The Legend of Zelda: Mystery of Read / Write
I find it hard to travel back and play early 8-bit consoles like the Atari 2600 or Colecovision. It’s not that their primitive graphics and sound don’t catch my attention, but rather, they are so committed to replicating the arcade experience. That’s not entirely a bad thing, but it was a temporary way to play games, because you would gamble your quarter, play until you lost, and keep hoping your high score would mean something. To make matters worse, early home consoles generally replicated the experience very poorly. I’m sure it was fun to play Burger time home in 1983, but the Atari 2600 version looks and plays like a garbage can running aground.
The idea of having the arcade experience at home kept dangling a root in developers ‘faces throughout the’ 90s. Indeed, the Genesis loved to praise her Altered Beast, while the Super Nintendo beckoned you with its port of Last fightBut during all of this, the real console experience began to form, and while games were fun Super Mario Bros. started us towards that goal, it would be The Legend of Zelda, with its ability to save your progress, that would really mark the beginning of the transition.
Kind of. Like most things in video game history, it’s a bit more complicated than simply saying, “Praise this game!”
Part of the reason we sat with arcade ports on consoles for so long was that developers had to consider the stamina of their audience. You were stuck with a game until your game was over, so only brief experiences were practical. Even the longest games with clearly defined ends, such as Super Mario Bros. (released only a few months earlier The Legend of Zelda in Japan), can be completed in one sitting.
That would change with The Legend of Zelda’s 1986 release on the Famicom Disk System, one of the add-on’s launch titles. The Famicom Disk System was an attachment to the Japanese equivalent of the Nintendo Entertainment System that allowed games to be played on floppy disks; read / writable media. The ability to save was one of the attachment’s selling points and used in games such as Metroid Kid Icarus, and Castlevania
This was of course possible on home computers from the start. They were already using read / write media such as floppy disks and cassettes, and saving was already possible in games such as last and Zork almost half a decade earlier than The Legend of ZeldaIn a way, the Famicom Disk System just offered that benefit on home consoles.
The Famicom Disk System never made it outside Japan, but Nintendo still wanted it The Legend of Zelda in Western hands. The problem they faced was that it was impossible to store data in the ROM chips that were central to the cartridges. The solution Nintendo had was to put a small battery in the cartridge that kept the data stored in the RAM alive.
Again, Zelda was not the first to do this. A few games on the Epoch Super Cassette Vision allowed you to save your high score and levels created in RAM, but they were powered by AA batteries you inserted yourself. It was the same idea, but not necessarily the same execution. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first time you’ve heard of the Epoch Super Cassette Vision.
Meanwhile, the CR2032 is in my Zelda cartridge is still functional to this day and I have not had to solder a new one. I suppose the 15 year lifespan is just a suggestion.
There were ways to require a battery to continue from a certain point. In North America, both Metroid and Kid Icarus have replaced their storage system with ridiculously long passwords. The same, Castlevania completely omitted in the English version. The number of games with a spare battery on the NES was quite small, but the number of games focused more on progression than high scores continued to grow.
What Zelda presented was an adventure with an end instead of challenge after challenge. It was much less level based than anything like that Super Mario Bros., to instruct you to discover the next dungeon for yourself in a (then) gigantic upper world. Shoot through the dungeons, get your equipment and save the princess. On a good day, it can take about 6-8 hours to complete, and it’s easy to get stuck and want to put the game down.
Most striking, however, was that a scoring system was omitted, which at the time was still practically sacrilege. It would take a long time to get the need out of the minds of developers and publishers, and it would linger as a rudimentary feature for years to come. However, it was a necessary sacrifice as we moved from endless cyclic game models to games with fixed goals.
It might be safe to assume that even without it Zelda’s influence, video games would eventually have shifted to a progression-based model, especially when this was already emerging in the home computer world. However, The Legend of Zelda’s influence and popularity excited the public and pushed developers towards this model, and the effects were felt almost immediately.
But the industry is often one that takes small steps. Even games with an end goal would be cyclical in some way, like both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda would start over in a harder difficulty setting after you completed them. With the influence of the growing RPG genre – a genre that was all born for homes and not suited for arcades – we would eventually find the freedom to chase endless high scores and learn to shoot for the gentle head pat of the game. credits.
I don’t miss the days of chasing high scores. While sometimes I like to try my best Space Invaders and Mrs. Pac-Man, personal growth for the sake of it is boring to me. I prefer the reward of being kissed by the princess after my friends and I defeat the unknowable evil. I am that simple.
Indeed, it was much more fun to sit and watch my dad kill Ganon in his hole in Spectacle Rock than to watch him drive, I don’t know, down an endless road cutting traffic inward. Spy HunterIt helps capture the imagination and gives you something to invest in emotionally, knowing whether the hero gets to the end – and there is an end – depends on you. I’m not sure I would have stuck with video games if I was looking endlessly for higher numbers.
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