The Legend Of Zelda didn’t create a genre, but it did help define it

T&E Soft is responsible for Hydlide, a predecessor to series like Ys featuring bump combat and overworld exploration. Like with Druaga, this game was released in 1984, but rather than being a massive success in arcades it was instead popular first on Japanese PCs, and then later on the Famicom after an updated port was released. While a North American version of Hydlide was released on the NES years after the games it had helped inspire came out, serving to mostly confuse and frustrate those who played it, there was nothing else like it when it first arrived on the scene in Japan. Despite the differing combat style, the influence on Zelda is clear to the point that North American reviews of the NES edition bagged on Hydlide for being an inferior version of the formula: you searched the world for hidden secrets and specific items needed to progress both in said overworld and in the game’s dungeons, free to roam but not without danger of overreaching due to being unprepared for what awaited you in what were designed to be late-game areas.

Cosmos Protector developed the PC-8801 action RPG, Courageous Perseus, which was another key 1984 release. In Perseus, you travel back and forth (and back and forth, and back and forth…) across an island full of monsters, searching for necessary MacGuffins and engaging in continuous combat with progressively tougher and tougher monsters, all of which exist on the map from the start. There is plenty of proto-Zelda here, in the sense that there is screen scrolling and backtracking, as well as an emphasis on very lightly guided exploration. You are left to your own devices here, figuring out where to go next on your own; if you have never thought of The Legend Of Zelda as particularly player-friendly or beautiful in its technological achievements, such as its ability to plop you down in a playable, useful spot when you transition from one screen to the next or keep the action and sprites moving at all times, well, Courageous Perseus will cure you of that misconception. Perseus is a key title in Japanese action RPG history, and worth experiencing to see why, but its importance outweighs its enjoyment, which was even the case at the time: there is a reason that it was Hydlide and Falcom’s games that found both an audience and space for sequels.

Falcom’s Dragon Slayer and Xanadu—especially Xanadu—are clear influences on Zelda, as well, to the point that if you play the latter even a little bit you will immediately see what Nintendo’s R&D4 studio had spent its 1985 playing. Dragon Slayer, along with the above titles, was one of the first action RPGs that helped to shape what the genre was and could be, but its first sequel, Xanadu, was even more ambitious and astounding. It is an action RPG as well as a proto-Metroid, owing to its blending of side-scrolling and isometric gameplay segments with vastly different gameplay and goals in each. It’s a computer RPG full of action role-playing elements with a character creation system meant to allow for player customization, includes a multilayered and deep system for powering up your character and his gear, features purposefully difficult but enticing exploration, and a morality system that, if ignored, will result in your being unable to complete the game, on account of being too evil to wield the legendary blade, the titular Dragon Slayer. It is in every sense of the idea the next generation of action RPG that followed 1984’s vital foursome.

What Zelda took from Xanadu was not necessarily any of the more complicated, layered sections described above, but specific dungeon designs. The game switched from its side-scrolling segments to topdown, room-by-room dungeons with locked doors and puzzles and special items required for progression, and the boss fights reverted to the side view… just like those in The Legend of Zelda would. If Hydlide and Perseus influenced Zelda’s overworld design and decisions, Xanadu had just as much of a hand in the dungeon elements as Druaga.

All four of Druaga, Xanadu, Hydlide, and Courageous Perseus are games that you could describe as “not for everyone,” even though that is true of every game and therefore kind of a meaningless bit of vocabulary that we carry around with us. But it’s a phrase that’s a bit instructive here, at least, in the sense that the idea behind Zelda, like with Dragon Quest, was to take these more hardcore, sicko experiences and streamline their design for a larger audience that maybe wasn’t ready for the specific levels of intensity that those games featured. Contemporary reviews of The Legend of Zelda brought up, again and again, how it was a translation of the agreed-upon difficulty of the computer RPG into a more digestible, approachable arcade form designed for the living room—a way to experience the depth and challenge of the games of the day but without some of the opaqueness, and with the most hostile bits removed or at least refined.

It’s difficult to argue with the results. The Legend Of Zelda got the “clones” treatment for years and years after, becoming the shorthand for the birth of an entire genre at a time when we lacked the language and complete picture to call it what it was: a refinement of existing—and ongoing—games in a genre that predated it. It influenced its own slate of action-adventure and action RPGs, and has either outlasted the games that inspired it or never gone dormant for long stretches in the way that other influences have. And it’s all due to Nintendo taking a similar swing as Enix did with Dragon Quest, recognizing the possibility of adapting an existing genre into something that even more people would be able to enjoy, something that was both familiar and new, and most importantly, refreshing and approachable without lacking in the challenge that made the source material a draw in the first place.