A World Worth Exploring
The Legend of Zelda is an action-adventure series created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka at Nintendo, debuting in 1986 on the Famicom Disk System. Where Mario ran forward, Link explored freely.
Miyamoto's childhood in rural Kyoto — the experience of finding a hidden cave, following a stream until it vanished underground, cresting a hill to discover an unexpected valley — became the design blueprint for Hyrule's overworld. The original game gave players 128 screens of explorable territory with no prescribed direction, nine labyrinths to conquer in any sequence, and a battery-backed save system that preserved progress: a combination of features that defined a new genre.
By 1991, A Link to the Past on the Super Famicom had expanded the formula into its mature form: a 16-bit Hyrule with a full narrative, multiple villages, and the masterwork parallel-world mechanic that split the game world into the sunlit Light World and the corrupted Dark World of Ganon's realm. Ten dungeons. The first appearance of the Master Sword. A villain with genuine dramatic weight. It remains one of the finest games ever made.
“What I remember most is going out and exploring — you’d find a cave, and you’d wonder if you should go in, and you’d feel brave or afraid. I wanted people to feel that.” — Shigeru Miyamoto, on the design inspiration for The Legend of Zelda
Videos
Official Trailer
Retrospective
The Early Era
NES Titles
2
The original Legend of Zelda (1987 NA) and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988 NA) established the action-adventure and action-RPG templates the series would explore for decades.
SNES Milestone
10
A Link to the Past features ten dungeons across the Light and Dark Worlds — three Light World temples and seven Dark World palaces plus Ganon's Tower, each with a distinct theme and boss.
Game Boy Gem
1993
Link's Awakening, developed by Nintendo EAD in their spare time, became the most emotionally resonant entry in the early catalogue — a self-contained masterwork on monochrome Game Boy hardware.