The original Legend of Zelda blazed many trails for gaming, arguably setting the standard for what would eventually become the open-world genre. Seeing as how this is the 30th anniversary for the series as a whole, Nintendo has opted for a blast from the past and dug up some of the original design documents from this first game to give fans an insight into the initial process of its development.
A video which goes over the whole overworld map was recently shared by Nintendo of Europe, and some extra images of a few different rooms were also shown. It's an interesting tour of this part of the development to be sure; it's hard to believe that much of this game was drafted on graphing paper.
What do you think? Were you able to 100% complete the original Zelda without any exterior help? Were you able to beat it at all? Drop us a comment in the section below.
[source nintendo.co.uk]
Comments 21
""It all started with some graph paper""
Just like the original Super Mario on NES.
@SLIGEACH_EIRE I know! I'm just floored by what they had to do back in the day in order to achieve what they did. I remember reading something on Mario where they said that the whole stage would be done on graph paper, given to the programmers to be put in game, tested, then the cycle would repeat until it was up to their standards.
So well crafted and so many years ahead of Its time. Zelda 3 has aged better. But Zelda 1 came from nowhere. There was no prototype for Zelda 1. That actually makes Zelda 1 a bigger Game!
I have Zelda 2 on the NES but not the first one. I didn't play through the first Zelda until I got the Wii. I wanted to complete the first game before re-visiting the second. It's the perfect example of what I would expect from a retro game. Simple gameplay but challenging. You need to be careful of how you approach and attack enemies. The difficulty curve becomes less steep, the more hearts and special items you get. Compared to other games of the time that were just far too difficult to play or progress.
Its truly amazing that they were able to design games like Mario and Zelda just on paper, with all the detail we saw later in-game!
Hey, they shared those for Super Mario Bros and then released a certain game... Zelda Maker confirmed??
I like how every map has the dungeon cut-out map over it (and exit in every four directions, 6 small blocks to left and 6 to right, and 3 large ones in the middle) even if they got ignored.
Maybe it was to for staying in the scale, but it gives me the feeling it was mass produced at the beginning and then they went "Ah, what the hell, I'm going to make some maps that have nothing to do with this and they will be great!"
Anybody know what "BG" stands for, as in "BG Planning Sheet"?
@FantasiaWHT I can only guess, but since this is top-down everything appears where a background would be in a sideview game. Then it'd simply be BackGround.
It could also be typical Engrish. As V is typically transcribed as B in Japanese. For example something like "Visual Game" -> "Bishuaru gēmu". Or visual graphics.
I love the history related to these retro games. It's really neat to see what kind of work went into such memorable masterpieces from back then! It's also equally impressive with how much graph paper they were willing to go through.
@FantasiaWHT "BackGround" seems to be the most obvious answer.
Some of the sheets have tables for background color palettes and for object color palettes.
I don't know why people sound so surprised by the idea of designing a video game on paper. Using a pre-made grid on paper is an easy way of dealing with tile maps.
Even nowadays, doodling on paper is still an easy way of prototyping software. Unless you are working with people who aren't in the same location as you, in that case, online tools become a necessity.
Nice!
They did so much with so little.
Graph paper- just as I used to map out the dungeons as I played the game! Still have them somewhere too.
Gaming history, gotta love it.
Reminds me of how I used to draw my own Zelda 1 dungeos, and Mario levels on paper as a kid.
@Qun_Mang I just hated when we had to tape multiple pages together because it got so out of hand!
That's really cool.
It's very cool seeing stuff like this.
I am so eager for Super Mario Maker to be released for the Switch. I never bought a Wii-U, but I'd still love to build my own game stages.
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