Anyone who spent a Saturday afternoon at the rental store knows some cartridges had a different color. On February 21, 2019, The Legend of Zelda turned 33: the game was released in Japan on February 21, 1986, as a launch title for the Famicom Disk System, the Famicom’s floppy disk add-on. Back then, not even Nintendo imagined how big the series would become.
The game was designed and directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, and was made at the same time as Super Mario Bros. The story is among the simplest: in Hyrule, young Link must gather the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom to rescue Princess Zelda from the hands of Ganon. What was not simple was the form: an open world seen from above, full of secrets, combining action, adventure, exploration and puzzles in a way nobody had done until then. Miyamoto said the feeling he wanted to convey was that of traveling without a map, stumbling upon incredible things along the way.
In the West, the game only arrived at the end of 1987, on an NES cartridge. And what a cartridge: gold, visible through a little window cut into the box. It was also one of the first games with an internal battery to save progress, without passwords. Those who finished the adventure also found the Second Quest, a harder version with different dungeons. The result was more than 6.5 million copies and one of the most influential series in video games, with the sequel Zelda II: The Adventure of Link coming out in Japan as early as January 21, 1987.
In 2019, the most recent game in the series was Breath of the Wild, which managed to bring enough novelty to renew the franchise without forgetting the classic elements born back in 1986. And the original remains playable today on Nintendo Classics, the classics catalog of Nintendo Switch Online.
Source: Eurogamer.
Zé Cartucho
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