The legend of Zelda - Research Paper Example

?The History of The Legend of Zelda The Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda and its main character, a boy d Link, are so well-known and recognized in the video game community as to be nearly iconic. The original title spawned a series of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and derivative works. The main series alone, without counting the remakes on various systems, consists of over fourteen games (Zelda Timeline, 2009). For many, the instrumental background music, character sprites, and especially the unique gold game cartridge for the original Legend of Zelda can still conjure up happy images from their childhoods (Vestal, O’Neill, & Shoemaker, n.d.). The game Legend of Zelda is so important to both the company of Nintendo and to video game development as a whole because it was such a revolution in video game design. The game allowed players to move around on the main map between screens in a non-linear fashion, forcing the player to determine where they should go next instead of clearly showing them (Nintendo, 2010). In addition, the game was filled with puzzles and traps that made the game “more puzzle than plaything” (Paumgarten, n.d.). The game also ended up establishing the now-popular game genre of “action-adventure”, a combination of the speed and reaction time skill sets required in action games with the longer story lines and plot development of adventure games (Nintendo, 2010). Despite its success now, the development of Zelda was never a sure thing, and in fact was following a long and sometimes rocky history for the company Nintendo (Paumgarten, n.d.). Having established the importance of the game itself, the need for further understanding of the game's history becomes clear. This history is in three parts: the history of the gaming company Nintendo, the careers of game developer Shigeru Miyamoto and his team, and finally the specific game development for The Legend of Zelda. Through this analysis, we will see that it took this series of events to produce the revolutionary Zelda game. History of Nintendo The original Nintendo company was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. Obviously, at that point they were not producing video games of any kind. Instead, the company was known for its intricate, hand-painted playing cards and other table game accessories. Well into the twentieth century, Nintendo also produced Japanese hanafuda, a word which literally translates to “flower cards”. These colorfully painted hanafuda were used as gambling chips, replacing an older tradition of using painted seashells to keep score in playing card games. Around the year 1949, when Fusajiro Yamauchi's grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi took over the company, Nintendo began producing electronic games and gadgets, in an attempt to diversify their product line. One of the more famous products they produced during this period is the infamous “Love Tester”, which supposedly shows if there is an attraction between two individuals squeezing the machines levers. Another product in this line from Nintendo was the Beam Gun, which was used in converted bowling alleys to shoot simulations of clay pigeons and was quite popular in Japan (Paumgarten, n.d.). It was not until the 1970s that Nintendo actually entered the video game market. Contrary to what some fans seem to believe, Nintendo did not produce the earliest video games. Those were designed by California-based Atari, the company behind the memorable games Pong and Space Invaders. These arcade games, and later the home console versions, quickly became a worldwide craze. Seeing an opportunity despite having no personal interest in video gaming, Hiroshi Yamauchi decided that his company would enter this potentially lucrative new market (Paumgarten, n.d.). The result was a stream of arcade cabinets for the commercial market. At current count, Nintendo has produced over ninety arcade titles. These included such classics as Duck Hunt and Mario Bros., but had other failed games that are significantly less well-known, such as Battle Shark and the arcade version of Radar Scope (The International Arcade Museum, n.d.). Nintendo also began preparations for entering the home console market during this period, in order to compete with the home consoles produced by Atari. This console, called the Family Computer or Famicom in Japan, was released to the US market as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It was an instant success and forever changed the future of home video gaming (Nintendo, n.d.). Shigeru Miyamoto Shigeru Miyamoto was only twenty-four when he started working for Nintendo. Having just completed an art school degree, Miyamoto was unsure what he was looking to do in his career, and took the interview with Nintendo only because of family connections with the company. His position in the company was originally in the planning department, but then began creating the designs and artwork for Nintendo products. In some ways, he could be considered to be the first graphic designer to be employed by the Nintendo company (Paumgarten, n.d.). Miyamoto's real breakthrough with Nintendo came out of one of the company's failures, which he turned into a chance to become one of Nintendo's greatest assets. As mentioned, not all of Nintendo's arcade cabinets were successful. One of the biggest failures was Radar Scope in the US market. Nintendo became stuck with a backstock of over two thousand arcade cabinets for the game. Miyamoto was ordered by the company president to design another use for them, and came up with the now-famous Donkey Kong. Similarly to The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong was a new idea in video gaming. Most arcade games of that era were designed simply to be played on and on until the player ran out of lives, in order to earn the new highest score. Donkey Kong instead had an objective: to defeat the gorilla at the top of the screen and free the character's kidnapped girlfriend. This type of objective-based gaming has now become the standard for most game genres (Paumgarten, n.d.). The success of Donkey Kong and its main character, Mario, spilled over into the design of the Famicom and NES game Super Mario Bros. Miyamoto and his newly-hired assistant, Takashi Tezuka, designed Super Mario Bros. as the pack-in game for the 1985 release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States (IGN Editorial Staff, n.d.). It was this game that first cemented the place of both the NES and Shigeru Miyamoto in the history of game design, as well as being responsible for the revitalization of the entire home gaming industry (Paumgarten, n.d.). The game The Legend of Zelda was designed to follow Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom/NES, and was released in the United States in 1987 at a price point of $40 (Totillo, 2011). Development of The Legend of Zelda While The Legend of Zelda was not released until over a year after Super Mario Bros., the two games were in simultaneous development. The game development at Nintendo was split into two teams, overseen by Miyamoto, in an attempt to keep the linear style used for Mario from interfering with the completely non-linear design being used for Zelda (Robinson & Johnson, 2003). Tezuka was the assistant director for the two projects, as well as the chief graphics designer for The Legend of Zelda. It was the combination of the two masterminds that really brought out the good points in the development process (IGN Editorial Staff, n.d.). The two worked closely, combining their different styles, in order to create features that neither of them would have made on their own. The original hand drawing of the world map, for example, was done on a single piece of paper with the two designers sitting side by side, each working on half of the sheet. The differing artwork style is clear in the drawing, but the overall map is just as clearly a unified work (Tezuka, Nakago, Aonuma, & Iwata, 2011). For all of its collaborative elements, however, The Legend of Zelda is very much the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto. While the name “Zelda” does in fact come from the wife of famed author F. Scott Fitzgerald, this is not because the game has any literary connections to his works; Miyamoto simply liked the name and decided to use it. In addition, many of the elements of the gameplay are childhood memories and experiences from Miyamoto's Kyoto home (Vestal et al., n.d.). For example, the design of the “dungeons”, where the player enters a cave that is slowly revealed as the character explores further, is based on a cavern Miyamoto discovered in a wooded area near his school (Paumgarten, n.d.). The revolutionary ideas of Miyamoto can also be seen in the hardware development for Zelda. The game itself was much larger, approximately 128 screens in total, than most games of the time (Vestal et al., n.d.). This required the data storage for the game to be done carefully. The dungeons were designed to fit together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, so that the blank space on one screen could be used to hold data from another section. In the end, the team did such a good job of reducing the data space needed that there was room for a second set of dungeons; this is known as the “Master Quest” and can be accessed after the player completes the game for the first time (Tezuka et al., 2011). In addition to making use of the space on the cartridges, The Legend of Zelda on Famicom was one of the first games to use a battery back-up system. This allowed the player to save their game and return later to the same spot. For an adventure game, this was an amazing innovation over the previous, clunky, password system, which required the player to record and re-enter long complicated passwords to continue their game (Vestal et al., n.d.). Conclusions The Legend of Zelda is the game that many people remember when they think of Nintendo, despite the company's long and varied history. Nintendo as a company has fostered playfulness and innovation since its beginnings as a playing card manufacturer, to its struggling times as an electronic gadget company, and finally into its heyday in the video game business. Hiring Shigeru Miyamoto and his assistant Takashi Tezuka was just another in a line of decisions by the company's second owner that changed the face of Nintendo and the world forever. Only in this environment could the designers of the revolutionary Legend of Zelda game felt so free to come up with new ideas. Only under this sort of guidance could Miyamoto felt comfortable enough to use his own childhood as the basis for a game. Events had to line up just right, as they did, for this game to exist. References IGN Editorial Staff. (n.d.). Top 100 Game Creators of All Time - 53. Takashi Tezuka. IGN. Retrieved August 16, 2011, from http://games.ign.com/top-100-game-creators/53.html Nintendo. (2010). The Legend of Zelda Documentary. Nintendo. Nintendo. (n.d.). Nintendo Company History. Nintendo Corporate. Retrieved September 1, 2011, from http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp Paumgarten, N. (n.d.). Master of Play. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all Robinson, A., & Johnson, C. (2003, April 23). Shigeru Miyamoto Interview - Superplay Magazine. Miyamoto Shrine. Retrieved from http://www.miyamotoshrine.com/theman/interviews/230403.shtml Tezuka, T., Nakago, T., Aonuma, E., & Iwata, S. (2011, March 9). Iwata Asks - Zelda Handheld History. Retrieved from http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/iwata/iwata_asks_-_zelda_handheld_history_15603_15604.html The International Arcade Museum. (n.d.). Battle Shark - Arcade by Nintendo. The International Arcade Musuem Library. Retrieved September 1, 2011, from http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7050 Totillo, S. (2011, August 11). Argument: It’s Time to Make The Legend of Zelda Free. Forever. Kotaku. Retrieved August 16, 2011, from http://kotaku.com/5830042/argument-its-time-to-make-the-legend-of-zelda-free-forever Vestal, A., O’Neill, C., & Shoemaker, B. (n.d.). The History of Zelda. Gamespot. Retrieved August 16, 2011, from http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/hist_zelda/index.html Zelda Timeline. (2009). The Angry Video Game Nerd. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIP9UtkQDQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player Read More