No Zelda game is closer to Breath of the Wild than the NES original

In the mid-1980s in Kyoto, Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka and their team at Nintendo were working in parallel on two game designs that would represent two sides of the same coin. One would be linear, an obstacle course, a headless rush towards a goal. The other would be non-linear, a mysterious labyrinth, an unpredictable world of exploration. Unlike the arcade games that defined the medium at the time, both would place less emphasis on player skill in favor of an immersive experience with a beginning and end. Miyamoto carefully reviewed each of the team’s new gameplay ideas and matched them to one game or another, probably unaware that he wasn’t just defining two iconic series, but defining some of the fundamental principles of video game design. The first game was Super Mario Bros. The second game was The Legend of Zelda.

Super Mario Bros. was a phenomenon and remains one of the best-selling games of all time. The Legend of Zelda was a hit, but sold only a fraction as often. Perhaps it was inevitable that Zelda would later become a little more like its more popular twin. Sequels kept the spirit of adventure alive, but used meticulous gear-gating systems – essentially a set of locks and keys – to order the player’s progression through their labyrinthine worlds. They were probably better games for it and certainly easier to enjoy.

2017 breath of the wild was a shock to this system: an incredibly free reinvention of role-playing and open-world conventions, and a return to Zelda’s original non-linear philosophy. Ironically, it would surpass all of its predecessors by a lot, and also become the first Zelda to surpass a contemporary Mario game. The world was finally ready for the kind of adventure that Miyamoto and Tezuka envisioned 31 years ago.

Even knowing all that context – and having been writing about Zelda games for 20 years and playing them even longer – it was a similar shock to actually play The Legend of Zelda for the first time. It’s a very old game now: difficult, unfathomable, and minimalist by modern standards. Honestly, it’s not nearly as fun to play as it was in 1991 A connection to the past, let alone later entries. But it’s also game design genius in its raw state. The Legend of Zelda is an amazingly bold and unencumbered vision of what a playable adventure could be. It’s both deeply familiar as the father of all Zelda games, and almost alien in its distance from what they later became – until breath of the wildThis is.

The first thing you notice is that most Zelda games (breath of the wild included) consciously locating oneself in a tradition – a place with a history, usually one that repeats itself – The Legend of Zelda removes all context. There’s a superficial setup: Princess Zelda has hidden the eight pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom in a series of dungeons, and she needs a hero to collect them and defeat her captor, Ganon. Enter Link, who in this game is just a guy standing in a clearing, pondering what to do next. He doesn’t even have a sword.

In this first adventure, nothing is predicted or forgotten, and everything is new. There’s a cave over there: what’s in it? An old man, with a wooden sword and a warning, “It’s dangerous to go alone.” But there’s no other choice, so Link has to go alone. Monsters are everywhere, scurrying in treacherous patterns that are as individual as they are unpredictable. Where to the next piece of Triforce? In the thorn bushes, between the bare rocks, along the beach with its rushing tides? This is a world with no waypoints, signposts, or even names. It is a mysterious iconography, a living map of which only a tiny part can be seen at a time.

In The Legend of Zelda, the first dungeon you discover is not necessarily the first “level” of the game. They may have jumped to the third or fourth. Equally, if you set out and explore and are very careful, you may find your way to powerful items within your first hour that are meant to be used much later in the game. Riches are scattered everywhere if you know where to look. Buy a candle and light the right shrub, and you can climb underground to meet a mysterious Moblin, who will bestow you with loads of rupees that would take hours to crush. Now you can buy potions, arrows for a bow you don’t already have, a blue ring that halves the damage received.

Even by the most modern standards, this is a daring open design. You can’t hike straight into the final boss’ lair, but you can plunge into grave danger or charge Link to the point where the game almost feels broken. The few gates that Nintendo placed into the game’s structure feel like real-life mysteries that emerge organically from the landscape – a feeling that Zelda’s designers would be experts at recreating, but in a way that in the has become expected and almost ceremonial over time. I imagine few Zelda fans wanted to let go of the ceremonies of this rather linear development, but diminishing returns were in effect, and breath of the wildThe developers of rightly chose to pass them by. What they tried to recapture (and did) was something that even the very best Zelda games of decades past had missed: The Legend of Zelda‘s Hyrule feels like a real, unexplored wilderness, or like the landscape Miyamoto explored without a map in his youth and spotted sights like he was the first to ever go there.

In contrast to its untamed overworld, the first game’s dungeons, which would go on to become the Zelda series’ most intricate and challenging puzzles, feel a little more contained and surmountable, even when they’re at their most difficult. That was probably not true at the time of publication. These are the first words in a language that has since been heavily fleshed out, and solving their puzzles will become second nature to any seasoned Zelda player. The first game’s simple, savage 8-bit combat poses a challenge, but as technically rudimentary as the game is, it’s never less than knife-edge, responsive, and fair – as smoothly playable as you’d expect from the team, that it had delivered Super Mario Bros. just months before. (I had to spam the Nintendo Switch Online version’s snapshot and rewind features to beat it, though.)

The Legend of Zelda is so parsimonious in its hints, so gnomish in its design, so jealous of its mysteries, that a new player trying to solve it unaided is likely to be left at a loss. If you’re looking for help, don’t feel bad: Miyamoto may not have planned online walkthroughs, but he always wanted the game’s players to talk to each other, share secrets, and work together to reach the end through combined efforts.

Unless you play The Legend of Zelda In a kind of cultural vacuum, it’s no longer possible to experience the game in all the impressive mystery it possessed in 1986. It is now a known quantity and has passed into a modern version of popular memory: a story already told, a map already drawn. In a way, that’s a fitting ending for this early masterpiece. And we can still look down and marvel at this teeming, wild little microcosm: a game so free and so ahead of its time that it took its own makers 30 years to catch up.