Sep 11th 1-2-3: What Made Me Love Art - The Legend Of Zelda
Hello!
I pray your week has found you well. It has been quite the past two weeks, and as is typically the case, it has been filled with a multitude of lessons and blessings.
For this week, I have a short, yet deeply personal body of art to cover. This will be about the body of work that got me to begin loving art, The Legend of Zelda.
So what is the story behind The Legend Of Zelda?
1: The Story Behind The Story ( 3 minute read )
The Legend of Zelda NES Title Screen
The outdoors is a beautiful and powerful place as a child.
Wonder, discovery, and life is teeming around every tree and underneath every rock.
For Shigeru Miyamoto, the outdoors meant adventure.
Miyamoto grew up in Sonobe, a town in the Kyoto region of Japan. Much of his childhood was spent exploring woods, hillsides, forests and caves around his home.
He would oftentimes become enchanted stumbling upon lakes and other caves. One time as a child, Miyamoto became lost in the woods without any guidance or a map.
Eventually, he did find his way back to his home, and with a story to tell.
These experiences would feed into his desire to evoke these same feelings of exploration, the unknown, and adventure in his players.
Fast forward 1984, and Miyamoto was working at the legendary, Nintendo.
He was working alongside Takashi Tezuka on both Super Mario Bros and The Legend Of Zelda at the same time. It began with planning, and then went into design.
While Super Mario Bros was to be linear with fixed progression, The Legend of Zelda was to be open and free, exploratory.
Just like the outdoors back when Miyamoto was a child.
The game would be filled with a large overworld with nine dungeons that could be explored in most any order the player wants, much like the caves Miyamoto explored as a child.
When he would once get lost in the woods outdoors, a Lost Woods was created in game where players could get lost in, and eventually find their way through to new secrets and places.
Just like the outdoors, exploration and discovery were central to the design theme of the game.
The Legend of Zelda was not just about telling a story, but rather, letting the player discover the land of Hyrule’s history and secrets themselves.
Familiarity is what players would gain of the world through exploration.
Along with this theme came the philosophy of player agency. Unlike most games at the time, The Legend of Zelda would provide minimal guidance, instead expecting players to experiment, fail, and try different paths.
This was a risk that they decided to take during development, taking into full consideration that the player may not know what to do.
However this created a balance between the unknown and reward.
Every time that the player would explore and try new things, they would be rewarded with secrets, puzzles, and even power-ups. This tension was much like the feeling Miyamoto would feel in the outdoors whenever he would get lost, discover a new location, or try new paths.
The player character would level up, just like Miyamoto did as a child all those years back in the outdoors of Sonobe.
Tension between giving enough tools to the player, and letting the player feel lost was what nailed home the feeling of adventure.
Alongside the adventure of designing and playing the game, was the adventure of charting new features and mechanics that influence video games to this day.
With the inclusion of an on-cartridge battery, saving games began and became commonplace with The Legend of Zelda. Likewise the use of MMC1 memory management controller in the cartridge version allowed for larger content than was previously seen before in video games.
The Legend of Zelda launched in Japan in late 1985, with a cartridge release coming later in 1986 in the US.
The game is, in and of itself, a legend, spawning inspiration for countless other titles in video game history.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Then in 1995, my Dad showed me a 4-year old me the game, and my mind and heart was instantly blown away.
I will never forget the feeling as a child of exploring the gigantic world of Hyrule. Screen after screen of new places, secrets, and enemies.
It was the first moment I can cognitively remember being enamored with a body of art.
Then, years later, the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would be released in 2017, and would have the same effect on my son as the original did on me.
Adventure, it starts as a child, and continues throughout your life if you would let it.
So let it.
Be adventurous, and be childlike.
Wonder reveals itself to such as these.
Shigeru Miyamoto
2: Creative Insights From Us
I. Think about a time from your childhood where you felt wonder and awe. What does it make you feel? What does it inspire in you to make?
II. Think about a body of art that you loved as a child. What did that teach you about who you are? How can you harness that to create something uniquely you?
3: Inspirational Quotes From Shigeru Miyamoto
I. “When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this.”
II. “Yes. So with a world of swords and sorcery as my theme, I decided to make an adventure game based on treasure‑hunting, and that was the beginning of The Legend of Zelda.”
III. “An everyday boy gets drawn into a series of incredible events and grows to become a hero. Within that framework, I wanted to create a game where the player could experience the feeling of exploration as he travels about the world, becoming familiar with the history of the land and the natural world he inhabits. That is reflected in the title: ‘The Legend of Zelda’.”
Thank you so much for reading!