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Legend of Zelda Celebrates 20 Years
The Legend of Zelda is one of the most beloved gaming franchises Nintendo has created. It is also celebrating two decades of life this week. 1up has a great feature on the anniversary, exploring the different games in the series with a list of 'stuff to love'. From the article: "Twenty years ago this week -- February 21, 1986 -- thousands of Japanese gamers played The Legend of Zelda for the first time, and their perspective on gaming was forever changed. Here was a huge world, a massive quest, an open-ended odyssey that demanded exploration. When we Americans first placed that golden cartridge in our Nintendo Entertainment Systems a few months later, we learned what our friends overseas had already discovered: Zelda was addictive. It was adventurous. It was ambitious. It was amazing." Four Colour Rebellion also has commentary on this auspicious occasion, with a Happy Birthday look back and some fond remembrances.
It seems like only yesterday I got my 8 bit nintendo. One of the friends of the family who worked at Circuit City said, "You should stick to Super Mario Brothers. Zelda is just TOO hard!"
I was sooo intimidated when I opened that golden cartridge on my birthday.
But, I beat it in under two weeks after school. Dumb blonde was lying...
And thus began my addiction...
*sniff* memories....
Wow, 20 years ago.
:)
c ounts bug. :)
Man, I feel old.
This was one of my favorite games many years ago. Who am I kidding? It still is!
What a BLAST it was. Always something new to find, explore, or otherwise.
I bet I could still remember which trees to burn so I could buy cheap shields; and which ones took your money.
Fun times; I guess I'm getting old. The new games just don't do it for me anymore. Too complicated.
I still somewhat regularly plug in my Intellivision and NES, but that's about where I stop. The newer games are all show, no go. There's just no gameplay compared to, say, Astrosmash. Or Super Mario Bros (1, 2 or 3, take your pick!) Or for sports games, try Super Sprint. Or of course, Intellivision Baseball (one of the best games ever written, anywhere, by anyone -- except for that annoying get-the-run-in-before-the-third-out-and-it-still-
Good stuff; I think the gaming industry today should be locked in a room with these old games to remind them how to make the games FUN!
Zelda plays You!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
-"Let's play money making game" engrish- turrets" minigame
-Farming the graveyeard ghosts for money
-Checking the white/master sword caves after every dungeon to see if I was "ready"
-Dying like a million times to those fly-things in Death Mountain
-Fucking red clouds...
-GRUMBLE GRUMBLE
-The "slash-the-old-man-and-dodge-his-fireball-defense
-Being really confused by the dodongo/digdogger name switch in level 5
I still have a copy of the original nintendo/zelda game but the damn battery died. Lucky for me gamecube had a zelda edition with zelda1 and zelda2 which I promptly bought. Best $100 spent in awhile. I could have opened up the game and mucked around with the battery, but I'm lazy.
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Maybe Windwaker wasn't to everyone's taste -- it was mine -- but Zelda has to be up there with the best of the best. What other series has lasted nearly as long, producing a mid-arc title (in Ocarina of Time) that's regarded as one of the best games of all time?
Aside from the various EA sports titles, you don't have anything else with near as much longevity, and Madden and company partly just sell you updated rosters every year.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I remember there was a Nintendo or Nintendo Power phone number you were supposed to call when you won if you were one of the first. (I wasn't, but I tried anyway.)
I consoled myself by attacking the "second quest" anyway.
Zelda was good, one of the best even. But it still doesn't hold a candle to NetHack.
I won't lie, I love the Legend of Zelda. With each new game that comes out, there always seems to be this 2-4 year waiting period, by the end of which I'm ready to explode with anticipation. Will the next game live up to expectations? Will I find it challenging?
the answer, again and again, has been 'Yes'. I have yet to play a Legend of Zelda game I don't like. Sure, there have been some games which I liked less than others, but I'd still rather play any Legend of Zelda game over Generic FPS #284. From that point of view, though, each Zelda game has similar themes, weapons and play styles, yet in the twenty years I've been playing it, it has yet to get old.
Being an '80's child, I feel like I grew up with The Legend of Zelda. As I got older, the games matured too, changing in play style, or gaining new features. While I'm incredibly frustrated at the constant delays of the upcomming Twilight's Princess I will still be lined up the day it comes out, and inevitebly lose a week of productivity as I play through it.
To all other Zelda fans out there, I hope your memories are as fond. Happy Birthday.
When my parents kicked me off the Nintendo to make me play outside (which was frequent) they understood that they weren't ruining my last 20 minutes of gaming. Heck, my mom or dad would often sit co-pilot with the map helping me find where to go, but I wasn't allowd to play unless weather didn't permit me to go outside. I grew up in Minnesota, so we get a lot of extremes.
Ah.. memories.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Can't read it from work, but I hope the article mentions the miserable Phillips CD-i games in there somewhere.
If not, here's a brief history:
Originally, Nintendo worked with Sony to create a CD add-on to its then-successful SNES. Things were going along merrily, but, for some reason, Nintendo cut ties with Sony and changed to working with Phillips- and Sony didn't find out until Nintendo made a public announcement. As part of the agreement for developing a CD attachment for Nintendo, Phillips got to use some of Nintendo's properties for its own ill-fated CD-i game system.
There were three games in all (Wand of Gamelon or something is the only title I can remember.) One had a cartoon opening scene (dubbed "Gay Link", and you'll know why if you ever see the video), another had live-action scenes (I think it was something like Myst), and another had you messily controlling Zelda on her way to save Link (hey, it had to happen sometime.)
In the end, Nintendo did away with the whole CD thing anyway. So, out of this entire thing, we got:
-One (1) ill-fated gaming console by Phillips
-Three (3) horrible Zelda games which should only be referenced to prove that a good series can go bad
-No (0) CD add-on for the SNES
And, as you may have already guessed, Sony didn't stop production after Nintendo cut its ties- the project they were working on? You know it now as the Playstation.
That's right- Nintendo help create the very gaming console that now overshadows them. This was the first of many stupid decisions that lead up to the Gamecube (where they corrected many of the problems.)
As an aside, some of the other stupid decisions were: forcing N64 developers to work on the Virtual Boy (we all know how that faired), the Virtual Boy itself, using cartridges over CDs for the N64 (due to, as I understand it, mainly piracy concerns- you can't copy something if you lack the media), and losing Final Fantasy to Sony.
Sure you're not thinking of Wolfenstein3d?
In the secret mission for episode 6, there was one really short level that was actually an entire grid full of secret pushwalls. If you moved them around right and didn't block off any paths, you saw a secret sprite that said "CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDVARK." It was a contest of sorts, but was cancelled before release because there were already map editors out from the shareware version.
Years ago we were flying from London to San Francisco on Virgin, Premium Economy class. In that class you got a SNES built-in to the back of the seat in front of you, and I spent a happy while revisting my Blanka-dominated StreetFighter II past.
My then-girlfriend-now-wife however, not a gamer normally though certainly not averse to them, picked up Zelda: A Link To The Past. She said she really enjoyed it, but found it incredibly hard to dodge everything and couldn't get the hang of fighting.
Years go by, and when the Gameboy Advance SP came out I bought her one along with Zelda: Link To The Past. Again, she loved it. But again she complained she just couldn't get the hang of fighting anyone. So I took a look.
Right at the beginning of the game, you get a lamp. Except my wife didn't think this was a lamp, she thought it was a flamethrower. For several years she'd been going up to guards in the game and just flashing that lamp in their faces, expecting them to die, whilst totally ignoring the perfectly good sword she had as well.
It's just stuck in my mind since - imagine you really are a guard in that world. Some madman comes up to you, shouts "ha ha varmint, have at you" and quickly flashes a small torch at you, Then looks puzzled and disappears. Then re-appears and does it again. FOR THREE YEARS.
Well, I think it's funny anyway.
ahhh... good times
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Aardwolf, not aardvark.
I am still amazing at zelda.
a few days ago, i bought a DS, a few games, and Zelda, the minish cap for GBA.
Ive played the DS games only a few hours, where as im playing the minish cap non stop.
Do you remember when Nintendo Power started to print color? (With the clay statue of Mario on the cover.) However, the top game lists were a carry-over from the pink-and-blank newsletters, I think.
And does anyone remember those freaky comercials that came out for it with the guy popping his head up going "zelda?zelda?" I can't believe after all these years I still remember the damn commercial.Got to give credit to Nintendo.They really saved console gaming after the crash of '83.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Happy Birthday Zelda, and Link, and all of those characters that kick so much butt.
:D
Now how about releasing a definitive date for the sale of Twilight Princess, eh Nintendo?
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
I recall a debate that adventure games were stagnantly based on Eurocentric Medieval world views. While many, many RPGs of the time were exactly that, I enjoyed Zelda because it was Japan's take odd take on this theme. Here's a guy dressed like Robin Hood with a sword, traipsing through dungeons and forests doing some of the things a questing hobbit might do, but that's where the similarities end. Zelda, like Pac Man, was an early indication of the fountainhead of cyber-culutre that would issue from Japan over the next two decades.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Wolfenstein? Wrong decade...
... and I learn that Zelda turns 20. As if I didn't feel old already!
On a related note, I was thinking that someone should make a movie based on the Zelda series, in the same light as LoTR.
And then I watched Doom and thought, "Oh god no. Please don't ruin Zelda by turning it into a movie."
-David
I was a bit young when it came out.. 5.. but I remember getting it when I was 9 or 10.. I'm feeling old!
Gone!
At the time I really wasn't a huge fan of the game, being a little bit on the youngin' side of things, but in retrospect it was so nice to play a Nintendo game that wasn't a direct arcade port. Games like Contra where you were supposed to die a bunch and could put in another quarter to get some more lives, didn't work too well when your NES lacked a coin slot.
As for Zelda, the king and start of a long line or battery backed up save systems, kudos cause they got it right the first time, I could probably go pull my old cartridge and it would still have my save states from a decade ago.
Link to the Past is still among my all time favourite games. The music kicked so much ass
Trout's epitaph: Life is no way to treat an animal.
And what of the savegames entrusted to the battery-backed RAM in the later cartridge release?.. Ha!
...why did they have to go and remind me of how freaking old I am. :op
I remember beating Zelda within weeks of its release. I couldn't do anything but play it. I think it was my first experience with obsession. Other NES games were good, and you wanted to play them... but after a while, you'd get bored or distracted and wanna go play baseball or whatever... but with Zelda... it was like you got sucked into that little 8-bit world and couldn't get out.
And holy hell, that gold cartridge was cool as sh*t. :o)
WATYF
Wow, that takes me back, and makes me feel all of my 37 years of age. I'll always remember the GOLD cartridge, and didn't it have a battery in there to save games? I miss the top down play of that (and other) games of yore, now they're too focused on making a virtual 3d world and forget about the puzzles and fun.
. html
There are flash versions out there online, here's a fun one
http://www.t45ol.com/play_us/1887/legend-of-zelda
fak3r.com
At the moment, it's: divorce, n: A change of wife.
Wouldn't "A wife-changing experience" have more zing?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
20 years? Isn't that how long Twilight Princess has been delayed now?
Zelda almost stopped me from getting married. I own a lovely first edition Gold Cart of Ocarina of Time (you know, the one with blood and Muslim chants). In college my now wife (then barely a friend) kidnapped it because my room mate (their good friend) was playing it too much. I thought someone had stole it. Once I found out it was them I was pissed. They had my baby. So...my (now wifes) first real impression of me was that I was some video game luvin' jerk.
:)
Why she married me I will never know
I still have that cart...and she knows not to touch it...
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And I just happened to choose to wear my Zelda t-shirt today. Whoo! Now if only I had my N64 at my dorm with me to play some Ocarina of Time...
"...and their perspective on gaming was forever changed. Here was a huge world, a massive quest, an open-ended odyssey that demanded exploration..." Let's not hype Zelda too much. By 1986 I was already playing Ultima IV on my Apple IIc. Maybe it was the first console game like this, but big deal.
www.arkhambrewingcompany.com For all your Lovecraftian T-Shirt needs
I remember when Ocarina of Time first launched, I had it preordered. I only really preordered as I wanted to be "cool" and have the special gold cartridge. The day it came out, I was at school, but my dad offered to go pick it up for me at the local Toys R' Us. According to him it was just pure chaos. There were people everywhere, huge lines outside, with people pushing and shoving to get to the front of the non-preorder line. This was a big Toys R' Us, but apparently they weren't getting many copies of the game in. On his way out, my dad was being offered cash left, right, and center. Someone actually offered him $250 to sell the game to him then and there. Short of the Xbox 360, you don't really see this much anymore. Perhaps there was a shortage with the Ocarina of Time cartridges as well, but ether way, people definitely wanted that game...and rightfully so after playing it.
Last week my Nintendo officially bit it. I gave it the mid-eighties electronics equivalent of mouth to mouth for about an hour. I tried other cartridges to see if maybe they would work (repeating the blowing for each and every one). When I was out of games, I sat for ten minutes trying to figure out what to do next. I had 5 other systems in my living room, but all I wanted to play was Zelda. My NES is still sitting where it last fell, like the last little chunk of my childhood I can't bring myself to get rid of. Sure, I could go and find another system, but I wouldn't be mine. Wouldn't have those familiar scratches across the front. Woudn't still have the residue from my sister's stupid My Little Pony stickers on it. Wouldn't be right. However, it would be about time for me to get one of those redone thingies with the wireless controllers from http://www.playmessiah.com/
Jester
Warning: This sig may be legally binding in England.
pull out the old Atari 2600 and play some Combat or Freeway - or go even farther back and bug my uncle to dig out his Intellivision with the numb-thumb, stick the graphic key-card in the numbered controller and play Dungeons & Dragons - I'd have to remember to not shoot into the dark or my arrow might hit a wall and come back
Around when 3D gaming was taking off, there was the N64. Admittedly, the console wasn't that great, but there was a lot of hype behind it and there were a few great titles (mostly overshadowed by the sheer volume of crap). I was foolish in those days and didn't realize that Squaresoft had left me for Sony, but even by the time I found out, I didn't care; Final Fantasy games were going to be released for the PC in the future, and I decided to take my ill-gotten cash (I was too young to work, so it was all bounty from the holidays) and purchase a shiny new N64. The driving force behind my purchasing decision? Ocarina of Time.
Okay, so I did spend several good hours playing Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64, but the vast majority of the time I spent just playing Zelda 64. It's one of the few games I've ever owned that I've played all the way though, and I did it several times. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a game so much since Final Fantasy III/VI back in the day.
Was it worth it to buy a console just so I could play one game? Absolutely. Will I do it again? Twilight Princess is approaching release, and I've been tempted to drop the cash just to buy a Gamecube. I've never been interested in owning one before, but all it takes is one killer app.
My mom erased not one, but two gold Zelda NES carts when I was a child. I would play the game continuously just working through the main quest and then the master quest over and over. I would leave it running, of course, while I was forced to do my homework or 'go play outside' and my frustrated mother would pull the plug on the "intendo" because she "hated the damn thing so much". And she would refuse to buy games for me so I had to save up for months to be able to buy the game the first time, but after she erased a second cart, I guilt tripped her into buying me the third one and calmly explained how not to erase NES carts. (calmly for a 6 year old)
This sig is in another castle.
...that theme song. That's right, you can't! It's burned forever into our memories, down there with how to walk and how to breathe. :)
20 years, holy cow. 20 years and I can still remember that damn song.
It's all about context. Nobody is claiming that Zelda was the first game that featured open-ended exploration, but it was pretty new to the Japanese at the time, and Zelda was one of the first titles to bring such gameplay to the masses (which probably owes as much to the simple pick-up-and-play fun factor of the game as much as it does the fact that it was released on a console instead of a computer).
i mean it when i say you're awsome.....
:-/
Gone!
It gives me a very special feeling to be able to share a birthday with something as great as Zelda. Awesome, just awesome.
I beat Zelda 1 without using the sword until the Gannon Level. I prefer 2d Zelda to 3d Zelda
God spoke to me.
Elijah Wood looked exactly like I imagined Link to look IRL, and the ring's dark world/light world power was incredibly similar to the magic mirror's power in the third game.
And lets not forget the hours of fun after some of us more adventureous Links started warping around our screens. Man i wish they would bring that back in one of the game cube versions as some wierd trick (how they would do that i dont have a clue). Hey it kept some of us glued to our GameBoys for more then when we should.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Of course, the alternative is to have CD's or DVD's which scratch nicely over time (particularly if you have kids), rendering them rather useless. Personally I'd rather have the cartridge in this aspect, as no amount of blowing will revive a dead DVD.
Er? No, the reference is correct... It was a secret level in Ep6. http://www.3drealms.com/wolf3d/
Ahhh, the days when "3D" was a selling point and not an assumption.
Actually, it was Episode 2, Level 8, and the sign was for "aardwolf". This is the original sign. In the 1997 re-release of the game, they replaced the sign with a pile of crap on the floor. Here's what Apogee's Joe Siegler originally said about it (stolen from here):
"Call Apogee and say Aardwolf." It's a sign that to this day is something that I get asked about a lot. This is a sign that appears on a wall in a particularly nasty maze in Episode 2 Level 8 of Wolfenstein 3D. The sign was to be the goal in a contest Apogee was going to have, but almost immediately after the game's release, a large amount of cheat and mapping programs were released. With these programs running around, we felt that it would have been unfair to have the contest and award a prize. The sign was still left in the game, but in hindsight, probably should have been taken out. To this day, Apogee gets letters and phone calls and asking what Aardwolf is, frequently with the question, "Has anyone seen this yet?"
Also, in a somewhat related issue, letters were shown after the highest score in the score table in some revisions of the game. These letters were to be part of another contest that got scrapped before it got started, where we were going to have people call in with their scores and tell us the code; we'd then be able to verify their score. However, with the cheat programs out there this got scrapped too.
Basically, "Aardwolf" and the letters mean nothing now. Also note that if you found the Aardwolf sign in the game (without cheating), there's a VERY strong chance that you're stuck in there. The only way out may be to restart, or load a saved game from before you went into that maze.
Dodongo dislikes smoke.
i remember my older brother getting the NES for his birthday. when we put legend of zelda in for the first time it already had a saved game (apparently my dad was a bit anxious to play and didn't think we'd figure it out).
Are Kirby: Rainbow Run, or Advance Wars: Dual Strike or Trauma Center all about the graphics? How about lumines?
Lumines®, published by Bandai, is all about graphics. If it weren't, we'd have more people just downloading open-source Lumines clones or other puzzle games in the spirit of Columns and playing them on a PC or GBA.
I still have to fellate my NES carts.
Actually, a cotton swab with one end soaked in rubbing alcohol works a lot better than your saliva-filled emulation of a compressed air can. Rub the moist end several times across both sides of the edge connector, and then repeat with the dry end.
It still annoys me to this day that I could only find 19 and 3/4 heart containers on Link to the Past. I can't wait for the Nintendo Revolution comes out so I can play the Zelda series again. I'd really like to see a massive overhead 2D game released.
just yesterday I finished Majora's Mask. It was waiting the whole time till I get a PC beefy enough to run Project64 at reasonable speed. I finished OOT with the old 700MHZ CPU but at 5FPS it wasn't it.
And now I seriously ponder buying a used N64...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The only one I found that I didn't like was Zelda 2 for NES.
You mean Zeldavania: The Adventure of Link Belmont?
All the Nintendo portable Zeldas were made by Capcom.
The Oracle games (GBC) and Four Swords (GBA) may have been, but last time I checked, Link's Awakening (for GB, re-released for GBC) wasn't a Capcom production. Still, I'd love to see Capcom vs. Nintendo in the spirit of the Marvel and SNK series.
Who else finds Epona damn sexy too?
Once every couple of years, I pull my NES out of the closet and load up The Legend of Zelda. Yes, I get all nostalgic when I hear the intro music, and when I walk into that first cave to get my little wooden sword which Link is so proud to hold above his head. But after playing halfway through the first quest (or using the name ZELDA to skip directly to the second) the nostalgia wears off and I realize... the game is still actually fun. Lots of fun. Decades of playing has made the exploration part not quite so exciting... but navigating the dungeons, beating the bosses, collecting the items... Fantastic. This is truly a game that stands the test of time.
The enemies of Democracy are
I used some 99% isopropyl alcohol and qtips, and wiped down all the contactors, and many games took on a whole new life.
Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A friend shoulder-looking. Just after racing with the undertaker's ghost. I drop into a tiny room deep under ground surface, a small enclosed cube with no exit in any direction, somewhere at the end of an obscure tomb in the cemetery. Badly hurt, no fairies, no potions, generally screwed up.
"I don't think it can get any worse" - I say.
"Maybe try playing some song, the song of time or something" - says the friend.
So I whip out the ocarina and try playing the song of time, from memory.
And I play the wrong song. Song of storms.
It starts raining.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I was 12. She was 25, and married...happily...to the biggest jock you have ever seen in your life...even had the 80s "big hair" thing going on...both of them.
Nerd cred is all I wanted outta that.
I see Twilight Princess isn't due out until June, now. Gotta hype something, I guess, when deadlines slip... Sure, though -- Link to the Past and Ocarina are on my "worth replaying" list, assuming I ever finish Star Ocean 3 (lost in the Firewall...)
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Princess Zelda will be the featured spread in the next Maxim.
My parents were (are?) more hip than I was. Getting that shiny gold cartridge for Christmas was the first I ever seen or heard of Zelda, and it was like getting a Wonka golden ticket.
I remember taping pieces of notebook paper together and drawing the overhead map across several sheets with my colored map pencils. I also remember my parents using it to beat the game. It was like the only video game they played besides all the games for the Atari 2600 my grandparents had.
I remember first watching my older brother playing the original Legend of Zelda. Then I got into it. Man, that game was (is) a blast. Now for a word from our sponsor. It's the Legend of Zelda, it's really rad. Those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad. Ocktorocks, Tek-Teks, and leevers, too. And with your help, our hero pulls through. Yeah, go Link." *Disclaimer: From memory, so it may be a bit off. ...
I'm such a geek.
Hey, I liked Yo! Noid.
but Dobie no luv Zelda :-(
It was actually dependent on how many heart containers you had. It's possible to get the white sword without ever venturing inside a dungeon.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem