The footage was only two minutes long, but it was enough to spark months of debate about relics, goddesses and swords, and could easily be confused with the arcane arguments of medieval scholars studying Arthurian legend.

But these self-taught experts were discussing a more recent heroic tale that took place over the past 40 years in a ruined kingdom called Hyrule. More than six million people watched the preview in search of hints about the next installment in Nintendo’s popular Legend of Zelda series. Millions more are expected to play.

Six years after its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has brought the series back with the apotheosis of open-world gaming, enticing players to explore vibrant environments packed with challenging tasks and powerful gear.

Breath of the Wild places players in the desolate wilderness of Hyrule, where there is little direction beyond the line of sight of the enchanting mountains and castles surrounded by fetid smog. Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel coming to Nintendo Switch on May 12, promises to expand this world even further with sky islands and caves. The game also gives protagonist Link new abilities to combine different items to build vehicles and weapons in a system that rewards ingenuity.

The immersive gameplay of the Zelda series is enhanced by a deep mythology that convinces players that they are unraveling ancient secrets.

“Some people would write entire college theses about certain parts of the world that Tolkien created,” says Ed King, a 26-year-old British gamer who translates the mysteries of the Zelda world for his 700,000 YouTube subscribers. “The Legend of Zelda hasn’t reached that level yet, but it has depth.”

To analyze the preview for Tears of the Kingdom in 30 minutes, King spent more than 12 hours meticulously studying each image and playthrough. He plays the audio backwards to look for messages that might reveal some of the plot points Nintendo is keeping secret. He is also a member of the Reddit forum where Zelda theorists try to translate hieroglyphics from marketing materials. Some amateur philologists speculate that the symbols may have been inspired by Chinese characters or Japanese hiragana.

The video game series, which began in 1986 with pixelated maps guarded by ghosts and goblins, has evolved into elaborate terrains of mountain ridges, coastal villages, and enemy hideouts. Gameplay has also become more engaging, with puzzle-box designs and environmental stories that encourage exploration.
But through it all, the fundamental spark of discovery remains Bos5000.

 

‘What we consider to be one video game is actually a whole almost infinite possibility of performances.’

The original Legend of Zelda, played by millions on the company’s Nintendo Entertainment System or Famicom console, was the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto, who described Hyrule as “a sandbox garden you can put in a drawer and revisit whenever you want.”

Link’s first journey was inspired by Miyamoto’s childhood explorations of the idyllic landscapes of Japan. The designer’s passion for mountain hiking and forest immersion is evident in Hyrule’s mysterious nature, where Hyrule guards its secrets and encourages players to burn down all the brush in the hope of finding another secret tunnel.

Miyamoto is what some would call a “mechanic” in the video game industry. When designing a Mario or Zelda title, he usually focuses on gameplay first. Aside from a few stories featured in the user manual, the original game only had one screen with a rough plot outline about the Demon King Ganon, a princess named Zelda, and a hero named Link.

But over the past two decades, the stories have become more nuanced, and the tone and artistic style clearly show the influence of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Link has sailed the seas, lived on clouds, transformed into a wolf, and even become a platoon leader. He forged an ancient blade of evil and shrunk to microscopic size.

Eiji Aonuma, another series producer, was responsible for distributing the narrative breadcrumbs that powered the Zelda games. “The story is there to give substance and flesh to the larger world you’re in,” he told Game Informer in 2017. He tends to keep Link on a typical hero’s journey, tasking the young knight with healing the world from a cycle of generational violence.

Aonuma’s rise through Nintendo’s corporate hierarchy has become a legend in itself. He joined the company in 1988 straight after graduating from the Tokyo University of the Arts, but with no experience in video game design. What the young artist did have was a passion for woodworking, and Miyamoto, who preferred employees with unconventional skills, was impressed by the intricate dolls Aonuma brought to his interview.

In the late 1990s, Aonuma began working as a dungeon designer on the Nintendo 64 game Ocarina of Time, the first adventure in the Zelda series to use 3D graphics. These dungeons demonstrate Aonuma’s penchant for blending story and gameplay. His puzzles consisted of a series of rooms, but also magical mansions, secret temples, the innards of giant fish, and more.

Ocarina of Time took two and a half years to develop, Nintendo spent millions of dollars marketing the title, and it is now a critically acclaimed classic. Many players remember entering Hyrule Field for the first time as doing cartwheels.

Zelda is a very solitary and exploratory and very lonely franchise.’

Wanting to capitalize on this success, Miyamoto gave the green light for a sequel. But Majora’s Mask’s development team was cut by three-quarters its size and given only a year to produce something that matched its predecessor’s quality. Failure seemed likely, which prompted designers to try impossible ideas and experiment with darker themes.

Aonuma returned to lead the project alongside developer Yoshiaki Koizumi. The men had been attending a colleague’s wedding shortly after the 1998 Cuban Missile Crisis, when North Korea fired missiles over Japanese territory. This juxtaposition of celebration and fear influenced the game’s apocalyptic atmosphere. Link has three days to prevent the moon from crashing into the world.

It was a much smaller game, with only four dungeons, compared to around a dozen in Ocarina of Time. But the developers focused on intricate side quests that help players improve the lives of the townspeople in some small way before the impending doom. In one key storyline, two lovers are reunited and exchange vows minutes before the moon sets.

Majora’s Mask was a hotchpotch of game theorists. Some have compared themes of identity and confusion, with the wearing of the mask being a key element of the game, to Erik Erikson’s theory of psychological development. Others stated that the game’s narrative follows the Kubler-Ross model of grief, arguing that Link dies at the start and spends the rest of the game dealing with his grief. However, some Zelda fans were disappointed by the emphasis on story over combat and exploration.

Subsequent Zelda games, such as Twilight Princess, a critically acclaimed launch title for the Nintendo Wii, returned to the formula established in Ocarina of Time, with the grappling hook, boomerang, and bombs.

However, by the time Skyward Sword was released in 2011, it was clear that the modern Zelda formula was becoming stale. Critics praised the cinematic storytelling, but found it too full of backtracking and how-to explanations, along with an hour-long tutorial introduction sequence. The areas were more generic and almost devoid of life, except for the Sky Island, inhabited by a few villagers.

Other studios also saw an opportunity and began to develop their own games in response. At the time, Greg Lobanov was just beginning his career in the games industry, and designers were beginning to wonder if Nintendo had lost its magic.

‘Zelda’s always focused on ‘What is actually cool about this as a game? Why is it fun?’’

“Zelda is the standard unit of measurement in the gaming industry,” Lobanov explained, noting that the 2021 game Chicory: A Colorful Tale is heavily based on the conventions of the series. “People were really unhappy with the direction it took.” But Lobanov noted that the massive success of one of the flagship games for the Nintendo Switch, Breath of the Wild, in 2017 caused many developers to abandon competing projects. The game sold more than 29 million copies, far more than any other in the series. Nintendo managed to bring back the joy of discovering the original Legend of Zelda, giving Link new abilities to jump freely and climb walls. While he remained silent, other characters had full voice dialogue for the first time. Traditional dungeons were replaced with puzzles hidden in four divine beasts and 120 temples, interspersed with 900 Korok seeds, giving Link incentive to explore the landscape.

“Breath of the Wild was very ambitious,” Lobanov said. “It clearly conveyed a sense of progression, even though the ending was very open-ended.”

Breath of the Wild’s sense of wonder came from a design philosophy that the game’s director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, called “multiplicative gameplay.”

Speaking at the 2017 Game Developers Conference, Fujibayashi explained that many of Zelda’s previous puzzles were based on natural phenomena or simple facts, such as the realization that detonating an explosive near a cracked wall could open an entrance. Usually, a problem has only one solution.

Multiplicative gameplay allows players to combine actions and objects in ways that allow for more solutions. The developers built prototypes to test their theories, recreating the original Legend of Zelda with interactive environments where players could burn wood, pick up logs, and build rafts out of wood. These mechanics were incorporated into Breath of the Wild, along with a physics system that allowed players to manipulate rules such as conservation of momentum.

Players spent thousands of hours in this version of Hyrule learning how to exploit the new systems, turning rocks into cannonballs and metal doors into makeshift bridges. With no clear solutions to the puzzles, players had to get creative.

“Breath of the Wild took us back to some kind of playground lore, where you exchange ideas with other players,” says developer Andrew Shouldice, who released Tunic, another game heavily inspired by the Zelda series, last year. “It doesn’t feel like the designers are watching you play. The world feels real, as opposed to this clockwork narrative where you have to turn a crank to move things forward.”

Gameplay previews for the sequel Tears of the Kingdom suggest that the Zelda developers are using this system in an expanded way.

Players can expect a dynamic world where lightning can spark wildfires and burn apples from nearby trees. Additionally, the game encourages new combinations of weapons and items. Combine twigs and stones to create an improvised hammer. Arrows combined with enemy bat-like eyes can track enemies like homing missiles.

‘I think Breath of the Wild was more about exploration, and Tears of the Kingdom is more about experimentation .’

Zelda theorists like Ed King had some lighthearted fun when these tidbits of information were revealed, and they seemed to confirm their speculation that the new game would include story elements only hinted at in Breath of the Wild.

The preview mentioned the ruins of a lost tribe called the Zonai, mentioned in ancient crumbling ruins scattered throughout Hyrule. And the artistic style associated with the fictional tribe is clearly present in the many sky islands featured in Tears of the Kingdom.

“The word Zonai is based on an anagram of the Japanese word ‘mystery,’ and was added intentionally to convey the feeling that something could have happened right before our eyes,” King explained. “If everything was strictly related to the plot, it would feel like the game world was fake. But the Zonai evidence makes it seem like it could all be true.”