The Legend of Zelda
What are the best Zelda facts? From the start to finish, the entire Zelda series is rife with fascinating details and trivia. From the original game that started it all back in the ‘80s, to the latest Nintendo game, The Legend of Zelda is one of the best video game series ever made. It stars Link, the hero and the name that stands for both the title of the series and a reference to the player. The games are set in Hyrule, a land of fantasy that grows and develops as the series progresses.
Being a Nintendo icon, there are naturally some Zelda facts and secrets that are downright charming, and others that are downright ridiculous. We’ve tried to keep any Zelda secrets or ones that might ruin the experience of playing the games on another, but if any of these facts fly in the face of your personal Zelda experience, be gentle with us. This is Nintendo we’re talking about, and you know how things can get.
Inspiration and Design
When creating The Legend of Zelda, creator Shigeru Miyamoto and the rest of the Nintendo R&D1 development team set out to make a game that could feature a character that would assist the main playable character, rather than appearing as a power-up. The team found inspiration in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with both games making their respective main characters travel across a series of connected adventures.
According to Miyamoto, Link’s design was a mash-up of Disney’s Peter Pan, with his green colour scheme and pointed ears, and the White Rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with the proportions of Alice herself and her unique tunic.
Twilight Princess was mirrored and changed Link’s dominant hand from left to right to accommodate right-handed players. The Wii version of the game also changed the lock-on direction from up on the GameCube version to down on the Wii version.
Link’s Awakening was influenced by Twin Peaks, a TV show about a small group of suspicious characters living in a small Pacific Northwest town. According to Breath of the Wild director Masahiro Higuchi, the game’s focus on a small group of suspicious characters on a small island was inspired by Twin Peaks, with the director even drawing direct comparisons in his development diaries.
Inspiration from Sesame Street also contributed to The Legend of Zelda’s cute, endearing style. Going against the grain of typically adult-oriented 80s video game artwork with their adorable, straightforward designs (and avoiding child labor laws), the Zelda art team explains that they “developed its beautiful appearance based on a sketch by Miyamoto-san that had such a childish quality to it that we half-joked that it looked like it had come right out of Sesame Street.”
Originally, The Legend of Zelda was named The Hyrule Fantasy in Japan. This is because the game was partly inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Carroll once referred to Alice as Hyrule, her name in-game. Historian Jake Hunter also states that the Hyrule Fantasy subtitle was also partly inspired by a pop-up book by Shirley Jackson named The Subsequent Disasters, which you can find references to in a Zelda picture book.
How long has Zelda been around?
The Legend of Zelda was first created in 1986 and was officially released into the wild in 1987. The game was originally intended to be released on the Famicom Disk System, which was an add-on device to the Nintendo Entertainment System that would allow games to be larger and more complex, but it was cancelled also because Miyamoto found it troublesome to develop for.
Though the series has since become one of the most beloved and iconic in the history of video games, it was initially a commercial failure. The follow-up, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, was even more so, selling some 600,000 units worldwide.
In 1996, Nintendo President and CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi clarified The Legend of Zelda’s internal sales numbers. He proclaimed that the series was a complete failure and that the numbers do “not look promising”. According to Yamauchi, there were approximately 3.2 million units sold until then.
Then, in another interview from The Kyoto Journal, the same Nintendo president boasts that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has sold “over 1 million units in America alone” and that it is “veritable hit in Europe, too”.
