The Legend of Zelda: Mystery of Read / Write
I find it hard to go back and play the first 8-bit consoles like the Atari 2600 or Colecovision. It’s not that their primitive graphics and sound don’t catch my eye, but that they’re so dedicated to replicating the arcade experience. This isn’t all bad, but it was a transient way to play games, as you split the quarter, played until you lost, and kept hoping your higher score would mean something. To make matters worse, the first home consoles generally reproduced the experience very poorly. I’m sure it was nice to be able to play Burger time at home in 1983, but the Atari 2600 version looks and plays like a stranded garbage barge.
The idea of having the arcade experience at home continued to be a hanging carrot in the face of developers throughout the 1990s. In fact, Genesis liked to advertise it. Altered beast, while the Super Nintendo signaled you with its Final fight. But over the course of that, the true console experience began to take shape, as the games seemed to Super Mario Bros. it started us towards that goal, it would be The legend of Zelda, with its ability to save your progress, which would really mark the beginning of the transition.
Sort of. Like most things in video game history, it’s a little trickier than just saying, “Praise this game!”
One of the reasons we were stuck with arcade ports on consoles for so long was that developers had to be aware of the resilience of their audience. You were hooked on a game until your game was over, which made practice only brief experiences. Even longer games with clearly defined purposes, such as Super Mario Bros. (published a few months earlier The legend of Zelda in Japan), could be completed in a single session.
That would change with The legend of Zelda Launched in 1986 on the Famicom Disk System, one of the launch titles for the add-on. The Famicom Disk System was an attachment for the Japanese equivalent of the Nintendo Entertainment System that allowed games to be played from floppy disks; reading / writing media. The ability to save was one of the outlets of the attachments and was used in games such as Metroid, Kid Icarus, i Castlevania.
Of course, this was possible on home computers from the beginning. They already used read / write media such as floppy disks and cassettes, and savings were already possible in games such as last i Zork almost half a decade earlier The legend of Zelda. In a way, the Famicom disk system only allowed this advantage in home consoles.
The Famicom disc system never came out of Japan, but Nintendo still wanted to get it The legend of Zelda in Western hands. The problem they found was that it is impossible to save data to the ROM chips that were central to the cartridges. Nintendo’s solution was to install a small battery in the cartridge that would keep the data stored in RAM alive.
Again, Zelda he was not the first to do so. A couple of games on the Epoch Super Cassette Vision allowed you to save the highest score and create levels in RAM, but they were powered by AA batteries you had installed. It was the same idea, but not necessarily the same execution. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first time I heard about Epoch’s Super Cassette Vision.
Meanwhile, the CR2032 to mine Zelda The cartridge still works and I haven’t had to weld a new one. I guess its 15 year shelf life is just a suggestion.
There were ways to need a battery to allow it to continue from a certain point. In North America, both Metroid i Kid Icarus replaced its save system with funnily long passwords. Equally, Castlevania total savings were omitted from the English version. The number of games that had a battery backup on the NES was quite small, but the number of games based more on progression rather than focusing on high scores continued to grow.
What Zelda presented was an adventure with an ultimate goal rather than just challenge after challenge. It was much less level based than something like that Super Mario Bros., taking care of discovering the next dungeon for yourself in a (at the time) gigantic world. Plumb the dungeons, grab the stuff, save the princess. On a good day, it can take about 6 to 8 hours to complete and it’s easy to get stuck and want to quit the game.
Most notable, however, he omitted a scoring system, which at the time was still practically sacrilegious. It would take a long time to eliminate the need for one of the developers and publishers, with this feature as a vestigial feature for years to come. However, it was a necessary sacrifice, as we moved from endless cyclical gaming models to goal-setting games.
Maybe it’s safe to assume, even without The Zelda influence, video games would have shifted to a progression-based model, especially when this was already in full swing in the world of home computing. Despite this, The legend of Zelda influence and popularity propelled the public and pushed developers towards this model, and its effects were felt almost immediately.
But the industry is often one to take action. Even games with an end goal would be somehow cyclical, like both Super Mario Bros. i The legend of Zelda it would start again on a harder difficulty after completing them. However, with the influence of the growing RPG genre, a genre entirely born for homes and not suitable for arcades, we would eventually find the freedom to chase endlessly high scores and learn to shoot for the soft credit lunge.
I don’t miss the days of chasing high scores. Although sometimes I like to try my best Space invaders i Mrs. Pac-Man, personal growth for that is boring for me. I happily prefer the reward of kissing the princess after my friends and I sell the unknowable evil. I’m simple that way.
In fact, it was so much more fun to sit and watch my dad end up Ganon in his lair at Spectacle Rock than it would have been to see him, I don’t know, driving down an endless road mowing the traffic Spy Hunter. It helps to capture the imagination and give you something to invest in emotionally, knowing whether or not the hero comes to an end (and there is an end) is up to you. I’m not sure I would have stayed with video games if I chased infinitely higher numbers.
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