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Jul - The Cutting Room Floor - Zelda 1 Original Design Documents New poll - New thread - New reply
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— FPzero —
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Posted on 01-17-11 08:32:28 PM Link | Quote
I was reading an old Iwata Asks article about the Handheld Zeldas and the conversation steered into how the original Zelda got created. It had a number of documents from the game's planning in it, with images of the documents too:



This is the very first preliminary document about Zelda, which at the time was just called Adventure. A very basic game flow can be seen here. If anyone can translate the text that would be great too. Following pages talked about items and enemies but those pages aren't shown unfortunately. It's dated from February 1, 1985.



From a few weeks later, dated February 13, 1985, these are sketches of enemies and items placed on a graphics grid. Not everything here was used in the final game but it's mentioned that they were drawing from this sketch for subsequent games for years. Of interest, (coordinates going down then over) the lamp at 2,6, the bull at C,6, and the mountain lion at C,4 and on the bottom border. I think the enemy at 8,3 later became that enemy in the Dream Shrine from Link's Awakening that mirrored Link's movements.



This is the Dungeon Select screen for Adventure. Originally, Zelda/Adventure only had dungeons, so this was how you would select where you wanted to go.



This was the first overworld drawn for Zelda. Note the desert is lower on the map than in the final game.



These are the dungeon layout documents for both quests. We already know that the dungeons were designed as a puzzle to fit the memory limitations of the hardware. What I didn't know was that according to the interview, the Second Quest was a completely accidental happening, in which the dungeons for the first quest were accidentally designed to use half the available memory. Instead of redoing the designs to fit the whole memory, Miyamoto had the idea to just make a second quest with new dungeons.



Unrelated to Zelda but from the same interview, this document about the original Super Mario Bros. surfaced:



The original Mario was planned to be 5 worlds but Miyamoto was sneaky. He folded an A3 sheet of paper instead of an A4 sheet and drew the 5 planned worlds on the front of the fold and 3 more on the back. When presenting it for agreement, after getting the go-ahead, he unfolded it to show that there were really 3 more worlds. The extra 3 worlds were possible because of the reuse of level layouts with more sprites added.

I don't know if we chronicle this sort of thing on the wiki but it seemed too interesting for me to forget about mentioning. The original interview is located here:
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/iwata/iwata_asks_-_zelda_handheld_history_15603_15604.html#top

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Posted on 01-17-11 08:36:47 PM Link | Quote


I'll leave the bullet points to someone better at reading Japanese handwriting than myself, but the text at the top says "Adventure", and on the left side I think the descriptors say (from top to bottom) "Original", "Random", "Edit", and finally "Maze"...

I'm not sure how to interpret that without the bullet points, but "random" is interesting.

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Posted on 01-18-11 04:30:00 AM (last edited by GlitterBerri at 01-18-11 01:31 AM) Link | Quote
Originally posted by Imajin

I'll leave the bullet points to someone better at reading Japanese handwriting than myself, but the text at the top says "Adventure", and on the left side I think the descriptors say (from top to bottom) "Original", "Random", "Edit", and finally "Maze"...

I'm not sure how to interpret that without the bullet points, but "random" is interesting.


Correct about the bullet points. Here's my contribution to the rest. I'll update when I figure out the smaller characters, unless someone beats me to it. Any chance you have larger versions of those shots? I couldn't find them on the page you linked to.

アドベンチャー

オリジナル

ランダム

エディット

メイズ

・各フロアの水晶玉を？ったか？　ー５Fに入れるか？
・５Fの？分を見つけたか？
・？今を？りせたか？
・その他に？これたナゾを見つけたか？

Adventure

Original

Random

Edit

Maze

•Did you ? the crystal balls on each floor? -Can you get to the 5F?
•Did you find the ? on the 5F?
•???
•Aside from that, did you find the ? puzzles?
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Jul - The Cutting Room Floor - Zelda 1 Original Design Documents New poll - New thread - New reply


Rusted Logic
Acmlmboard - commit 47be4dc [2021-08-23]
©2000-2022 Acmlm, Xkeeper, Kaito Sinclaire, et al.

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