How The First Zelda Was Made and Considered Sci-Fi Instead of Fantasy 

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Congrats on the sponsor! Just wanted to chime into anyone reading: if you're on the fence, go for it! I sleep in my Raycons every night and I adore them.

raycon deez nuts loam

@@thegothaunt that’s pretty much their only use though 💀

Well.. Raycon and quality are far and in between. And trying to have them replaced, noperoo. But grab the bag of cash and enjoy it.

That's pretty cool

I'd imagine grid paper was literally the only choice back then

No we had stone tablets and a chizle.

@@MikeRavia-xp5ig fo shizle

Well even some of the graphics was usually done on grid paper up to a bit into the 80s I mean grid paper and well paper in general is still used a lot when designing games. Sometimes Lego bricks is also a great and quick way to prototype layouts

I wish I had real caves to play when I was kid. totk new caves finally satisfies that part of me.

​@@stormhoughtTotK satisfies your childhood need to explore under the earth and find a terrifying hellscape?...

nobody cares anymore. miyamoto is overated af

@@Radien Yes o_o

​@@RadienThe children yearn for the mines XD

Looks like BotW and TotK finally brought the technology based triforce idea back to the series, too

Link to the Past had several scenes of transitions that you watched water drain down, rock changing, ground shaking/rising, weather changing. And "time travel" is pretty similar to light world and dark world being slightly effected by each other being a "mirror" of each other. Ocarina of time is more like a re-creation of Link to the Past.

Dude was really ahead of his time in game development

Link to the past had the concept of two worlds / time travel. He just sidelined that idea for lttp.

@@AricTWS Don't forget that ToTK is literally what Skyward Sword was meant to be (with the Sky Islands and truly falling into the surface/Depths). Even the glider is just a fully functiong sailcloth.

Yup and that the same designers were working on both! Can't imagine what their schedule must have been like. Props to Miyamoto and Tezuka.

I find it especially insane that so many of the ideas that were shelved for one game were used in the other. You can see some of the similarities here and there, especially later on in SMB3 and Link's Awakening, but for the most part they seem very different.

​@ThatGuyGlen gigachad miyazaki was working on dark souls 3 and bloodborne at the same time too.

@@co2_os that’s actually kind of insane to hear as well

It's called multitasking. Not that insane. Do you get your mind blown when you turn on the faucet and water comes out?

BotW basically felt like everything Nintendo originally wanted to do in 1986 was finally achievable with better hardware.

​@@badladyamiI mean yeah, they explicitely said they developed BotW with the idea that it was a "remake" of the original game and then some

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yV8e_RkpiNA.html You mean the part starting at 2:10? If you say it like this then yeah, there are similarities, but I probably wouldn't even notice if you didn't tell me, as the style is very different (this is pretty experimental, Zelda theme is grand and adventurous). But if he was a fan and played the song in a band, it would make sense. It can happen even subconsciously. I play covers of songs on guitar too and some of the songs really get under your skin after you play them enough of times, so their patterns become a part of your musical thinking. And when you're then asked to write a killer theme in a day, your mind goes for the readily available thing and this can happen even without realizing.

@@SMJSmoK I'm not that user, but they would have been talking about the part at 2:00 which is unequivocally near note for note identical to the bridging section of the dungeon theme of the original Legend of Zelda. It's odd that you asked which part they meant, as this one hits you like a bus to the face - there's no doubting it. As someone with an uncommonly vivid musical memory (it's hard to put into words), I do always find it frustrating when musical similarities are pointed out and people respond by identifying differences, especially ones of flavour rather than musical theory (not that I have a classical understanding of music, it's more an inner visualisation and sort of emotional language). This particular section happens to be played on an organ, the same sound and style that the NES chipset was emulating, but people will frequently say it for matching pieces where the style or feel or instrumentation differs, and my point is always that it's irrelevant. Imagine two people who look strikingly similar. You could always say that one's eyebrows angle slightly sharper than the others, and one has a faint mole while the other doesn't, but the claim was never that they're indistinguishable, it's that they share a resemblance-or in the case of music, a motif/chord progression/melody/etc. To see what I mean, try Queen's 'Don't Lose Your Head' and the Underwater/Dam music from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 on the NES. People more famously note the similarity of the title track to 'Sheer Heart Attack', and rightly so (despite it not being note for note), but the Dam music is more interesting to me because it's the *feel* and the sort of essence of 'Don't Lose Your Head' that's been recreated. It's one of these things where if somebody else can't hear it, okay, but they're not getting what we're picking up - it's not that what we're picking up isn't there or that 'there are only so many notes'. Incidentally, other Queen/Nintendo comparisons include the four chord prelude at the end of 'Procession' or intro to 'Father to Son' (they flow into one another). Few people will be get this one, but if you sang/played the intro to Legend of Zelda's title screen over the top, it's the very same chord progression (different key). There's also a bit in 'The Seven Seas of Rye' after they sing "I challenge the mighty Titans and their troubadours" that's very similar to the famous main Zelda theme melody. This isn't to say that all of these are evidence of one artist being inspired by another, but more often than not I strongly suspect it's the case - likely subconsciously. Those last two examples could easily just be coincidence from playing around with scales and chords, but 'April' is undoubtedly the inspiration for LoZ's labyrinth theme as it's a nearly 1:1 recreation.

Interesting how similar the 2:00 part is. But the 2:10 part is more a matter of the widely used Andalusian cadence/progression than any direct/specific similarity.

@@SMJSmoK I've heard a lot of things in hard and prog rock from that era that remind me of '80s and '90s era video games motifs. I usually chalked it up to being a combination of my mind jumping to notice any incidental similarities due to those old NES themes being burned into my brain at a very young age, and the influence of the neo-classical laden styles of those '60s/'70s bands on the NES-era composers who would have grown up listening to them. I've heard that particular moment in April you're referring to dozens of times and admittedly always thought of the Zelda dungeon theme, though at the same time I assumed it was largely coincidental, as this kind of fully-diminished chord played in a series of inversions has been pretty common since Bach. In fact, Jon Lord in particular liked to lift things from Baroque compositions so often that might actually even _be_ from something by Bach originally. Though I have to admit that particular sequence and rhythm along with the tone of the organ matches the NES track so precisely that it's hard not to think Koij Kondo may have been channeling this subconsciously. It's funny how hard it is to not end up doing that though. Back when I used to compose more frequently, I'd very often find that underneath my "original" ideas, I had embedded clear copies of things I knew without realizing it. For instance, I once wrote a piece for flute, clarinet, oboe, French horn and cello structured around a "lament bass" progression, only to later realize I had written an elaborate instrumental rearrangement over-top the framework of Hotel California.

I'm not sure listening to a 2014 remaster makes much sense. But, there are some similarities. Some notes in common and some similar rhythms, but the change both in style and in orchestration is massive. To the point where I too would have missed it if not told where to look.

the title theme, not the overworld theme

​@@TheGalaxyWingsat 12:10 he says overworld theme, is the video incorrect or did you misheard?

@@mmmmmmmmmmm10 neither, the new title theme kondo made was an arrangement of the preexisting overworld theme

Cool, but not unique to Zelda, Dragon Quest had a similar situation.

Believe it or not most hits are written in minutes.

They would probably be twice as big!

It was actually pretty ingenious because the second quest enhanced the overworld too. The dungeons weren't where you remembered them, so not only do you have to re-explore the dungeons, you have to re-explore the entire overworld too. The second quest essentially increases the exploration 150%, instead of just 50%.

I would imagine it’d just be a game with 16 dungeons, or they’d be twice as big

I feel like we must not be understanding that properly, if he "accidentally only programmed half of them in" then the simple fix would be "program in the others that the designer had on paper and you forgot to program in" and then we'd have 18 dungeons. I think what the actual quote is supposed to be is like, the designer thought he had X number of game tiles/screens to devote to 9 dungeons, so he divided them up accordingly, and after they were all done, discovered that was only half of the allotment, leading them to decide "make 9 more dungeons but put them on a separate file" which makes sense, Mario did something similar and it was common at the time that after a game you just start over with a new game. And since the new dungeons are all letter-shaped instead of object-shaped, it makes sense they were all created as a separate group it reminds me of the story of pokemon gold and silver, where the dude stayed up all night eking more space out of a gameboy cartridge and then found he'd _doubled it._ so he went ahead and ported in the entire original map from red and green.

​@@KairuHakubiThe dude you're mentioning that programmed for a long time straight (I think it was a whole weekend) to optimise space for pokemon Gold/Silver is none other than the late Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo. IIRC, he wasn't even a part of the team developing it. Game Freak was desperate because they were quickly running out of space on the cartridge and time before the deadline. Iwata was so good at programming that the extra space allowed the entirety of the Kanto region to be included in the game.

Then going back to him with the tail between your legs and "Boss, look I'm afraid we really screwed up." and Miyamoto being like "Nah, it's fine, we'll make another quest instead." lol "I wonder how that happened" Lots of stress before deadlines I guess, focus slips and accidents happen. These teams were relatively small (basically a size of an indie team by modern standards) so it's possible that nobody checked his work until it was too late. And they were working on two games at once...

nah, tezuka made the map but still LMAO i would be so embarrassed... making only half of the game......

Copying stuff from paper quickly becomes a challenge when there is a lot of data.

Miyamoto made the Oracles team remake the first Zelda as a way to make them understand Zelda.

Timeline wise, Oracle of Seasons and Ages take place before the original Legend of Zelda, and Adventure of Link. According to The Goddess Collection of official books.

My pleasure!

Really in my opinion it’s the worst one of them all

@@thekxckup3854 sure its your opinion.

I wonder if this is why "futuristic" elements always seem to sneak into the series? Steam boats, telephones, a motocycle, cell phones/tablets, trains- I personally love it. I'm glad that they keep ideas like this around.

@@avereynakama9854 teh zonai devices and constructs asw as guardians from botw

​​@@flamingbanana5831even before then, Majora's Mask had speedboats, and schematics for a bomb powered rocket ship in the bomb shop, plus Spirit Tracks obviously had trains, and even in Skyward Sword there were robots

Same, I only care about scores when they help me advance the plot (i.e. reveal a true final boss).

Scores were stupid, as were timers.

@@catsaregovernmentspies Ugh, yes absolutely. I despise pointless time limits.

true, but now we're too much on the story side, with games taking hundreds of hours to finish and makes me sleepy

@@wphanoo still plenty of quicker and more straightforward games out there, as well as skill games with near zero plot. The market caters to virtually everyone now.

{Koij Kondo}: I'm gonna pull what the kids call a "pro-composer" move.... Like, what dark magic did the heads of Nintendo use in the 80's to summon so much talent into one company? Like Nintendo in the 80's, excuse us while we just casually invent the platforming and the adventure RPG genre and do it so good they're still some of the best games ever made. Nintendo in the late 90's, excuse us while we casually create modern 3D gaming from scratch and releases Mario 64 and OoT. Nintendo today, excuse us while we casually perfect the open world game, on portable hardware that's 6 years old at this point. Nintendo, chill.

Makes me happy to hear that :D

Much appreciated!

Thank you!

Thank you very much for the kind words!

My pleasure gothaunt, glad you liked it!

My pleasure, Jean!

The main difference for me is that Zelda games became increasingly "handholdy" as time went by. I really like that concept of the first game, that you don't have a clue about anything.

Much appreciated!

Same! I somewhat recently found out his daughter is even named Zelda. Miss that man.

I've even seen some criticizing the fact that tech is even more abundant in Tears than it was in BotW, saying they don't like it and doesn't feel like Zelda. I mean, opinions are fine, but I just find it to be a petty gripe especially considering the franchise history.

It is a new implementation. Cut ideas that were never implemented are not what Zelda defined itself as, in the final medieval product. Cars and planes are out of place in the world these devs described as "medieval" 9:40 and "Lord of the Rings" inspired 2:42.

@@Luxembourgish Nah.

@@TheFos88 Why did we never see cars and planes in this medieval fantasy series before? Why was the Zelda series created as "medieval" 9:40 and "Lord of the Rings" inspired 2:42 according to developers?

@@Luxembourgish who really fucking cares? Tech fits fine and the imaginative creativity found is fun. Mountains out of molehills.

Thank you very much for the kind words, glad you enjoyed it!

My pleasure, glad you liked it!

Thank you very much, glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Zelda does it 1000 times better, though.

@@andreaschatzopoulosOne would hope so, sheesh. In those days, the days of console _infancy,_ consoles advanced so quickly that it only took two years for the latest arrival to outperform the older unit the way it today takes an entire generation. (Think the VCS, 1977, vs. Intellivision, 1979). The six year difference between the VCS-the console that _made_ home gaming a bona fide thing-and the NES was far more than a single generation of improvement, not leastwise because the NES itself was years ahead of its contemporaries.

Glad to hear you enjoy them and will do!

You're misunderstanding. It wasn't half of the disk, was half of the dungeon maps, a lot of other stuff were also consuming memory and disk space. That's why the second Quest reuses the overworld maps while having different dungeons (but still using the same assets from the second quest). To make the futuristic setting like they wanted, they would have to fit another overworld and making completely new and distinct assets for it (and maybe even the dungeons).

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Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed it!

@@ThatGuyGlen all good! 😊

He just ripped off Deep Purple's - April

He didn't wrote in one day, he rearranged the overworld theme to fit the title theme. And the Dumb Elf don't know what "ripping off" means.

You're thinking of the US, where we are generally behind on technology (especially back then). The 3.5 inch floppy came out in 1983 in Japan. In Japan, new technology gets adopted pretty quickly. Side note: the original Macintosh came with only a 3.5 inch floppy drive, in 1984.

Awesome, thanks for subscribing!

Much appreciated!

My pleasure!

Much appreciated!

Thank you! That section starts about 2:20 minutes into the video.

@@ThatGuyGlen ohhhh how did I miss that! Thank you so much. I'd say that's why we got a link to the past, but it's not called that in Japan is it

@@ThatGuyGlen Your title for the video keeps changing every few days! I think the original title was best with "medieval" in it

Much appreciated and thank you for subscribing!

I think it was middle class, but his city was more rural during his childhood. Or lived outside the city.

He based Zelda on the forests he would explore around his home. It wasn't actually inside his home

Where I live back then there's actually a ton of buildings, forest, caves, and rivers to explore. There's no such thing as nowhere to go, my guess is that your folks are too secured with you to let you go explored anything yet. As a kid, I often get lost in the nearby woods and rivers where I fished and camp.

@Voan Siam Yeah, so I lived in a trailer park next to a busy highway next to a toxic river you can't swin or fish in with a railroad track that was often used by trains back then. So no, it wasn't my parents it was the environment.

You should look up traditional Japanese homes, it makes a lot more sense in that context

Will do!

Thank you, glad you liked it!

Always a good day when I can share a new video :D

No he isn’t

Watch the movie and you should realize he is. No way Nintendo would admit he's named after a bandit who sleeps with whores.

That would be the worst decision, the map getting bigger with the same number of dungeons would not offer much.

having a secret quest unlock after you beat the game felt very cool as a kid.