Topic: Something you may not have known about NES Zelda 1.

The dungeons fit together in the first quest:

The dungeons spell out ZELDA in the second quest:

Whoa, that's crazy...

They had to do that to save space on the cartridge. And it doesn't spell Zelda. It spells EA'LDZ if played in the right order.

sweet

The first one is not that interesting but, the second one= wow.

I think its because you can go directly to the second quest by Spelling ZELDA as your profile.

I never knew this. That's awesome!

I can't see what makes the first image so special, but the second one, that's kind of weird and clever at the same time...

The different colors in the first image distinguish the different dungeons of the first quest. Because of cartridge file size limitations, they could only have so many rooms in the game, and Miyamoto has said that this method saved them space. I don't know why they had to be physically represented like this since some connect indirectly via stairs with no problem. Doesn't really make sense to me, but it was supposed to be a clever way to make the best of limited space.

Oh so that's what those letters in the second quest are for! Awesome!

Clever.

Awesome

Thanks, never knew this

People really never noticed that about the 2nd Quest dungeons? It was pretty obvious, i thought.

Nintendo can't hind nothing from us

Yea, me too, Shpydar. I thought the first part was much more interesting, even if it doesn't really make sense to me, though I'd heard about it before. You can't really play through the first five dungeons without noticing the ZELDA thing. Perhaps the responses come from those who haven't gotten that far.

Jump, Nintendo revealed this themselves, actually, though I suppose the first part could have been discovered before. The second part is hardly a secret.

They are hiding the Zelda timeline pretty well, aren't they?

@Adam: I understand the reason the dungeons were mashed up into one map from my experience with RPG Maker: More individual maps take up more space than one map with more stuff in it. The staircase thing makes sense too, because it's not difficult to program events that move your location, even if it's to another part of the same map.

Interestingly, this storage limitation remained an issue with some SNES games as well, most notably Earthbound. That image is really something to see for any fan!

The staircase thing was my point of confusion, actually. If it's so easy to move your location instantly across the map, what's the relevance of this "super map"? I'm sure it makes sense, but as someone who is not a programmer, much less an NES programmer, it seems odd, but interesting!