Zelda's low-tech design documents are truly impressive.
Nintendo's ongoing celebration of The Legend of Zelda's 30th anniversary continued today with a rare look at some of the game's original hand-drawn design documents.
Yes, as this post on Nintendo of Europe's website reveals, you weren't the only person who crudely drew The Legend of Zelda's world on bits of scrap paper back in the '80s. In fact, it appears that much of the preliminary design work that went into the game's layout was done with colored pencils and graphing paper.
That video above, for instance, is a particularly fascinating piece of video game design history as it affords us an all-to-brief glimpse of The Legend of Zelda's overworld as an official design doodle. While it's not entirely clear what every symbol and note on the drawing relates to in terms of in-game assets, it's impressive to see how the vision for arguably the most innovative game world of all-time began. The grid-layout of the game's map as established on the drawing is especially notable as the drawn in borders seem to correspond fairly closely with the actual edges of each in-game section.
Nintendo of Europe posted several other Zelda-related GIFs and images on their website which show concept drawings from producer Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto. Along with the burst of pleasant nostalgia these drawings induce, the best thing about these preliminary level layouts is how closely they mimic the final product. At a time when concept art in gaming was a far cry from what gaming technology could actually produce, it's fascinating to see how closely these designers came to matching their artistic vision.
It's enough to make you wonder just how many visions of gaming's future were crumpled up and tossed effortlessly into an art department trash can.
