The open world imagined by the creators of Zelda, as well as the 3D aiming systems, laid the foundations for an entire section of modern video games.
In almost forty years of existence, Zelda, Nintendo’s action-adventure video game series, a new episode of which is released on May 12, has influenced a large number of creators with its mechanics or its unique universe. Here are some examples:
“Zelda is a reference and even a bible” for developers, says Katsuhiko Hayashi, editor-in-chief of the Japanese specialist magazine Famitsu.
“A lot of games have sought to pick up elements from influential titles like Doom, Metroid or Metal Gear Solid“, reminds AFP Mark Brown, who analyzes the design of games on his YouTube channel “Game Maker’s Toolkit”.
More Zeldahe says, “has always been different: the developers have often been inspired by a more general feeling that they evoked, made of exploration, adventure, mystery, surprise and progression” of the hero.
Among the creators who have “confessed their love for the series and created games inspired by their experience”, he cites Hideki Kamiya (Eyes), Hidetaka Miyazaki (Dark Souls) ou Fumito Ueda (Ico).
“More recently, we have also seen independent developers who have liked Zelda in their childhood trying to capture these feelings in their creations”, as Fez or Tunic.
Of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) To Skyrim“open world” games, which allow you to move freely and interact at will in a huge world, are now legion.
This element was already present in the first Zelda in 1986, explains Kiyoshi Tane, author specializing in the history of video games: “the scale of the game was enormous at a time when most games were completed in an hour or two. The map was designed with a real emphasis on about exploration and, from that point of view, it was sort of the pioneer of what was to become of open-world games”.
The latest episode of the series Breath of the Wild(released in 2017) “came at a time when people were getting tired of the open world” and helped reinvent it, adds Kiyoshi Tane.
He “challenged many preconceived ideas, for example by trusting the players to explore by themselves (the universe), instead of listing all the points of interest on the map”, details Mark Brown.
By working on Ocarina of Timethe first 3D game released in 1998, its creators come up against a major problem: how to allow the player to easily target an enemy with precision in a three-dimensional universe?
The trigger comes to Nintendo developers watching a samurai film, whose hero is surrounded by ninjas that he faces one after the other. An enemy throws his kusarigama (a sickle connected to a chain) at him and moves in a circle around the hero, to whom he is bound by this taut chain.
These observations lead them to the creation of a so-called “Z aiming” system: this places the camera behind the hero automatically and helps him focus on a character he wants to talk to or on an enemy to attack.
“It was really the perfect solution,” said Kiyoshi Tane. “Subsequently, action games multiplied – including on other consoles – adopting the same principle. Perhaps without Ocarina of Timegames on PlayStation and Xbox would have been very different.”
