Retronauts - 750: The Legacy of Zelda

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

To celebrate The Legend of Zelda's 40th anniversary AND the Retronauts' 750th episode, we assemble the Triforce of Cool People Who Like Zelda Games [Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and John Ricciardi] to discuss the OG Zelda's impact and legacy.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, it's the legend of Zelda, and it's really old. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. This is a very special episode. It is episode 750, 50, 50, and that is significant because we like numbers that are multiples of 50, I guess. I don't know. It seems, it's like three quarters of the way to a thousand, which is a big milestone in some sense, because we all use base 10 numbering. We are not 8-bit machines. Otherwise, it would be 256 and 1,024 that were the big deals. But no, we're just base 10.

And so we are going to talk about an 8-bit video game where everything is base 8, 16, whatever. I'm not even drunk here. I don't know what's happening. I've been trapped in the house all day with a snowstorm. So I think there's not enough oxygen. Anyway, yes, as I mentioned, I'm Jeremy Parrish here for episode 750, and I'm talking to people all the way on the other side of the planet because technology is cool. It's way better than it was 40 years ago in some respects. So who do we have joining me this week for episode 750, 50, 50, 50 of Retronauts? We'll start with the regular and then talk to our speculations. guest. Good morning. This is Diamond Fight. And in honor of our subject, I'm recording today entirely

left-handed. And who else do we have here? You haven't been on retronauts in a long time. Have you been on retronots before? I feel like you have. I looked it up because I actually forgot, and it looks like I was on, yeah, 10, 15 years ago, something like that. I was on an episode We recorded a special episode in your offices in Tokyo. one day. And I was on that episode, as was Jeremy and Kyle McLean and Cat Bailey. It would have been like 2013 or so. Yes, it was. That is it. I am John Ricardy from John Ricardy, all the way over here from Tokyo. I work at 84. We have our own podcast. You might

have heard me there. And if so, I'm sorry. But yeah, I love talking about retro games. And it's been, it's been a spell. So, hello. And the retro game we are talking about today, or at least the center fulcrum of this episode is The Legend of Zelda. And as John admitted before we began recording, he is a big Zelda nerd. Actually, I don't think you used the word big. You just said Zelda nerd. But I've spoken to you before and you are a big Zelda nerd. And that's perfect for having you on an episode about Zelda's 40th anniversary.

Yeah. Big Zelda nerd. You know, probably I'm also an old. Zelda nerd. And so I think, you know, I was thinking about this before the episode, but a lot of my a lot of my sort of formative video game memories are centered around, you know, the first Zelda. But I also feel like, man, I, every time I talk about this, every anniversary, every 10 years, whatever, I feel like I remember less and less. So I'm hoping you guys will help me, you know, pull out those great, those great memories. Hopefully I remember them.

Okay. Well, I can help you. So Zelda is a lady, but she's not actually the hero of the game. she's held prisoner and the hero is a guy named Link. Maybe he's a boy and he might be an elf. We'll sort it up. We know that he doesn't wear pants. No. But it's funny. As I get older, like the only memories that remain concrete for me are the ones tied to video games.

So it's very fortunate that I've, you know, made my life about talking about old video games because I'd be in big trouble otherwise. But, yeah, Zelda is one of those games, the original especially, that just evoke. not just certain, you know, memories like, oh, video game, but just, you know, places and feelings, there was something very evocative about the original Zelda. And that's why we keep coming back to it every once in a while. We've talked about the original Zelda. But this is, this is not just about like, hey, let's talk about the creation of the original, the legend of Zelda and what it is like. Right. There will be some of that. But it's also, I want to, I want to, I want to dig into, like, what has Zelda done for us lately?

Like, what's, what's Zelda accomplished? What is its legacy? I feel like it has a pretty big legacy, and I would like to discuss those things. So, I don't think either of you have been on an original Zelda episode of Retro Nuts before. Is that correct, Diamond? I've been on Zelda topics. I know we did a ranking episode of 2D. Zelda's at one point, and I'm pretty sure I was on that one. But you know me. I'm podcasting and writing

so many things about video games, including Zelda games. So it's, you know, I'd like to think I know more about this Zelda than, say, the Zelda that she's named for, you know, F. Scott's Gerald's wife. You haven't been studying Zelda Fitzgerald for decades now? I read that book once in high school, and that was enough for me. So, you know, It's fine. It's fine. So you cannot tell us what the legend of Zelda Fitzgerald is. Oh, I mean, the legend of Zelda Fitzgerald is the legend of Zelda, because now I think for anyone, anyone born in the last 50 years, this is the Zelda they're probably going to think

up first, you know? Even older people. I'm sure Rob Williams thought about this Zelda many, many times, and then he's like, hey, I have a baby. You know what this baby is named? It's named Zelda now. I think those are the three Zelda's I know. I know of Zelda in Zelda. I know of Zelda who, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, who this was named after, and I know Zelda Williams. And I think that's it. Yeah, I think Zelda was one of those names that just went out of fashion around the time of the Great Depression. Like, people just stopped using it. They said, let's go with something different. My grandmother had a similar name, Othelda. Oh, wow. That is just not a name anyone uses anymore. That sounds like a great game idea right there. Othello and Zelda, put it together. No, no, please, please no, Othello.

I've had to write about and make videos about Othello so many times. I don't want that. Well, you didn't have to. You choose, you, Jeremy. You make videos about a lot of classic stuff, and I love watching your stuff. No, my hands are tied. My hands are tied. Often I'm like, who's making you do this?

It's in the chronology, and I can't say. So I'm going to cover the NES library, except this one game. F that game. Right. There are times, though. Anyway, yes, the original Legend of Zelda. So because neither of you have been on a podcast specifically devoted to the original The Legend of Zelda, I think it is fair game for me to ask, how did you come across the original Zelda? What is your story?

What's the meat cute here? John, please. We have to know, what turned you into a big Zelda nerd? I think I was about 12-ish when Zelda first came out. And I, you know, this was to kind of set the table, right? This was like the peak, or not the peak, rather like the beginning of when the NES was becoming sort of the coolest thing in the world. And everybody had it and everybody at school was talking about it. There was no internet yet, you know, and so at least as far as we had access to.

And I just remember. Al Gore had not distributed it to the people yet. Right, right. Still waiting. It was part of the charm of games back then, I think, is like everything came from hearsay, right? And so, or, you know, from video game, the few video game publications, I think there was the Nintendo Fun Club news was probably at that time the only thing was EGM. EGM was around around then. No, that was 89. Yeah, okay. So, June, June 89. So two years later. So yeah, it was just the fun club news. The only other American publication at the time covering video games was a newsletter called the Computer Entertainer newsletter. Yeah. And I don't. That was it. I didn't have that. But it was that in Nintendo's, yeah, marketing newsletter. All that to say. like information was sort of you had to get it from people who already had got it.

You know what I mean? And, um, and, uh, and I was in New York. And, you know, one thing I learned this only many years later. I didn't know this at the time. And Diamond, I think you're from around those parts too, right? But, um, I believe, you know, we would get things kind of early. Like not, not earlier than like everyone, but a lot of times like stuff would ship to New York first.

And so like when they say something is coming out, because you didn't even have exact release dates around that. You just knew something was coming soonish. And, uh, often, you know, we would, we would be among the first. received them I found. And I had this friend at school, this guy named Sam. And I only, I don't remember most of my, you know, classmates from back then, but I remember Sam, because Sam had Zelda. And Sam invited me over to check out this new game he had. And, you know, like flashing the gold cartridge. And it was just like, oh my God, what is that thing that he's

holding? That is so different from everything I have seen before. There was a mystique to the whole, I think, you know, presence of this new game. They had a little cutout in the box where you could see the cartridge through the front. And it had a, you know, it could save your progress, which was, if I'm not mistaken, I think this was the first game that did that on the NES. And so, you know, all this about it made Zelda something I was very excited to learn more about. And so I was very close to Sam that summer. And that's kind of how I first learned about Zelda. This is before I owned it myself. And kind of got, I'm not going to say hooked on it, but sort of like wrapped up in the, in the mystique. I mean, there was definitely like,

like a two-week period in there where I was obsessed with this game. I borrowed it from a friend, and I just worked it inside and out. I beat the second quest. I was like, oh, you know, just, that was what I breathed for about two weeks. But that was much later than the game actually came out. The Fun Club newsletter here that I'm looking at is actually really interesting, because if you can see this, the Zelda coverage for that issue, there's no article about it. It's just the overworld map, the complete map, which has markings on it, and it shows levels three, four, five, and six maps. Because I guess levels one and two are already on the... It's just the insert that came with a game, but they fleshed out the corners that are blank on the insert.

And then gave you the next four stage maps. There's no explanation of how the game plays. This assumes that you have Zelda already. that you are engrossed in it. It doesn't try to hype you up. It's like, you already bought this. You saw that commercial. You saw the kid in the turtleneck calling out monster names, and you saw the sonorous announcer voice saying, a never-ending adventure, new for Nintendo Entertainment System. And that hooked you, and you bought it because, because of course it did, because it's a cool commercial at a gold cart. So here's the full map, kids. Here's where the stuff is. Here's where you

touch a little stone statue. you of a guard and it comes to life and you can find a neat thing underneath. So that's really interesting. I'd never really stop to look and really pay attention to how they covered the game in the Zelda issue of the Fun Club newsletter. But it is just like, fait accompli that you already own this game. They just assume. It's very, very cool.

But then also, in the back, there's a half-page ad that says, what happens when Link grows up, and it's promoting Zelda 2 already in autumn 1987, and that game would not ship for another year and a half. Thank you. Chip shortage. In English. In English, yes. It was already out in Japan, but we didn't know that because there was no import scene back

then. But that's part of my story, because I'm pretty sure 1987 is the year that I got my NES, which was earlier than some, but as John alluded to, not that early because the NES launch in New York first in 1985. So before I got mine, there were friends who had NES games and I would go to their houses and I would see different games and they were all very exciting to me. And so when I got my NES, I kind of already had, much like the NES cherry-picked the best of the Famicom releases.

By the time I got my NES, I could sort of cherry-picked, okay, I know Mario Brothers is very good, Mario Bros. was in the box, but I had an idea of what games were already good. Yeah. And there was already a lot of hype around Zelda. because it had just come out earlier that year, and anyone who had NES was already playing it, and they were talking about it. But somehow, I don't know who,

I don't know if it was newsletters or mythical uncles from Nintendo, but kids were already talking about how they were more Zelda's out in Japan. They insisted there were already three Zelda out in Japan, and that's not the case. You know, there wouldn't be a third Zelda until 1990, but still, by the time we were getting Zelda 1 in America, Zelda 2 was already out in Japan.

So yeah, they could have an ad in the newsletter saying, hey, what happens about what's Link going to do next? And we had no idea yet, and it wouldn't be a long time. But it's telling how Zelda immediately had a huge impact and it had a long tail. And you mentioned the new letter, Jeremy. If I believe correctly, the first issue of Nintendo Power, which is much, much later, of course, that also had a big spread on Zelda one. Not two, Zelda won, I think the second quest. It was the second quest, yeah. Yeah.

But it's a huge spread because it's like, yeah, this is a game. game that we know if you're out there and you've gotten an ES, you probably have this game and you've probably played it at least once, but have you played this far? Well, kids, here's a giant strat of information about things maybe you didn't know about that game you already own. How about it, kids? I think they dictated a lot of their coverage. I mean, I assume they dictated a lot of their coverage based on, you know, how many calls their gameplay counseling line got. And I'm sure Zelda was up there near the top of the list. And yeah, your point about Zelda, too, only being a year later, I think if you think about that now, it's kind of insane. Like, the first one was just

coming out and they were already teasing the second one. And yeah, I didn't know at the time either, but it was actually already available in Japan, which is kind of insane, but, or at least it was coming very soon in Japan if it wasn't. It was out. It was January, yeah, it was 11 months after the original Zelda. Yeah, yeah. So January 87. Which is extra while considering how how little Zelda 2 resembles Zelda 1. Like, you know, some game, like Super Mario Brothers, Super Brothers in Japan are basically, you know, it's basically like an extra map pack, you know, but Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 are two entirely different games, and yet they had them out within

one year of each other. That's incredible. Yeah. And I am a big fan of Zelda 2 as well. But I did want to just go back to one thing about the original Zelda that I think was very, kind of helped seal my interest in the series was, imagine your kid, you know, and you probably liked it. Back then, at least, we used to play outside all the time.

I was, like, never at home, and I was never being supervised either because that's just how it was in the 80s. But, you know, exploring your local, the woods near your house. Right. Zelda is my mom. And, you know, you would explore, like, the woods near your house or the weird graveyard around the, I had a graveyard around the corner and we would go there at night sometimes because it was fun and scary or whatever. And like, what Zelda did, I think, you know, by giving you that map that was like half complete and kind of, you know, talking about this big adventure and everything, it's sort of, you could take that home now. Like that sort of sense of wonder and adventure got amplified. And then you could do stuff that you could never do, you know, in your neighborhood or whatever.

And that was a big, big, big appeal. Yeah, if you run around stabbing people with swords, big problem. Well, you know, I'm not killing people. We're killing mummies and we're killing, you know. Your son just burned down the bushes in my front yard. Get him under control. That, too. There was something magical about that.

Burning down, I mean, again, it's not, when you, when you say it out loud, it sounds funny. And it almost sounds like, are you a pyro? But no, like, I would never think of burning a tree in the real world. But the idea that you could explore by kind of messing with the environment and finding hidden caves and treasures and stuff was extremely, extremely exciting and interesting. And I think relatively new at the time for video games. Yeah. And not only that, but it was persistent. Like when you saved the game, stopped playing, and you came back later,

Like, you know, my first experience with Zelda was not owning the game myself. It was playing it with friends who owned it. And so we would start up and, you know, they'd been exploring. They'd beaten a few dungeons. They'd been, you know, poking around the world. And so I would come into this world where some things had already been revealed. Like, you know, they had pushed aside some of those rock formations to open up the stairwells that let you warp around the world.

They had found, you know, dungeons. They had burned some bushes or bomb. some rocks. So, you know, my, my first impression of Hyrule was not the sort of pristine sandbox that you step into, where it's this, you know, this beckoning new adventure waiting for you. It was, you know, someone had already kind of come and ransacked a lot of the loot and found a lot of the cool stuff, but there was still more stuff out there. But just turning on a game and it just taking you right into that. I mean, even now, that's a lot of it. I mean, even now, that's pretty novel because we have all these startup screens and like, here's, you know, the, the engine logo and here's the, you know, the online experience may differ and have a different, you know, ESRB rating than what we've got on the box.

Right. All of that stuff. Like, in Zelda, it was, you know, you started up, the title screen music plays, you jump to the select screen and then you're just in the world. And it's super disorienting if you've never played the game before and you open up someone else's cartridge. And, you know, there's just all the stuff that's happened. And so you don't know, like, it makes you even more lost than before. And that's really cool, actually. That made it exciting because it just felt like this world is so big and so mysterious.

And, you know, it's not actually that big. It's, what, 16 by eight screens or something? So, again, you know, working in base 16, 256 screens. You know, it all comes back to hexadecimal. Well, I can certainly talk about the secrets that I think Jeremy brought up, because by this point, we had already played with Mario Brothers, so we knew that video games were going to have secrets. But the thing is, in Mario Brothers, most secrets involve, okay, well, here's the space,

you've got this column, you know, jump around. Maybe there's a hidden power up inside that block. Maybe there's a block you can't see. It's really there. You just can't see it. And in Zelda, it's a little different because you've got this map to explore. and at first you're just walking around and then I don't even know

how it first started because, you know, most of it, you wouldn't think to try pushing a rock, you know, you wouldn't think to try burning down a bush, because when you get the candle, it's supposed to be a light source, you know, and maybe if you accidentally touch it, you realize it hurts. Oh, it's fire, it, fire hurts.

And then somewhere in your brain you can put together, well, wait, I've got this thing that makes fire, there's lots of trees around, can I light trees on fire? And the answer is sometimes, you know, or you get the bombs. And the bombs obviously explode and break things, but most of the times that it's, you know, hurt enemies. But maybe it's like, oh, can I use a bomb to make a hole in a wall? And the answer is sometimes. And it's up to you to kind of just

figure this crap out and maybe you're writing it down somewhere or maybe you're just, just relentless. You go, especially when you get that first candle that only works once per screen. Like you enter a screen, try and burn a bush, leave, okay, try the next bush, try the next bush. And that can take a long time. It's always funny to me when you think about how quickly you can clear the Legend of Zelda, the original one,

if you know where everything is, because when you first play that game, you're playing it for hours, hours, weeks, maybe, and just, you're going everywhere and you're trying everything, and then you get a second quest where things are even more hidden

and all the stuff you think you knew you didn't know anymore. Well, I'll have to do it all over again. All right. Yeah, to encourage not only exploration, but I think experimentation, which you know, you still see to this day in some form, right, all the way up to tiers of the kingdom, which is a very complex, you know, modern version of that, but it's evolved a lot over the years.

But yeah, you would get items and you wouldn't know exactly what to do with them or how to use them or in what ways you can use them. And, you know, that by getting those and going back to places you've been before, it's kind of the Metroidvania thing, I guess, a little bit right. Sorry, Jeremy. I know you hate that word. No, no. But, you know, it's a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of.

a bit of, you wrote the book. It's a bit of going back and, uh, and, and, and a bit of that. And like, the, the experimentation, I think, is part of the allure too, because it's not just yet looking what's around that next corner, whatever, but it's like, oh, I've been there already, but maybe now I can do something else. Maybe now I have the ability to move that rock because I got the power bracelet or, you know, whatever it may be. Um, and that was extremely cool too. And let's not, let's not discount the importance of instruction manuals in the year of our lord, 1987. Because, I mean, that, that's something that I think is. is not really taken as a given these days.

If a game even has a manual, you're so lucky. But, you know, there's going to be an in-game tutorial. It was assumed that you would read the massive, thick, chunky boy manual that came with The Legend of Zelda and also the fold-out map. And it did explain a lot of this. It did explain, you know, like use a bomb and it can blow up a rock or candles can do more than just light up a room. So there were a lot of explanations about things. It didn't necessarily tell you, you know, eventually you're going to meet a guy who says grumble, grumble, what's that about?

Figure it out on your own. But, yeah, the manual did go a long way toward kind of easing you into the mechanics and mechanisms of the Legend of Zelda. And, you know, that manual, if you can find one that's in pristine shape these days, you've found a real treasure because that was a was something that people had just sitting next to them, referencing it, looking at the instructions, looking at the foldout map. I mean, that came sealed to, but you'll never find one that's still sealed because, you know, it's, you had to open it to look at it to see what the world was like. And so, you know, the physical aspect of the game was really important, you know, the gold box that broke from standard Nintendo design language. I mean, the, you know, the, you know, the, The way it's kind of skewed, the Legend of Zelda is reminiscent of the black box design, but it is not that pixelated art and, you know, strong Helvetica against black.

It's something different. It's something more elaborate. And you can see a golden cart shining through. And it came with a ton of stuff inside to help you on your way. And the cartridge had a battery in it. And all of these things were, like to me, I, you know, I just last year published a series of books called The NES era, which is really just sort of like a chronology. through photographs of console gaming from the NES launch onward.

And I gave The Legend of Zelda a very rare two-page spread just because, like, that was to me the moment that video games were back in the U.S. after the Atari crash. Like, yes, the NES came and Super Mario Brothers was great, and there were these other games. But it was with the legend of Zelda that Nintendo kind of planted a flag. and they said, we're going all in on promotion for this. We're going all in on the actual, like, physical item that you purchase. This is something special and different. And this could not have existed, you know, a year ago because there just wasn't a market

for it. But now, lots of people own the NES. Now, you know, Nintendo, us, we have, we're flush with money. We've got a lot of resources that we can sink into this and create something that's a very premium experience. And, you know, this is a moment at which. Nintendo's own publishing and development tactics and methodology changed because, you know, the early Famicom Pulse Line, Black Box in the U.S., like, those games were all made either by Nintendo

or made by, you know, partners working closely with them, like Hal or Paxofnagar or something. And, you know, it was all very much kind of like, we're doing everything. this is our system. And that was the standard for the time. You know, up until Activision came along, Atari made all of its own games. If you look at all the game systems that came out before or around the time of the Famicom in Japan, you have the SG-1000 from Sega, you have Cassio's PV-1000, etc. Like all of those systems were built very much around the model of the console manufacturer is also the publisher of all the software. And Nintendo's, they didn't necessarily deliberately break away from that, but their partners kind of, from what I understand, forced their hand, like Hudson and

Namco came in and said, hey, we're going to publish some games. And then that turned out to be a huge windfall for Nintendo because people wanted a great copy of Load Runner that they could play on their Famicom and an almost arcade perfect version of Pac-Man. So, you know, all of a sudden, there were all these other games that were making money for Nintendo and selling consoles, and Nintendo could step back, not make all of their own games, and really sink time and energy into making the games that they did create something special, something that really stood out and took advantage of the additional time and resources that their status afforded them. And this is where the good part of a licensed publishing model comes in.

to play because you do get sometimes a publisher that actually, you know, stops and says, let's really do something special with this medium, with this platform, with this product, and make it great. And Zolda is really kind of, to me, that moment of inflection for Nintendo and for the NES. Yeah, technology was really rapidly evolved. The technology of video games specifically was rapidly evolving at the time to, I remember reading in one of those interviews somewhere or another that they had actually started developing Zelda

even before Super Mario Brothers, but ultimately aimed to focus on Super Mario Brothers because Zelda was designed initially with the thought that it would be a disk system game which is going to have more memory and everything. But then, yeah, I think it was only probably a year later or something after the disc version came out that it was now possible to do that on a cartridge, right?

And that's what we got. But basically, you know, right around that year, they started breaking away from those black box games right. Like we got Metroid and Kid Icarus where the password packs and they had like the silver boxes. Silver, yes. You know, Zelda was only, I think a month or so later than that had the gold box with the gold cart and the battery. And, you know, a little later than that there was like punch out and with this black box. You know, like punch out was also black box, I guess technically, but it kind of felt a little bit different. And like they started. Had a photo on the front. Yeah, yeah. And they started basically sort of evolving at the time. It was all a very, and this was all to as a kid, this felt like a very long time. for this all to happen. But looking back, this happened in a span of like,

you know, a half a year. Like so, Franksafaldi had that thing. Recently you guys probably saw about the NES. It was a great video about the, sort of the creation of the NES and those early years. And like,

you know, they went from like one prototype to another to having a thing shipped in like six months. You know, and it's just insane how fast things moved back then versus now where, you know, we're lucky if we get a new Zelda game every, what, like four years or five years or whatever it is. So time was different.

But it was things were changing rapidly. Yeah, you mentioned that Zelda was the first NES game to have a battery in it. It was really the first game to have a lithium, like, battery built in. There were a couple of games released for the cassette, super cassette vision in Japan that you could put double A batteries into. Oh, interesting. And I think, I think Famicom, I think Famicom, I think Famicom Basic also had, in Japan, had the ability to, like, retain program data that you created with, the Famicom keyboard with double A batteries. So they were these like big oversized carts. Then if you find them now, they're going to be like encrusted with battery acid inside.

It's it's, I had, I had those Super Cazette Vision games and they were just like a horror show. If you looked inside the battery compartment. But Zelda had the lithium battery. And some of those batteries, I think, are still saving data 40 years later. Those things, those are little batteries are truly amazing. And all it did was just maintain the most infinitesimal electrical charge for this tiny little add-on package of RAM, like just, you know, a couple of bytes of RAM, basically, like a maybe a couple of, like a kilobite. I don't know. Not a lot of RAM. Just enough to retain, like, each screen has a thing that you can interact with in each dungeon screen.

So that's 512 screens. And then it keeps your, like, the amount of money you have, which is also the number of arrows you have. and which objects you've acquired. So it's really very compact. And all the battery has to do is just like make sure that there is a steady electrical charge going into that RAM so that the volatile memory doesn't disappear. And that's it. And those things just keep going and going and going. They were really being energized your bunny. They were like, it's only going to last for five years at the most or whatever. And I think they were just like, yeah, your lawyers probably told you you had to say that. But turns out like 25 years later, some of mine are still working.

I wish Game and Watches were that efficient, but they're not. And every once in a while, one of my Game and Watch batteries will die. And then there will be the most horrible haunting noise from somewhere upstairs in my office. And my wife and I are like, what is that horrible sound? It's like a robot dying. And it's so faint. And it's impossible to isolate where the sound is coming from. Like I have to break open boxes and hold things up to my ear until I finally,

found, oh, it's the pinball game and watch. And it's emitting this tiny but yet somehow piercing sound intermittently every five minutes. And it's going to keep us awake until we change the battery out. Nope, nope, Zelda didn't do that. It just kept going. Yeah, although I think years, I do remember years later, they started adding the messages to all NES games, but especially Zelda as well, about having to hold in the reset button when you turn the power off so you don't lose your save. So I guess They probably got a lot of calls about that, too. Never an issue for me. But that was always a bummer when you would have a game that you spent a ton of time on and then your battery died.

Or rather, your save died. John, you mentioned something about Zelda being in development for longer than Super Mario Brothers or before Super Mario Brothers started. Have you looked at some of the documents about how Zelda evolved over time? When it first started, it was just going to be dungeons. There was no overworld. It was just the dungeons. Like, if you look at Zelda, it really feels like a game built around some of the trends of its time. Like, Nintendo never talks about external influences.

Like, if you look at Nintendo's official documentation and their developer interviews, it's pretty hard to find a point where they acknowledge the existence of any video game company that is not them and any prior works. and I understand that that's kind of like a cultural thing over in Japan, and I don't think they're necessarily just trying to, like, you know, say, we invented video games. Good job. Us. It's more just circumspection. And it's a respect thing. Like they're not, you know, if someone else created a thing, it's not really our place to talk about their thing kind of kind of approach. But, I mean, if you look at the original Zelda compared to some of the things that were big at the time, it's impossible to look at it and say like, oh yeah, no one in, no one in, no, No one at Nintendo played, you know, Hydelein or the Tower of Draga because, like, those games just feel like they have enormous presence in Zelda. Zanadu, you know, Dragon Slayer 2, Adventure for Atari 2,600. Like, you can see all of these elements in there that just, like, I feel like the folks at Nintendo making games for NES and Famicom were pretty voracious game consumers. I feel like they were making video games because they liked video games. And so they had to have been aware of some of these things that were, you know, like in the case of the Tower of Draga, exploding on Famicom. The biggest thing that summer, you know, right before Super Mario Brothers came out.

So, you know, they had to have known that. And they had to have been aware of, you know, Atari's adventure because for a long time, Atari 2600 was like the big game console around the world. even if it wasn't that prevalent in Japan, it still just would have had so much influence. You know, Venture by Exidy, which kind of was like an arcade-ized version of adventure. You know, there are some more esoteric things. I saw Krista Lee recently posting about Courageous,

a game I had never heard of until it showed up on Egg console. And you look at that and you're like, yeah, I can kind of see where that overworld, like the open world style comes from, even if that was not very good and Zolda was a much better take on it. Right. Those are the trends of the time, right? I think like in that era, you know, those years, I guess in Japan, you know, as we know,

it's been well documented. RPGs had kind of blown up and they were directly inspired from PC RPGs in the West, right? Like wizardry and Ultima, you know, and whatnot led to eventually, you know, like things like the Black Onyx and Dragon Quest and things in Final Fantasy and all of those inspirations. But generally speaking, it seemed like that was kind of, okay, RPG. are have blown big how do we take that and make that you know more um interactive i guess or you know to put action in my RPG and i think that's something that japan really took lead on right like the west is kind of where the art the pen and paper and the math RPGs uh came from and turn-based

you know stuff but then japan sort of took the action and ran with it and i feel like that was uh you know say what you will about miyamoto because everything has been said about him at this point but i think he was very keen on sort of where things were going i think he was always a couple steps ahead back then especially, right? And I think if I were there, you were there at the time, any of us were there, maybe we would have potentially seen that sort of thing, like, okay, this is kind of where things are going. He did say in one of those interviews that, you know, adventure movies were big in the 80s at the time. And he specifically said, mentioned Indiana Jones as like an indirect inspiration at the time. It was like, that was the hot thing at the time, right?

Because, yeah, that was the 80s, right? There was tons of those kind of things in popular media at the time. And so also the Ghibli movies. I personally, I don't think I've ever seen them say this, but like you can't watch like Nausica or Lepita and not think that maybe there was some inspiration, you know, weaned from those movies, right? Yeah, they're definitely drinking from a common pool, if nothing else. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the Legend of Zelda, you know, if it did begin as just progressing through

dungeons in a sort of linear fashion, that is pure Tower of Duraga, which is. is a tower with 60 floors, and you go through them one by one, and it's full of secrets. And there's knights that have shields, and you have to hit them from behind, and there's withers who warp around and shoot energy beams at you when they manifest, that you have to reflect. I mean, it's like the connection there is so obvious. But even that was sort of predated by Zanadu. Actually, no, I think Zadadu came after the arcade version of Tower Draga, but the original

Dragon Slayer, I think, came before. the arcade version of Tower of Draga. So I'm not saying anyone was like taking notes and ripping each other off. I think it was that a lot of different companies sort of arrived at the same ideas at the same time. And then you had Hydeleid, which was what, like an eight by eight world totally open. And you could go anywhere, but there were parts that you had to like find certain items in order to pass that area. You could go down into dungeons. There were vampires and dragons and things like that. You could go in the water. And it just feels very, very similar to Zelda. And also the theme music is the Indiana Jones theme, turned into a repetitive grading

version of itself. So again, yeah, just all these things were sort of in the air and just coalesced into Zelda. And it wasn't doing anything necessarily that no one else had done before, but it did it so much better. Like, playing Zelda even now, all these years later, it just feels good. And I think a lot of that is the technology of the Famicom, not even the disc system, but the fact that Famicom is a console that displays direct to the TV. And when something's programmed well, it's running at 60 frames per second. So it just feels silky, smooth and responsive in a way that early, like, PC801, 901 games could not MSX games. Like, they didn't have smooth scrolling. they certainly did not have 60 frame per second refresh rates.

So everything felt kind of jumpy and skittish. They didn't have multicolored sprites. You know, they didn't have, unless you were talking like the PC-9801, didn't really have good music processing or generating capabilities. Sure. So. But, you know, also. Yeah, so Zelda just like pulls all those things together and it just makes all of it work in a great well-oiled little machine. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these, this also goes back to, I think it's, you know, it's a very important point that, you know, Miyamoto was an industrial designer before, you know, over being like, say, a program. And a lot of these games were made by like, like, to make a game, you had to be a programmer. Like, you didn't have to be a designer. You didn't have to have a, you know, so a lot of these games were one-man machines or at least, you know, a couple of people who were basically program oriented didn't necessarily have like kind of the design sense or we're thinking so much about like how this feels.

to players, you know, the user kind of interactivity of a game and how it, how, how, like, nice it feels to play or whatever. And, you know, I think that his industrial design background and also Nintendo's background as a toy company, you know, they were leagues ahead of a lot of these other developers because they were thinking about those things as a natural aspect of product design, you know, and so, you know, nowadays, you know, if you think about like, what, like, so I work at a localization company and when we're bringing games over to Japan, we're, you know, our designers are, like, looking at the fonts and stuff and the aesthetic things that, that will contribute to the player experience but aren't necessarily going to make it,

quote unquote, a better game. But I feel like in the same manner, these guys back then were way ahead of everyone else, way ahead of the curve in terms of thinking about that aspect of the game. So everything you just said is completely true. And I think on top of that, you also have just these people who were thinking about the feel and the fun of stuff, probably more so than a lot of the programmers who were making games at the time. Yeah, I completely agree. To me, one of the things that really stands out, especially about like 8-bit, 16-bit Nintendo stuff. But 8-bit especially is just that their games feel good, even when they're not actually that great. There's just a level of responsiveness, like feedback and immediacy that you didn't see in other games. And I really do,

yeah, I think their programmers and designers were really thinking in terms of a toy, like what is fun, what feels good, like what is, you know, there's almost like a tactile quality to some other games, the way Mario moves in Super Mario Brothers. It took a while to refine that. Like, movement in Mario Brothers is better than in other games of its time, but it's still kind of clunky. And, you know, you see that kind of carried through with a terrible jump arc and ice climber. But they got there. They got to Super Mario Brothers and they really figured it out. And, you know, they pooled their resources. It was not just like one man sitting there saying, I know what is a good game.

You know, they, they pulled Satoro Iwada's code from balloon fight, the arcade version of balloon fight for Mario Swimming because it was just better than what they had come up with internally. And they said, yeah, this is great. We've got to, we've got to just use the same code. I don't think I knew that. That's really interesting. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's really cool. Something I'm really thinking about, you know, talk about the context of things.

It's remarkable how Zelda is just brimming with confidence, you know, like presentation-wise, even before you get the U.S. version with the gold packaging and the gold cartridge and all this stuff around it, like, even just playing their first game, the way it boots up, the way it opens, like most Nintendo games at this point had a very simple opening. You got a title screen and this sort of, you know, joint little ditty. and it's very toy-like in that regard, almost like a game-in-watch that's like kind of better. But Zelda doesn't do that.

Zelda does this full color, it's glowing, the music, it's got this rich musical score, the title screen changes from day to night, and you've got this giant scrolling wall text, which I believe it in Japan is written in English, isn't it? It is, yeah. Yeah. Even the Japanese Bible.

The magic book is called the Bible, yeah. Right. And it's just, even on that, that ground alone, it is just overwhelming you with like, we know this is going to be special. We want you to think of this is special. And if we got to the U.S. branch, they must be like, oh, boy, this is, you guys, you guys are on to something here. This is really fantastic, which makes me think about how much the challenge must have been

on the U.S. side to try and explain to people in America besides the gold packaging. Like, no, no, no, this is special. This is something different. So listeners at home can't see this. but I'm recording today, my Zoom background, I'm in the infamous black Nintendo basement where comedian and voice actor John Cassier bounced around and just shouted a bunch of enemy names

while wearing a black turtleneck and it's this bizarre ad, but it kind of reflects like, we don't know what to do with this thing. You know, apparently the original concept was they wanted a comedian to just riff on stuff that was in the game that they thought was cool. I looked this up, apparently one of recent,

one of Frank Sefaldi's recent conference, with Gail Tilden. She talked about this. Like, that was the concept. They wanted a comedian to just talk about the game and why it's cool. And somehow that ended up being a guy alone in what looked like a padded room just like going crazy. You know, if you look, if you look on this up commercial on YouTube, you know, it's all on YouTube, of course, all the comments are like, did they just get a guy and give him a bag of crystal meth and told him like go crazy? Like, that's what it feels like. It's like an anti-drug ad. It doesn't make any sense. But to me as a kid, I'm kind of like, this just enough.

game footage in there. And the root of the commercial really is, this is a, you know, you're going to go in here and you're surrounded by weird stuff. Figure it out. You know, at one point the guy's like, his face rotates around the screen. He's like, which way to go? It's like, you don't know where to go. And that's a really big difference from a Super Mario Brothers where it's like, oh, where are you going? You're going right. Just go right, kids. You'll figure it out. Right. And this game instead opens up. Link is in a clearing. There's a wall to the south. There's a wall to the south. There's a, there's a, west, there's a north, there's the east, there's passageways he can go in any way, there's a little hole he can crawl into, and you just got to figure it out. And if you don't, if you don't go in the hole right away, you're defenseless, you know, until you go in that hole and talk to a stranger, you're not going to have any weapon to fight anyone. And that's kind of also amazing to me that I can't think of many games these days that would let you potentially miss the primary weapon of the game, you know? Certainly secrets bound even in games today. But the idea like, oh, this game starts, we're not even going to tell you, go in that hole first.

Yeah, unfortunately, if it was today, you know, you would try to go up a screen and it would stop you. And it'd be like, nope, you can't go here yet. You know, they didn't trust you. They don't, they fully trusted the player to know what to do. Even later Zelda games would, you know, I'm thinking about Lake's Awakening where you've got to like get from the town down to the beach. Like, they very carefully arrange an entire path for you to get there, you know? And it's very clever. And the original Zelda's like, no, no, we'll just go out of kids.

I hope you find the sword because you need it. Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty easy thing to find. And if you go out into the world without the sword, you're not going to get very far. And maybe you can avoid enemies for a few screens, but you're eventually going to die. And that's going to send you back to the first screen. And eventually, you're either going to give up, which, you know, you're a kid. You just spent all of your allowance on this game. You're not going to give up.

You're going to keep throwing yourself at it until it makes sense because that's just how it was. with video games back then. We did not have Steam backlogs, and there were no, you know, humble bundle sales where everything was 15 cents per game. This was a commitment. So you would keep playing it, and you would stumble into the sword. And then it's like, oh, it clicks. I need to find stuff. I need to get things to become strong. And now I can fight. And now, you know, I can actually make a little more progress. Oh, and things keep killing me. So I got to get stronger. So I think the context that John mentioned earlier is important, you know, to kind of understand how people interacted with and related to their games, what those games meant in terms of, you know, just 40 bucks in 1987 is a lot of money. So, you know, it was a big commitment to buy and having that gold box with the gold cart shining through.

that was pretty compelling. It was like, wow, here's something really cool and different. I should check this out. They had great commercials. You know, if the comedian ad was too weird, they also had a rap ad with some white kids rapping at you. So, you know, there was something relatable for everyone. That predated in terms of marketing.

And yeah, you know, they really, I feel like hit just the right notes, both with the game design and with the presentation. And I feel like Zelda, the Zelda series, is. bigger in the U.S. than it is in Japan, which is not to say that it's not popular in Japan. John, you're nodding your head. But yeah, I feel like for American Nintendo fans, like Zelda is kind of like the S-tier. And, you know, everyone loves Super Mario. People love Animal Crossing. They sell tens of millions of copies each game. But among the like the diehard American Nintendo fans, that sits at the pinnacle of the Pantheon. And, is the game. And it really does tie back to the way it was presented. I mean, you know, I borrowed Zelda. I never owned it. And it wasn't because I was cheap. It was because I was like, this game seems like too good for me. It's so, it's so incredible. It's a gold cartridge.

Like, I don't think I can buy this. I don't think I'm good enough. So I, you know, borrowed it and played it. I might as well have owned it, but I didn't. And it just, it was actually kind of intimidating for me. So, you know, marketing works. Kids are stupid and they're very easily tricked. And I was tricked into thinking Zelda was too good. So no sales from me, Nintendo, he blew it. You know, I have a question. I'm just thinking about it now for the first time. So obviously, at this point, the Japanese video game scene already had an abundance of magazines and resources that players could get information from. Did they have a helpline in Japan?

Was there a Nintendo helpline in Japan? Does anyone know? That's a great question. I don't know, but I could almost, I'm fairly sure they didn't, just because I can't really imagine that here, but I don't know. I can imagine them having a consumer focusing, like, a request line for, like, business inquiries, and I wonder if that started getting phone calls about the video games

and maybe they realized they needed to set something up. Yeah, that's an area of knowledge I am very, I'm lacking because I don't really know, because that could tie into just like what was, you know, to really simplify this. What was like the general like telephone culture in Japan? And that, you're right? Because in the West, we had, you know, at first that line was free, the gameplay line, but they quickly realized that was a mistake and then it was no longer a 1-800 number. But, you know, we had like the 1-900 numbers that were being advertised.

I remember for years, there were tons of them for everything from, you know, from like, what was the famous, um, shrink? This is Cleo? Yeah, Miss Cleo. Shane always brings her up. Um, Miss Cleo to like, you know, we had all that stuff there. I have no idea, uh, what that was like in Japan. But, but I, I do find it, I can't even really explain this because I've never thought about it. But I do find that a little bit hard to imagine that they would have like, because it just seems, you know, Japan is kind of a, again, to greatly generalize.

But I think in general, people are. shy here. Let's put it that way. And so I just feel like calling up to ask for help for a game seems like doesn't feel like something that would happen so easily here. But I will look into that because it's an interesting point. Because what I'm thinking about is, you know, we mentioned already the Tower of Duraga. And the Tower of Duraga as an arcade game only kind of works because of the community that grew up around it. You know, you would go to the arcade and there would be a notebook there to sort of help you out. Like, this is a home game. You're not going to go home one day and find a notebook next to your Famicom

that tells you, oh, guess what, I found this? You know, unless you've got an older brother something who's very good at taking notes. But it's like, I'm just trying to wonder about, like, how did the structure work? Because in America, we didn't really have the magazine set up. So it was basically it's all about either you heard something from another kid on the playground.

Right. Or you asked your parents and you called long distance phone number and you got a stranger to tell you what to happen. And I don't know if I called anyone about Zelda, but definitely 1987, like pretty soon, definitely Castlevania 2. I definitely called them for Cassavini 2 because I don't know what to do with this game.

I don't remember what the first game I called, but I definitely, there was a point where I started calling and realizing this is an incredible resource. And like I probably for a few years I was calling off in. But I don't remember what the first game was I did it. The only game I ever called for was Krono Trigger. And there was one hint that at the very end where Melchior in the end of time says, someone close to you is in trouble, go find them. And I was like, what, what is? is that? And I couldn't find, like, I cleared the game, everything, every quest, every ending. And I still could not get that to change over. And so I called and they said, oh, no, that's just like a general point of advice. So I wasted, I wasted $3 to find out that I cleared the game in its total entirety. Yes, my party's 99 all the way across the board. There's nothing more I can do. Yeah, I think that happened to me. Yeah, I guess I would have thought maybe the, your, your nerdy friend's mom with the machine, but okay.

So, so we mentioned, someone mentioned, I think maybe Diamond, magazines. And I feel like, you know, there was, there was a video game phone culture, but it was, it worked in the other direction in Japan, you know. Oh, yeah. Miho Nakayama's Doki-Doki High School, like, that has a phone number in it that you call. And it gives you, and actually, Portopia has a phone number in it that you call. in the game, but then they like translated that into the real world, like call this phone number, and Miho Nakayama is going to give you hints for the video game that she stars in.

So, you know, it was a different style of experience. It wasn't like call in and get hints. But weekly Famitsu launched around the time that Zelda came out. And let's not forget that the best-selling book in Japan in 1985, Not video game book. The best-selling book published in the year 1985 in Japan, dominated sales charts, was How to Win at Super Mario Brothers. And that sparked a wave of strategy guides. Like, you know, they had magazines and guides and tips like that in the guides.

There were a few, like, standalone guides. But that book, it launched an avalanche of strategy guides. And if you go to, you know, any of the retro game shops around you, you'll find tons of old A-Bid Strategy Guides in that same format, that same size as the Mario Guide. And they all kind of start around 1986. Like, you don't really see a lot for, you're not going to see like a 1984-85 Famicom game covered. There's no book that I've ever seen like that for Potopia or Zevius. But in 86, like all of a sudden the floodgates are open.

So that was a big part of Zelda, too. And I think a thing about Japan, too, is that it's not like we had, we definitely had strategy guide culture in the U.S. at some point that really kicked in. And there was something similar to that in Japan. So that's kind of a one-to-one thing. But then there are a lot of other things in Japan too. Like something about, you know, living here, it's a little less so these days, unfortunately, but especially like back when I moved here, you know, in 2000. And I'm sure much more so 15 years before that book, book shops on like every corner. Like, There were just little manga shops and bookstores everywhere. And so, you know, everything was within reach. Now, granted, I'm in Tokyo. Maybe if you live in the middle of nowhere, that's not the case. But, I mean, there's a huge population here. And if you're in a relatively major city, you know, you had, you didn't have to, like,

wait every month for the Nintendo Power to show up in your mailbox. You could walk down the street. And five minutes later, you've got the very latest information on anything. And so I am sure that filled in for a lot of the, what we lacked in the West, where, where we had to call to get our tips or talk to our friends. was probably, you know, with all the weekly comic magazines and everything else, you know, little corners of each issue that weren't even necessarily game focused, but would have stuff about video games. And so it was, information was just accessible in a different way.

So, okay, yeah, we've talked a lot about the original Zelda and kind of its impact and why it was interesting and great. But I, you know, we also talked about the games that influenced it. But maybe it's worth talking about the influence that Zelda had, because you know, this was a milestone game for the reason we've talked about in the U.S. But also in Japan, it was the launch title for a new piece of technology. The Famicom was the biggest thing going. And Nintendo said, hey, here's a device that makes your Famicom better. It adds more memory.

The games can now be bigger because there's more storage space. They have extra music and sound effects. you can write data, you can customize things, you can save your progress. All of this is new and exciting. And there were other games at the Famicom Disc System launch, but all of those were existing Pulse Line, just, you know, cartridge games converted to diskette. And the idea was like, hey kids, instead of paying $3,800 yen for baseball, now you can pay $1,900 yen.

And also on the backside of the disc, for $500 yen, you can write tennis. So, you know, it was basically like, here's the discount version of these old games. But Zelda was new, and it wasn't just like, you know, here's more of the Pulse Line stuff, but you haven't played it before. It was, here is a brand new experience. Here's something that is like seismic in terms of console game design. And that's really what it comes down to is that this was really the moment that video game consoles got their first game. that was on par with a personal computer experience in terms of depth, in terms of the amount of

time it took you to complete, not because it was like, you know, unfairly balanced and you died in one hit and it was you were surrounded by enemies. It was because there was a lot of stuff here. They mentioned, you know, 512 screens of content. They packed every bite of that game with information, I guess 256 screens of content. But if you count the second quest, then you get another 128. Anyway, the point is, it's like Diamond, Diamond put a mention in here. And then, John, I see you followed it up with actual drawings of how the maps work for the dungeons, which is that each of them, like, you just cram them together and they fill up basically an entire grid, if you overlay them correctly. So they, they maximize.

that disk system storage space. And that was already two, four times as much storage space as a cartridge could have. So massive game. Yeah, there was an interview somewhere about that, too, that they did that. That was an accident too. So like the whole second quest came to be because Tezuka mistakenly used half as much memory as he thought he had, which is so hilarious and amazing. And so he was like, oh.

Oops, I was accidentally efficient. Yeah. And so they had a so... How often does that happen in game development? What an incredible mistake. to make, you know, for we all benefited from it. But yeah, and the second quest adds, you know, it's, it's the same game, but it's so much harder because enemies have new behaviors and new abilities. And there are new ways to interact with

the environment, some of which are a little, you know, like the whole pushing through a one-way wall thing. I don't love it. But it does add a new level of complexity and challenge and difficulty to it. And of course, because I was like an insane child, I cleared the second question like a week. But, you know, nowadays, if I were thrust into that experience, I would just say like, oh, my God, what's happening? I'm too old for this. But I'm just saying, like, Zelda had a massive impact when it landed, you know, when it just felt huge. And that was actually a reflection of what the game was. It wasn't just like there's a lot of hype here. It's a game that sells well. It's here is a game that is hyped and has great sales because there is something really different about this. And I feel like this game really informed console game design going forward. Look at how many clones there were of Zelda and how many games that didn't directly borrow Zelda's concepts, but we're kind of working in that vein. I mean, If you look at Famicom and NES games released in 87, 88, 89, like all of those are trying

to be either Dragon Quest or Zelda in some respect. I mean, 1926 in general, I feel like that was the trend that was coming. But yeah, you had Zelda early in the year, and then what? Two months later, you get Dragon Quest in Japan, and, you know, Metroid is also 86, and then at the year's end, you've got, you know, so I can't bring this up on this podcast, but the bizarre Takeshi, no Choshenjo,

like the weird beat Takeshi game, but all these games come out in the same year and they're all about like, all right, you're going to buy this game and you're going to mess around

with this thing, and it's going to take you a long time to figure this out. Maybe you buy the book, maybe you don't, but like, that's clearly the trend that's happening.

And I do, it's funny how the FAMICOM system launched in part because they figured, oh, well, it's been three years, you know, fads last for three years. We need to try

and get new fad going. And then by years, end, I think everyone's like, oh, geez, you know, cartridges aren't even dead yet, you know. I mean, I have to wonder how much things would be different. If Dragon Quest had been a disc, I wonder if that might have changed things. But no, Dragon Quest was a cartridge. All the Dragon Quest games were cartridges, and the Famicom live for a much longer time after that. I mean, within six months of the Famicom disk system coming out, you started to get more advanced

memory management chips on the cartridges. Like, I think the first one to come here was ghosts and goblins. Terrible, terrible choice for this. But that was a game that expanded the NES cartridge capacity beyond what was, you know, fundamentally available based on the NES-based hardware. Like, it used a memory management circuit in there to basically trick the console into saying, hey, you've actually got two cartridges here. They're just, you know, the same game.

And, you know, when Zalta came out, you had people figuring out, well, we can reproduce the save effect of the disk system by putting some RAM in here and just having a constant low-grade stream of electricity to keep it going and maintain that volatile memory. And, you know, by 1988, the disk system was pretty much obsolete. It lasted for like a year and a half, two years. And then cartridges had more capacity and all the features, you know, extra music. channels, way more than the disc system could have if you really, you know, wanted to get elaborate like Konami did. There was just, you know, there was no need to have the disc system. We never got it in the U.S. because there was no point.

Like, we didn't need the disc system. All the stuff that it brought got ported back into cartridges. And Zelda was a big part of that too, because it was, it actually came out here slightly before Metroid, slightly before Kid Icarus. So it was the first NES game on an MC1 mapper or memory management chip and the first game with a battery. So, you know, at that point, like, why do you need the disk system? Like, the NES couldn't have expanded audio. So that wasn't even a question.

Yeah, I don't want to say that this system was a mistake or a misstep. I think at the time that they made it and planned for it, you know, I think it was largely because they kind of saw. they didn't see a future for cartridges. But I think, so as that machine, literally machine got up and running and the sort of things were moving forward towards release and everything else, suddenly technology changed and it became possible to have bigger carts. You know, they tried to make a go of it. Turns out that people didn't, you know, like the saving is a nice thing. But like, really, you're supposed to be able to do more with the disk system, right? Like, you're supposed to be able to like, because it's the disc format, you can potentially do stuff with games.

Just like what was supposed to happen with the 64dD where you're going to have all this like original content. stuff you could save. It didn't really turn out to be, maybe it was ahead of its time, but for whatever reason, that wasn't really a big thing. But the tech itself, you know, was kind of outclassed by carts so quickly that, yeah, it just kind of became pointless. So yeah, not really a mistake, but probably had they known carts were going in that direction, I don't think they would have done the diss system. You know what I mean? I think it was something they thought they needed to do at the time. But maybe they would have because, you know, Hiroshi Yamauchi was the one who really pushed for that, like technology, you know, trends happen in a,

in a three-year cycle. So I think even if he could have predicted that cartridges were about to go big and we would end up with something like metal slater glory by the end of it, I still think he would have said we need to refresh this hardware with something new just to keep it, you know, keep people interested. Especially at that time because they didn't know. I mean, we have all the hindsight of, you know, understanding how peripheral and add-ons and whatnot, kind of diminish the overall potential of a system just by limiting the audience and whatnot.

But I think back then, they were still very much figuring that all out. Yeah, I mean, they were still kind of, I think, that kind of residual thinking of it's a family computer. You know, this system should be a computer. It should go beyond just a console. So you got your keyboard and you got your basic cartridge. So now you have the disk system. Those never really interacted. Those never really, I can't think of any disk system games that needed the keyboard.

Were there any? If there were, I don't know of them. Yeah. I haven't dug too deep into the disk system outside of the games that I really cared about. So, yeah. But, you know, just the idea of expanding, of adding on to consoles was still just like a fundamental baked-in element of the business. If you look at, you know, the U.S. side, you have Intel. vision and Colico Vision and so on and so forth, all these systems that had expansions and could be

turned into something kind of like a computer. You know, the SG-1000, which could become an SC-3-000 if you stuck a keyboard on it. So, you know, I think they were still kind of in that mindset. And they said, let's, you know, let's do this thing that everyone has to do, but do it in our own way. So instead of trying to turn it into a real computer, they were just like, let's take the good stuff from a computer and stick it in here. But, you know, the result was a game that feels very much like it was built with a computer design mindset, but with the heart, the energy of a console game. And, you know, that is such a big, big defining factor of Famicom and other 8bit software going forward. Yeah, I mean, family-based... It's funny that Zelda 2 is so different from

the original Zelda and tries to be more like a true RPG but also a true action game. It kind of takes the things that Zelda synthesized so well. And, you know, it's like when they serve you deconstructed food at a restaurant, it's like, instead of having a burger, why don't you have the patty over here and the bun over here? And you're like, no, I just want them together. So, you know, patty has a downward stab, Jeremy. Come on. Like this is, I get that. I get that. But, you know, you had other people step in and say, well, I like the way Zelda is originally. So I'm going to make a game like that. So there were a bunch of games made in the original Zelda style before Zelda 3 came along.

Sure. And, you know, three years later, four years later. So everyone was just kind of like saying, that was a good thing. Nintendo shouldn't have gotten away from that. So let's make ease. Let's make, you know, what are some other? Willow, you know? There's a bunch of games, Crystallis, Newtopia.

all of these games were were just like made in the the image of Zelda and I think I think Nintendo kind of came around and said you know what we did create something that was really unique here and a lot of people were doing the Dragon Buster style you're a little guy who runs around and stabs things like anyone could do that but the Zelda thing that was us we did that and it was good let's go let's go do more of that yeah they went back. I mean, Zelda, too, obviously, you know, I know Miyamoto has said some things over the years, too, about how it wasn't his favorite and stuff, but I think people kind of took that a little bit farther than maybe he intended even for it. But, you know, it seems like they were influenced by Dragon Quest,

amazingly. Like, they came out and did their thing, and Dragon Quest came out, and RPG started to really pick up. And then Zelda, too, leans back towards RPG. And then I think at some point, yeah, it was just sort of like, well, let's go back to what we are good at and kind of what we are sort of known for and Zelda 3. At the time, I feel like, you know, I remember, tell me if I'm wrong, but I remember playing Soulblazer first. I think that came out before Zelda, but it actually didn't, but for some reason, I played it before Zelda also. Well, I didn't, I would, I played Zelda right when it came out, but my memory of Soulblazer was like, oh, this is a cool action RPG to tie me over until Zelda. I'm probably, yeah, this is what I mean by like, I thought so long ago,

but yeah, but for some reason, and no, I, like, I have that same memory, but I've, I've, you know, done the chronologies and you're right. I'm looking at it now and it was, and it was, like a year later. Soulblazer came out later, but it feels like it came out before Zolda. Well, that's the weirdest thing. Yeah. As much as I love Soulblazer, too, Zelda is a much, I think, better and more kind of complete full game, and that might be part of it. But, like, you know, I feel like when they did come back to that format for Zelda 3, which is what we all called at the time, by the way. I know nobody calls it really that anymore. But I still call it Zelda 64. Well, that's true, too. I mean, that's what it was called by Miyamoto himself for a while.

But I feel like Zelda 3, though, really, like, took the action-rpg genre. And maybe all those games, I'm not going to call them copycats, but those games that were influenced by Zelda, too. And just leapfrog them all, again, I feel like in terms of just game design. Yeah, you know, Zelda 3 kind of went, or a link to the past, went the same direction as Super Mario Bros. 3 for the U.S., where it was a return to forum. And you're like, oh, that original game that seemed so dated, like, like, when they spruce it up with new stuff, new graphics, bigger worlds. Like, there's still something really good here.

I'm not tired of this after all. And, you know, it took them a little longer to do that with Zelda, but it worked out. Zelda linked to the past, great game. Kind of one of the definitive games, honestly. You know, when you talk about the Metroidvania, that is as influential on that genre as Super Metroid. like, you know, Symphony of the Night was basically Super Metroid plus Zelda,

a link to the past combined into one, one just delicious, chewy, you know, they undeconstructed it. That's the burger right there. You want that. Right, right. I'm speaking your language, Diamond, talking about burgers. It's Sunday morning here,

and I've never wanted cheeseburger more in my life. Yeah, something, this is kind of an incomplete thought, but something I was thinking about, you know, when we were thinking about this, show is like, it kind of feels like for at least a few generations there, you know, Mario was sort of the headliner title for, you know, new Nintendo hardware, like to draw people in maybe or just to kind of, you know, yeah, like maybe at the time it was meant to be sort of the mainstream thing to grab everyone. But then Zelda was like, okay, we took what we learned from Mario and now

we're going to make something richer and deeper and more complex and, you know, taking advantage of the hardware more potentially. And I feel like that really. really, at least with the first game and with the third game and then with like 64, like all three of those that felt like Zelda benefited from what Mario did before it, you know, as a sort of like the more advanced game from that team, I guess. Yeah. And, you know, a link to the past brings its own kind of thinking into how everything works. The original Zelda, if it really is an open world, you can just kind of go anywhere.

and if you have the right tool, you can go into any dungeon. You can also go into a dungeon, take an item, like the treasure for that dungeon, and then say, you know, I don't feel like fighting Glioc right now. I'm going to piece out and I'm going to go to the next dungeon because now I've got the raft and I can just cross the sea. I can go find all those heart containers out, you know, stranded on the ocean. And, you know, there's no real gating beyond just like those key items, the ladder, raft, a few other things, until you get to the final dungeon. But I think to the past is much more, it's much more linear in the sense that every dungeon is kind of discreet. It's a standalone space. And, you know, there are drawbacks and benefits to that. You lose the openness,

which is, you know, Nintendo brought back with Breath of the Wild. But on the other hand, it does kind of give you some boundaries. You know, and they did the this also with Super Metroid, where you get a new item and then you can't leave the space where you get the item until you figure out how to use the item. And Zelda is actually, you know, a step beyond that. You can't go to the next dungeon until you complete the dungeon, which always requires you to use like, oh, you just got the hook shot. Well, now pull those eyeballs off the monster and kill the monster without the eyes. Right. Right. It really turns the entire game into a, like this kind of series of standalone puzzles, really.

And even though they're not puzzles in the link to the past so much in the sense that you get a lot of the modern Zaldas, the 3D Zaldas, it's still like the thinking is there. The idea like this is kind of like a contained space and everything in here relates to the challenge of getting the item, learning to use the item, and then defeating a monster with that item. And it can be formulaic now, but it certainly wasn't with a link to the past. That was fresh and new and amazing. What I think Link the Past does get right is that it sort of starts off a little rigid in that when you begin the quest and you get out there, you've got an open world, but you know, okay, I need to go to this palace and this palace and this palace and then I can go to the castle. Once you get to the dark world, it very much pushes you towards that first.

the palace number one to get the hammer. But beyond that, there are a lot of dungeons you can sort of like, well, which one do I want to go to first? Which one's closer to this one? And indeed, you mentioned taking an item out. I always, to this day, I always go to the marsh before I go to the ice dungeon, because the ice dungeon has this one stupid complex puzzle where you're supposed to push a block down a series of holes.

And only when he gets to the very, very bottom, can you push the block onto a a switch and then get to the end of the dungeon. Whereas if you go to the next one, which is technically like, I think it's like level five, little six, but technically if you go to the next dungeon first and get the one that just makes a block appear out of nowhere, if you get that one first and then leave,

you can go back to the ice dungeon and just skip that whole goddamn puzzle. It's like, okay, you want to block on the switch? Here, block. Right. Did it. Ladies and gentlemen, game breaking pro strats. I still do that. I don't want to bother with it. puzzle. You both kind of brought up points that I think are pretty interesting, though. In the terms

of like what you just mentioned, Diamond, like yeah, I think we saw that again in Ocarina of Time where there's almost like a, like a junior version of the adventure at the start where you've got a couple of relatively simple things and a kind of guided process before the game blows open, right? And they did that in LinkedIn in the past. They did an Ocarina of Time as well. And then Jeremy, what you said, I think is really interesting and important too in that like it's almost like the style of Zelda game diverged down two paths because if you look at, you know, the games that, as you said, it was a trade-off, like the games that did have these more complex, interesting dungeons that maybe required you to clear them before you could progress, yes, that took some of the, or that added some

linearity to the whole adventure, but at the same time, it made for much more interesting dungeon, like exploration experiences, I feel like. And then they aimed to bring that sense of open adventure, like you can go right to the boss. They aim to bring that back with Breath of the Wild, right? But what we saw from that was what suffered the most by far was like the dungeons, quote unquote dungeons, were almost non-existent. Instead, we had a bunch of shrines, which were cool, but they were like mini nugget puzzles. They weren't like, it was like eating a lot of fast food, but not really getting the, or I should say junk food, but not really getting the kind of, you know, the steak dinner of a like a, you know, a stone temple tower

or something or whatever. And I think that, tears, of the kingdom, I know we're jumping way ahead kind of in the timeline in the future, timeline's a bad word, but I think that Tears of the Kingdom... That's a different topic. Took steps to try to bring them both of those lines together. And I wouldn't say it succeeded completely, but I personally absolutely love Tears of the Kingdom because it brought back, because I like those linked to the past elements of having more complicated dungeons and things to explore and stuff, but I also very much love that I can go

anywhere I want in, you know, the first Zelda, and I like that about Breath of the Wild. I thought Tears of the Hainan brought those both together, but didn't fully succeed in that there aren't still quite like real proper dungeons, you know, in the sense of like Ocarina of Time or Link to the Pass, whatever. But it also still has that exploration. And I think like, as we look forward, you know, to where the series goes, I wonder if they're going to take, you know, because it's kind of like two lanes. It's like the left lane or the right lane or are they going to try to further converge them in a way that makes everybody happy. That's kind of like my personal dream for the series, I think. Because while I love the shrines in both of the games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I don't, I miss, you know, the dungeons of like Twilight Princess or, you know, or Wind Waker and kind of the more, they're almost like self-contained, you know, mini Metroid games in a sense, you know, of just exploration and whatnot. Yeah, I was recently a guest on a different podcast, my apologies, but it was not Retronauts. We talked. How dare you? Because we talked about Tears of the Kingdom, which is not a retro game. And absolutely, when I talked about, when I talked about Tears the Kingdom, I can't help but notice how it took all the best stuff of Breath of Wild.

Like, you know what? That was a great game. Can we do it better? And the answer is yes, yes, we can by exploring a little more and adding a little more variety. You know, I really felt like Breath of the Wild. Those four divine animal, like, dungeons, quote, were really bland. The fact that all, like, all of them had, like, the boss battles were different, but it was basically the same monster. it just kind of like had a little different behavior.

Yes. And Tiers the King said, no, no, no, let's go all out. Like, you know, let's battle something flying through the sky now. Let's, let's board a ship and zip around a volcano and fire your rock buddy at a dragon who's coming out of the volcano. Like all these like really fun set pieces that are just different and not just the same encounter over again. And I really, I hope that's the general direction we're going forward. I don't need, I don't need like a third breath of the wild. style game. I don't know if they're going to do that.

I'm kind of curious as what what, if anything, more games are going to try to borrow Breath of Wild? I mean, honestly, I'm still kind of blown away that we got a Sonic the Hedgehog, Breath of the Wild kind of game. That's real. It exists. It's still very soon to see where things go from here.

But you know Nintendo must have ideas already because we're recording this. It's 2026. They're mostly hyping up the next Mario cartoon movie, but they already started teasing stuff for a Zelda movie that's apparently being shot as we speak, you know, it's coming. And, you know, when that kind of stuff comes out, they're going to want to have another game relatively soon afterwards to get people to go back and play the game.

They've got their hype cycles already figured out for the future, you know? I don't know what's coming, but. Yeah, well, I mean, I hope. I hope this is where it's going. Right. Just to touch real briefly on the Tears of the Kingdom stuff you just mentioned. Yeah, they also added like a whole, you know, underworld, right? But it's, and while it's cool, it has some incredible elements to it, you could argue that

it's not as fully fleshed out or deep or interesting as you would want it to be. And then they also added caves, which I think are such a simple, it is terrifying. No, I had some moments down in that that were like among my all-time best favorite Zelda moments ever. So I'm not against it, but at the same time, it does, once you can kind of see behind the curtain, you realize it's not quite as fully fleshed out as it could have been potentially. And same thing, there are caves all over the world, which I think is a massive improvement, because that is just to wander around and see a cave, what's in that cave. And there's all kinds of experiences in there.

But those two eventually start to feel, I don't know if template is the right word, but you can kind of see. And to their credit, this is a massive game. And it would have taken a million people, probably a million years to do everything. But they're learning from each one. And I feel like I want to see them expand upon that going forward. And as far as like where it goes from here, yeah, we're sort of jumping ahead to probably what is the end of this podcast, what should have been talked about at the end of this podcast. But like, do you remember Jeremy? very back in the beginning, I mean, you might have seen this too. In the early discussion of

like the first Zelda, there was talk about it being like taking place partly in the past and partly in the future. And, you know, his name was link because he was supposed to link between the time periods. This was in some interview somewhere or another. And as you said, there were like early screens of like a first person view. Like there was a screenshot of a, you know, a cave in front of you. They even show it in the game code. But like that was never used. Like there are clearly other ideas that have yet to be explored for this franchise. And yeah, this year is the anniversary, a 40th anniversary. You've got a movie coming out. You know, they did big stuff for Mario's anniversary last year. There's got to be, I would hope there's a more like a lot in the plants, you know, for not just like something new,

but hopefully many things new and many things old being brought back as well. Yeah, this, this episode actually goes up on Patreon on Zelda's 40th birthday. So, you know, it's entirely possible that Zelda fans who also subscribe to retronauts are going to be eating really good on this day. And then people, you know, a week later getting in on the public feed are going to be like, oh, well, you guys sure blew it by talking about this too early because they just announced, you know, like the Zelda Omnibus, it's every game in one and you can play them all together at the same time or, you know, something. I don't even know. But yeah, like I'm curious to see where Zelda goes from here. I did want to go back to

before we kind of wind up here or wind down, you know, talking about a link to the past's design and how all those spaces are sort of self-contained. I feel like Zelda, that Zelda does a really great job and kind of sets the template for how this can work effectively because it is mostly linear in terms of the dungeon progression. But the game really reward you for just wandering around, getting lost in the Hyrule. It's not as, it's not as, uh, like, easy to just kind of wander anywhere as it is in the original Zelda, but you can still go off the beaten path and you discover caves and things like that. And if you poke around, you'll find all kinds of stuff. You're always rewarded for going places. Maybe it's a piece of heart. Or it's, you know, like,

hey, I just met Azora and they're talking to me and sort of trying to kill me. That's weird. Or like there's a dude sleeping under this bridge. I wouldn't have got that. that. So, you know, it really, it encourages you to explore. And sometimes you can't get a thing that is right there within reach because you don't have the right stuff. And, you know, that is such a fundamental Metroidvania thing. Like, here's something. And it's tantalizing, but you can't get it right now. Come back later. And I feel like that is kind of the most satisfying breadcrumb in video games. Like the thing that I see and I want, but I can't have yet.

But eventually, I'll be good and powerful enough that I can take it. And I can't wait. I sure hope when I'm powerful enough to get it, I can remember where I saw it. And I feel like that's kind of the big challenge with, you know, sort of combining the link to the past, discrete dungeon, open world Breath of the Wild style, like making that work together so that you have really expansive, complex, well-designed dungeons. But, like, how can you explore those in any order when you're constantly acquiring new abilities throughout the world?

And some of those are going to be, you know, there's going to be like the sense of progression as you need to build on your abilities to traverse the dungeons. Like, do you have something in a dungeon when you can't get there, you know, like through the dungeon that says, oh, come back when you've got another skill? that just seems too mundane for Zelda, like to just say, oh, come back later,

you don't have the right power. But at the same time, when you have a world as big as Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom to, like, have something that is, you know,

tantalizingly just out of reach in the style of a link to the past or Symphony of the Night, that's really putting a lot on the player to remember, I need to go back to this one space

in this immense 3D world. Even if you have something like Prince of Persia-Lossans with the map element where you can make notes on the map and like take screenshots and stuff, you're just, you're asking so much in that big space. So I think that's, you know, really kind of the ultimate design challenge of Zelda right now is like find that synthesis in a way that is not prosaic, but also not so overwhelming and too demanding for the player that it just doesn't work. Like, how do you thread that needle?

Diamond? I just want to mention one of my favorite examples of this. It's in LinkedIn, it's in LinkedIn, and it's in Death Mountain. You know, you climb up the mountain of Death Mountain, and there are a lot of caves, and there's a cave that's kind of out of the way and it's hard to reach. And if you get in there, you discover that it's just full of spikes. And it's like, oh, geez, this is clearly something important. I got to make sure to figure out a way to come back here. And as I recall, there's maybe one or two different powers you can use.

To get past those spikes, including one that I think where if you have enough life and you have enough like potions, you can kind of like just tank it. Just tank it. Yeah. And to me, that was that cave and that thing, I remember that more than what's even inside the cave. Because I don't think what's inside the cave is that important. It's just, it's a purely optional item, as I recall. But the fact that you can find it relatively early and realize you have to come back and get it. And then a few years later, I think it's simply the night.

and you're in the... It's less out of the way, but you're in the chapel, and you go down one path in the chapel, and you're like, wait, this hole is full of spikes. What the hell I'm supposed to do here? I can't survive here. And in fact, if you do a good job exploring the thing, you will eventually find exactly what you need

to survive that hole, and it's actually super important. Now, of course, speed runners have figured out a way to sort of trick that and tank it, too, but it's just kind of funny how a little, a few spikes in the right spot can really just sort of draw your attention. oh, geez, this has got to be important.

And even the link of the past is not that important. It's still something I still think about, you know, in that case, 30 years later. I agree. Yeah, I think the, talking about this with you guys, like, yeah, I think the challenge is. And, you know, I hope that the answer, like, I think the challenge or the question is, how do you bring both of those styles of play together? And then what I hope the answer, I hope that the answer is not, you shouldn't or you really can't or, you know, there is no way to kind of perfectly blend them both. But I definitely think

that could be a possibility, you know, and maybe, you know, I want them to keep trying and I hope they get there, but maybe, you know, when they go back and, like, we got a link between worlds many years later, but I thought that was a fantastic game. I would love to see them bring that back to switch, by the way. But, you know, maybe sometimes you just go hard in one direction. I think it's easier to go hard in the classic direction because you can have a complete experience versus, like, if you go hard in the open world direction, I think you just have a big open world, that's not that interesting. And so I don't know the answer on that way, but I would like, I would like to see more of what you're talking about, Diamond, in terms of just like, yeah,

that kind of like those like moment to moment exciting exploration things that kind of pique your curiosity and get you kind of trying to figure out a solution to a problem. That's, I never really associated Zelda with Metroidvania, Jeremy, but it's interesting that you mentioned it. I mean, I definitely see what you mean in terms of like, yeah, yeah, I get it. I see the connection there. And it makes me think that, yeah, maybe that's just a video game thing in general that is ultimately extremely appealing. And I, you know, that's kind of what I love about Zelda. And the more than anything else I think is just those, those moments of exploration and discovery and exciting and kind of making you feel like you're the smartest person in the world, even though it's probably not that,

you know. It's a video game. You're supposed to figure it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think what I want to see from Zelda, I don't know, maybe, yeah, like figuring out how to combine all of its strengths into the sort of ultimate synthesis of all that is Zelda. And I feel like if any company can do it, it is Nintendo because they have effectively infinite resources. They can take as much time as they need. They are flush with money. And on top of that, they're one of the few major developers that keeps its staff around. So there's years and years of learned experience and collective shared cumulative knowledge that so few other companies in this business value. And, you know, that's, that is a, like, just an incubator for great design and for

clever problem solving and saying, like, how can we do the greatest thing imaginable? And, you know, not everything Nintendo does lands quite like that, but I feel like, you know, if anyone could do it, it would be them because they just have all the components they need to, you know, brute force it if they have to. Yeah, they have more institutionalized knowledge about game making, I feel like, than any, possibly all other game companies combined if you think about the number of people who have worked there for 40 years or more and haven't left the company, you know. Yeah, it's going to come up on this month's community show, but here in 20226,

we just had news of two long-time employees who have either, either retiring or stepping away from development. We're not really sure what the exact quote is, but either way, like, these two guys, Kenske Tanabe, and I'm sorry, I forgot the other man's name of the moment, but... It's Hideki Kono. Yes. They both, like, they both joined the company in 1986

and they were still actively working on stuff something or another until recently, and like now they're kind of, you know, stepping away. And it's like, that's incredible to have that kind of lineage, even though neither one was super into the Zelda stuff, but, you know, I mean, certainly Tanabe

it was mostly about, you know, did a lot of Metroid stuff, which is certainly Zelda adjacent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's the sad. I mean, it's not, I guess not sad, but it's something, it's just a fact of, you know, when you hit something like a 40th anniversary, it also kind of shed some light on just the, yeah, the fact that most of those people making those games at that time were starting out their careers. They were in their 20s. They were, you know, in the right place at the right time of a new industry. And now, many of them are hitting the retirement point, like right now. Just as that game. is hitting 40, that means these guys are hitting their 60s, and it's time to start thinking about, you know, other things. And I think the nice thing about Nintendo is they've sort of developed this culture from everything I've heard from everyone I know who's worked there. You know, they've kind of have this internal culture of trying to pass that knowledge down, you know, to the younger generation. There's nothing is going to replace the actual knowledge of having been there at the time. But, you know, still, they, when you have a company that, fortunately, you know, is not cutting staff

all the time and maybe not treating this, you know, I don't want to get too negative about it, but you know what I mean? They're not treating this like it's just purely about the money, right? And so they're a creative studio first. They're like a giant creative studio, basically, you know, then I think that we can potentially benefit from, you know, having that continue on for a long time in the future. So here's the next 40 years of Zelda. Yeah. Yeah, I'll see some of that. I'm sticking around for all of it. Yeah. That's my goal. It's not impossible. It's not impossible. I am, I won't be 100 years old in 40 years, but, you know, whatever. All right. So let's, let's wind down here, as promised, and call it a night, or in your case, a morning.

Yeah, so Zelda, 40 years old. That's crazy. And I still have a great time just jumping back into the original game. I can power through in like three hours, but it's still. like, you know, sitting down and watching Zelda open up on a CRT, I just, I'm taken back to the warmth of seeing it for the first time on a friend's big color TV and just how mysterious and vast it seemed and how compelling that was to me. I'm someone who, when I dream, the thing that I, the things that I remember from dreams are places. And I don't know if that comes from, like, I think in terms of places. My memories are in terms of places and video games. But I don't know if that's something that is innate to me and it's why I like Zelda and Metroid and games like that. Or if I think that way because, you know, during this formative period of my life, I played so much Zelda and Metroid in games like that and started to think about spaces and exploration and, you know, just like memorizing the lay of the land and experimenting and exploring. I can't speak to how much of the games that I like are because of who I am and how much of who I am is because of the games I like.

But I do feel like somewhere in there, Zelda plays a big part. Like, that's a big piece of the puzzle that is Jeremy Parrish. So, you know, I feel like I owe this series and that game in particular a lot about just my tastes and interests. And I'm happy to see people still love Zelda all this time later. And it's, you know, just remains every bit as popular as it ever was, if not more. And, you know, people can still jump in. Young people who have never, you know, played eight or 16 bit games before can jump into the original Zelda

and still find something compelling in it if they can look past the tech. And yeah, it's just a pivotal moment in video games, a keystone. Yeah, it still holds up. I play it probably once a year just to kind of... I think part of it is just nostalgia, but part of it also is just like, I feel like it reminds me of what the kind of core elements of games that I appreciate because, you know, it's very filtered, right?

It's not... You don't have all the excess that modern games have surrounding it, so... I will say, too, if any... If any... Diamond, have you been to the Nintendo Museum? I have. In fact, I was there recently, so I was able to see this sort of new... The art gallery. Art Gallery, which unfortunately, like the rest of the museum is lacking in people's names, but there's still some really great documents in there that I love.

There was, oh man, they don't allow pictures, but there was a wall. There was something on the wall. It was just like a bunch of like Samus Saran faces, and I wanted to steal that. I wanted to just rip it off the wall and run out the door with it. I loved it. I remember that. And I think it said, didn't say like Sam's or something, S-A-M-S. I forgot.

It's like, has her name in English. They didn't know to spell her name. But yeah, I just mentioned it because there's a whole wall of Zelda history there from the very first game to the very most recent game. And there's loads of just incredible stuff in there. And so, you know, if you do travel to Japan or you get a chance to go to a museum, make sure you check that out. Because as a fan of Zelda and its history, and there's stuff in there that hasn't been seen anywhere else, too, which is cool. Gosh, I would love to travel to Japan. Sounds great.

All right. So this has been episode 750, 50, 50, 50 of Retronauts. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks, John and Diamond for being here. Retronauts, of course, is a podcast that exists on the internet. And you can find it at such places as Retronauts.com and pretty much any podcast distribution platform you care to name besides Spotify. And we got to get on YouTube, actually. We're not there, but we should be. but we're easy to find. Look for Retronauts. That's Retronaut as an astronaut, not Retronaut as in Zero. And of course, if you really enjoy this show and we're like, gosh, I wish I could have heard this a week ago on Zelda's actual birthday. Well, the great news is you missed that, but you can go to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribe to the show and get every show. a week early in higher audio quality with no advertisements or interruptions.

It's the premium experience. It's the way to go. It's like three bucks a month. So it's the best deal in entertainment, as I am fond of saying. And as inflation grows, it continues to be an even better best deal in entertainment. So check it out, Retronauts on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. That's our pitch.

Now, please, people who are here on the podcast with me, tell me about where we can find you. John, pimp yourself. Oh, hi. Well, I'm, I guess on social media, I am on Blue Sky at John TV, and I do a little podcast called 84 Play in Tokyo. We come out every other week. I probably all the places where podcasts are found. I don't know. I don't do that part. And I work for a company called 84 and we localized games. So check out our stuff. Have you guys has localized Zelda games before? I feel like you. You did some of the remakes? Actually, yeah. We got to work on Age of Imprisonment, which came out the most recent release. There you go.

Which, yeah, which was like a dream come true for me to be able to be involved in that. We're so thankful that they asked us to work on it because it's a, you know, canon entry in the in the Tears of the Kingdom storyline. And I love Tears of the Kingdom. I played the game like 300 hours. I really got to play that game. It was very cool. Yeah, please check out Age of Imprisonment. All right.

And Diamond. Hello. You can find me around the internet by looking up my, my name Fight Club. So, F-E-I-T is my last name, C-L-U-B. That's a word you already know. I'm on social media as Fight Club. I have my own website, fightclub.me, which looks like it's very old, but in fact, it's new. And to piggyback on what Jeremy said, if you go to that Patreon website and pay an extra $2,

which is like, what's that, that's nothing, you get a whole bunch of bonus stuff, which includes columns from me that I write every week and a community show and Discord access and exclusive episodes every month. So really, we love that you're here, folks, but if you come back and give us a few bucks each month, you get so much more. And I can't recommend enough because I write or produce most of that stuff. So please, please enjoy it. I'm checking out your website, and do you just do this whole thing? You just write all the HTML by hand because it kind of looks like it. That's how I do.

That's all I do. Awesome. Very cool. All right, and you can find me, Jeremy Parrish on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish, J. Parrish. You can find me doing stuff at Limited Run games, sometimes even making games now, which is weird. Let's see what else. Oh, you can find me on YouTube as Jeremy Parrish and on my channel, N-E-S-works. The Legend of Zelda episode is still by far the best viewed, most viewed and most popular episode I've ever put together. And I do feel like it was a very good video. So check that out to continue wallowing in Zelda anniversary goodness. And of course, I'm here on Retronauts a lot. So plenty of me out there. Enough to go around. Don't get greedy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. Zelda, you're old, but we still love you. And in fact, I'm going to go play some Zelda right now. And I highly recommended for all of you.

All right. Good night.