendo's answer to "traditional RPGs," Shigeru Miyamoto says: "We wanted the player to interact with the game world using the controller, and conquer dungeons"

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Speaking during a Q&A included with the 1994 audio CD The Legend of Zelda: Sound and Drama (and surfaced via Retro Gamer's 40 years of The Legend of Zelda issue) Miyamoto explained that Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda were not only being worked on simultaneously, but once Mario was finished, developers from it went to help get Zelda across the finish line.

But these were games with vastly different scales, which is why in Japan, Super Mario Bros. was a traditional game cartridge release, while Zelda was released for the floppy disk-using Famicom Disk System allowing the game to be more expansive than the relatively simple sidescroller. "We were eager to take advantage of the Disk System's features," said Miyamoto. "We were able to register names, add better sound, save the player's progress, and incorporate other new ideas, which made the game a lot of fun to make."

Zelda 1 however, can be a bit obtuse at times – especially compared to Mario – and this was something the team was conscious of. Miyamoto added, "We were worried that people wouldn't know what to do, even at the beginning of the game, and the game wouldn't be well received."

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"I wanted to create a game where the player understands the history and nature of the land, and it feels like they're exploring." Miyamoto explains, "In traditional RPGs, the game progresses solely through dialogue, but we wanted the player to interact with the game world using the controller, and conquer dungeons using a simple mapping system."

The Legend of Zelda is a brutal game at times. If you take the wrong turn in the first screen of the game you'll be exploring without a sword, while others will need you to use your – ammo limited – bombs to explode seemingly random parts of the game world to progress. But despite Miyamoto's fear, Breath of the Wild would later take inspiration from the freeform exploration of the original game in its approach to the open-world formula, so all is well.

Shigeru Miyamoto thinks Zelda 2 was "sort of a failure," and A Link to the Past is the "real sequel"

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Scott McCraeContributor

Scott has been freelancing for over three years across a number of different gaming publications, first appearing on GamesRadar+ in 2024. He has also written for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, VG247, Play, TechRadar, and others. He's typically rambling about Metal Gear Solid, God Hand, or any other PS2-era titles that rarely (if ever) get sequels.

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