Today, Explained - How Zelda changed gaming

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this podcast. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A few weeks ago, my friend Amy texted me a video. It was nighttime in New York City. She was biking down some street, wind blowing in her hair, filming herself with her front-facing camera. Tears of the kingdom. She asked me to send the video to my brother in Montreal. He sent one back. Tears of the kingdom. Tears of the kingdom.

Tears of the Kingdom. Tears of the Kingdom. Tears. I wasn't completely sure what was going on, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with Zelda. Tears of the Kingdom. The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom drops today. It will probably be the biggest video game of the summer, and it will probably do bigger numbers than any album, TV show, or movie in the world. Tears of the Kingdom. Coming up on today explained how Tears of the Kingdom, and especially its 2017 predecessor

Breath of the Wild, are turning grown-ups into gamers. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained. Rama's Farm. Amy Pearl. What's going on? Have I caught you at a good time? I'm coming out of the shower.

Oh no, that's a terrible time. No, it's good. This is the best time for me because I have the babies and I have my dog. So let's do it. What's going on? I called to ask you about a video game. My video game? Which is your video game? Tears of the Kingdom.

Tears of the Kingdom! Tears of the Kingdom! You know, somebody said to me the other day, who lives in my building, was like, Oh, did you hear? There's a new Zelda game coming out. I was like, what? I'm like, what is your brother? Like, did I hear? I watch YouTube videos continuously when I'm not working. What are the YouTube videos you're watching? Oh, just like breakdowns on gameplay, like is Link's hair longer?

Like things about the theme music, all the different music, what's coming back from the old game into the new game. But let me just say, Sean, I have not been into a video game before. This is my first time. I know. I haven't played a video game. The last time I played a video game was Centipede, in the back of the clothing store where I grew up. What year was that?

1980, 1981. So I don't know anything about video games, so if you want to really talk about it, I'm not the best person, but I'm so excited. I've known you for 10 years. No, I've known you for 11 years. And I've never known you to give a wit about any video game. How did you get into it?

How did you become a gamer? I'm a gamer. It's so cool. Gamer girl. Remember Isaac Jones? I sure do. He was my former colleague, your former colleague. When Breath of the Wild came out, that was like right around the time that Isaac and I were first working together. And he was like, oh, you do play video games? Your former colleague? Then fast forward during the pandemic, I started hanging out with him weekly via Zoom to watch movies and just like have mental health time.

And he again was going and he was like, I'm replaying Breath of the Wild. You have to try it. Have you considered it? And so finally I broke down and walked into the GameStop on a strip mall like near Danbury. I was like, I want to play Breath of the Wild. Can you help me? What do I need to buy? I got a Switch and I started playing.

And like the first weekend, I remember telling my mom I was hanging out with. I was like, this was a mistake and a waste of money because I can't control this guy. I don't know what's happening. I don't know how to fight. I don't know how to fight. I can't make the guy do what I want. And then just days later, I was hooked. I would be like sitting in a Zoom meeting at my desk and I would like out of the corner of my eye, I would see my switch charging and I would just be like oh should i just go over there i mean it was insane like i would play on my switch till it ran out of juice and i would have to like go

plug it in i was so into it i just like i i mean you can like take the guy's clothes off so he's only wearing like kind of super underwear type stuff and he's barefoot and he has a sword and then he rides a horse like that and like you can ride a bear. I just run around picking mushrooms and I pick mushrooms. I make dishes with it. I start fires. Sometimes I catch a horse. I ride it. I watch the sunset from a bridge. I found this one place where you can go and sit up on the top of the hill. And just like every morning, the dragon of that area comes out and flies within like one foot of your face. And it's like the most beautiful creature.

It's really fun. It's really fun, Sean. You would like it. Actually, you wouldn't. You like stupid games that are like, beat the goal, get a soccer ball, make the truck go. Right? That's your kind of game.

This isn't about me. This is about you. How much did it cost? How much did the Switch and the game cost? I bought a Switch Lite, which is the cheaper one. And I think it was like $250. Wow. Or maybe just $200. But then think it was like $250. Wow. Or maybe just $200, but then the game was like $49 or $59 or something like that.

So this isn't like recommending a movie or a TV show to a friend where there's like zero barrier to entry. You just turn on your computer or go to a movie theater and spend like $10, $20 at most. This was like, hey, Amy, you should check out this game. And you had to drop Benjamins on this thing. But that wasn't a barrier to entry for you? You were game to give it a shot? When I decided I wanted to try it, I just decided I wanted to try it.

I'm a grown-up lady. I'm over 50 years old. I can spend $300. So that wasn't really the problem. The problem more was like, do I want to spend 300 bucks on this? Or do I want to go out to an excellent dinner in Manhattan? So it was more like that. And I decided, I mean, Isaac kept saying like, you will lose yourself in this world. I was like, how is that possible? I have no inkling that that could happen to me.

And it did. It's interesting hearing you talk about the world, you know, so much of what you're talking about is nature. And I know you love nature and I know you experience nature all the time. And even in the pandemic, you probably had access to nature knowing a bit about your life. So what was it about this virtual reality nature that you found so compelling? I think just that in real nature, when you're like, oh, I'm gonna go on a hike and have a campfire and do a weenie roast and then come home. It's like you start hiking out there. Your shirt starts sticking to you because you're sweating. Bugs are biting you.

You go to start the fire. It doesn't start. Then it gets all smoky. Then you drop your weenie. It gets like chips of wood on it. You eat it anyway. You're tired. You're like disgusting and smelly.

And it seems fun in theory, but in real life, it's just kind of like, it's too real. So I was looking for something where I could lose track of time from the comfort of my couch. Plus, Link, who's the guy that you become, he never talks. It's like a silent, wordless existence, which I love. I just love beyond language. It's like where I want to be.

And also, he's just like, he's so fit. He's like, he's like, starts climbing and he just like, I mean, he's sweating and he's grunting, but he doesn't. He never really gets that tired. And like, even when he gets like pushed down by an enemy and he like rolls down a cliff and stuff, he always like takes him a second, but then he gets back up. And I mean, I just like, as my body is getting older, I'm like, oh, it feels good to just be able to vault onto the back of a horse and just go, which I can't do in real life. I mean, I know the point of the game is like something completely different and you have to like go in the shrines and solve all these puzzles and then like you know find your memories and and go and fight Ganon and save Zelda and stuff and I did it I did it I did all that but that that's not what's so great about the game it's kind of like a daydream you know know, where you're daydreaming about meeting up with your friend and daydreaming about seeing them again and how great it's going to be. And in that daydream, you know, the subway doesn't like let you off at Atlantic Terminal and you're late and everybody goes to a new bar without you.

And they're like, oh, hope you don't mind. We're meeting in Queens now. You know, like it's a daydream. I mean i mean yes there are blood moons where enemies come back to life and and yes there's like bokoblins and whatever those things are that like come and attack you and stuff but the game is built so that if you don't want to fight something you can just sprint and you can get away from it so you can go through the entire game and never have a battle. Which is just like so fun. Are you

thinking of getting it, Sean? Absolutely not, but I'm so excited for you and my brother and everyone else out there who lives for this game. I actually just got Monday and Tuesday off so I could just like continue playing. Did you really take two days off so you could play this game? Yes, and I did.

And my boss asked me, and I was like, my video game is coming out. And it was like, radio silence. I'm a loser, but a happy loser. It was great to talk to you, Amy. All right, good to talk to you too. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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Hey, listen! Today Explained, we are back with Mike Mahardy, who's a senior editor at Polygon. He's in charge of video game reviews at Polygon. He's in charge of video game reviews at Polygon. Mike, earlier in the show, we heard from my dear friend Amy Pearl, who was not a gamer until Breath of the Wild, which completely converted her. And since we've been talking about this show amongst ourselves as a team, I've heard this kind of story from lots of different people. Do you have any idea how many Amy Pearls are out there? How many people were brought into this game and this storyline through Breath of the Wild? Breath of the Wild itself has sold about 30 million copies.

Early in its lifespan, more people owned Breath of the Wild than owned the system you needed to play it on. Wow. So Breath of the Wild was very much like one of these watershed games. Got it. But if Breath of the Wild sold 30 million copies, how much does it cost-ish? So that was $60. So that's about like $1.8 billion just doing the general multiplication.

Obviously, not everybody would have had to pay full price through various deals or trade-ins, et cetera. But Tears of the Kingdom is $70. Games have just gone up with inflation. But this is like Top Gun Maverick money, if not more. This is as profitable as a huge blockbuster movie and certainly more profitable than most popular TV shows could even be. in box office sales. Granted, that's only five weeks into its run. Breath of the Wild is six years old, but right now the sales of Breath of the Wild, if you were comparing them, more than triples the Mario movie box office sales.

Wow. What was so groundbreaking about Breath of the Wild? What made this game such a game changer that it made so much money for Nintendo? It's the same thing that made the original Legend of Zelda in the late 80s so powerful. It was just about dropping into this world and exploring for its own sake.

And the developers were smart enough to reward that exploration, reward that curiosity, so you kept exploring because there was a bit of confidence that your curiosity would be met with something cool, something interesting. Breath of the Wild is actually much like that first game in that regard, except with better tech. The developers have way more experience in hindsight. You know, it was 2017 instead of 1986. So all these open world games that were coming out in the early aughts in the 2010s were very much about like go knock these boxes on a checklist off breath of the wild was just much more organic

in the way you're exploring and it really was just kind of like going back to the concept of the original zelda but with new tech better hardware more experience on the developer's part and is the sequel to breath of the wild tears Tears of the Kingdom, which comes out today, going to be bigger? It's hard to say. They haven't released figures yet. Nintendo kind of usually doesn't do that. They're a bit more closeted for a while in terms of their financials.

But it's one of those games where Nintendo released a teaser a few years ago, and people were not just combing through this 30 seconds of a teaser to see what that character said. They were like, oh, I heard this weird little sound snippet in the background. Some people were even playing them backwards, almost like you would an old school Led Zeppelin record to hear these demonic messages that Robert Plant might have been sending you. Is there a chance, you might remember that like Deuce Bigelow, European Gigolo was famously nowhere near as good as the original. Is there a chance that Tears of the Kingdom disappoints fans of Breath of the Wild? So the game came out today or last night,

whatever you want to say it. Maybe you went to a midnight release if you're listening. However, I actually have had it for like two weeks. You've had it for two weeks? Yeah. How do you do that? I was reviewing it for Polygon, and I've played it for like about 70 hours. Wow. Still have not scratched the surface. It's actually not really one open world in Tears of the Kingdom,

like it was in Breath of the Wild or any number of other open world games. It's actually kind of three layered atop one another. There are these sky islands above Hyrule that they've been showing in these trailers and these gameplay demonstrations. However, there's also an entire subterranean map that is basically the size of Hyrule above it and that is much bigger than these sky islands.

So you're finding an item in the sky islands, like a treasure map, that actually leads you down to what they call the depths, that subterranean map. But to explore the depths, you're also needing to gather certain items that can light up the darkness from this middle world, this Hyrule.

So I think it actually might potentially turn some people away that really like Breath of the Wild, specifically because compared to Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild was basically just like this overture, like this introduction, just by how big it was. Because Tears of the Kingdom, even 70 hours in, I'm still like, even right now while we're speaking, I'm thinking of things I haven't tried in terms of like how you can build these vehicles in this game, how you can fuse together different items to make new weapons.

It's, I think people might find it overwhelming, especially those people who, like we talked about, came in with Breath of the Wild because, for as complicated as the things were under the surface, it's actually a pretty simple game to learn. This is more upfront. You're learning these abilities that are basically trying to make you almost think like a game developer. Okay, so if people aren't scared away by the complexity of this game,

it stands to be just as huge, if not maybe even bigger than its predecessor. What would that mean for Nintendo and for the gaming industry? So Breath of the Wild for Nintendo was their repudiation, so to speak. I think open world games, these actual maps you're dropped into to explore. Since the early aughts, really, open world games were kind of becoming stale. You had games from publishers like Ubisoft in which you get dropped into this world and there are these icons all over the map. The UI was cluttered and crowded. It had like six missions up on the side to go pursue.

Basically, you couldn't catch a break in terms of like just deciding where to go on your own. Breath of the Wild came along as this kind of response to that. And since we've seen tons of developers chasing after Breath of the Wild's design, Elden Ring, which released last year, it was Polygon's game of the year, was from software who's made Dark Souls, Bloodborne. If you don't know those games, they're very, they don't care how difficult they are. They don't care whether it's going to take some work on the player's part to figure out what's going on. They're just very confident and they don't clutter the UI.

They're just there like, hey, go find this general boss and then see if you could beat them and we'll figure out where to go from there. But I think the games industry at large, I'm hoping at least, as a fan of those games that I mentioned that kind of put the control in the player's hand. So I'm hoping more studios chase after Tears of the Kingdom

the way huge studios have chased after Breath of the Wild. And Nintendo, I think, really needed this at this point in time. They are definitely lagging behind. If you're looking at the big companies, Microsoft with Xbox, Sony with PlayStation, even Valve with PCs and Steam Deck now, which is a handheld and it's awesome. Nintendo is really lagging behind in terms of the actual technical side. I mean, Breath of the Wild was pushing the Nintendo Switch's hardware back in 2017.

Tears of the Kingdom is no different. They really needed a big win on the creative side, on the software side, because they just said recently, do not expect the Switch 2 or Switch Pro, whatever it happens to be in 2023. So it means a lot for Nintendo, I think, financially, sure, but also just kind of in terms of continuing the relevance that New Horizons and Breath of the Wild established, I think it's a big deal for them. You mentioned that Mario movie a little while ago. And I wonder, you know, it feels like video games are kind of everywhere right now, not only on our platforms, but in the movie theater. HBO just had a very popular TV show, The Last of Us, based on a video game.

It was wildly successful. If you don't think there's hope for the world, why bother going on? Is there something more pervasive about video games in our culture right now? Because we still had movies based on video games in the 90s, and certainly after that, but they're certainly everywhere you look right now. Yeah. I think it's less that like video games are having a moment right now. And this

is kind of the result of a buildup. I hate to like attribute everything going on right now to like lockdown and COVID. But the reality is that during lockdown, people were getting into Animal Crossing. They were, it became less of this little hobby you do on the side alongside the TV shows you're watching, alongside the movies that you're watching, alongside the books you're reading. It became this cultural force that is just like this kind of binding agent in your social groups. I'm willing to bet most people listening play a game in some respect, whether it's Wordle in their family chat or it's Marvel Snap when they play on the subway. The way you invest money using Robinhood or the way you look for your life partner on Tinder.

Duolingo, the way you learn languages is extremely gamified. That has learned so much from video game UI and the way video games teach us and vice versa. I think in some way, you are what we used to call, quote unquote, a gamer. I think everybody is at this point. So I think The Last of Us being this tentpole on HBO and the Mario movie, which was a bit more based on nostalgia than actual like trying to tell this like quality drama. I think both of those are kind of the result

of video games being mainstream for a while. And now creators in other disciplines are trying to, you know, actually bring that to the forefront for other audiences. Other disciplines, as you generously called them, have always wanted to like co-opt profit off of anything that's popular, be it a Barbie movie or Super Mario Brothers or whatever it might be. But when you get back to like this game or its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, it feels like for a lot of people, it's about just escaping into a world.

And that's like a pretty pure thing that isn't really about corporate profits or intellectual property. It's just about spending some time in a world that's really satisfying. Yeah, I mean, one of the best-selling games on Switch that released during lockdown was basically just about having a normal life. Animal Crossing was just, you wake up, you tend your crops, maybe you harvest a few of them, go talk to your friend who happens to be the museum curator, and there was something really rewarding about having that normal life cycle when we were all just kind of consigned to our apartments. So I think people nowadays, more and more people just realize not every game is going to be focused around combat.

Some games just can be about this pure escapism, this pure discovery. And Tears of the Kingdom to me is one of the sheerest demonstrations of what happens when developers just kind of embrace the fact that people want their curiosity to be rewarded. Yeah, it's a powerful thing.

Mike Mahardy is a senior editor at Polygon. If you are excited about this game, Polygon is going wall to wall on it over at Polygon.com. Thanks to Mike's colleagues, Nicole Carpenter and Christopher Plant, for their help too, and Ode White. Thanks, Ode. Earlier in the show you heard from Amy Pearl. Amy doesn't presently have a podcast to plug but she used to host one

called 10 Things That Scare Me I loved it. Maybe you will too Our show today was produced by Amanda Llewellyn She had help from Matthew Collette and Laura Bullard and Paul Robert Malinzy and Michael Rayfield I'm Sean Ramos for M. This is Today Explained.