Nintendo’s design documents from The Legend of Zelda

Take a look behind-the-scenes with design documents from The Legend of Zelda!

Nintendo: It’s The Legend of Zelda’s 30th anniversary this year, and so we thought you might appreciate a look at some illustrations created during the development of the first The Legend of Zelda game, originally released on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

These design docs include a video of the hand drawn overworld map and show how some of the original dungeon sketches translated into the game.

(via Gamasutra)

The Legend of Zelda — Original game map

For reference, here’s the finished overworld map from the game…

See also

• Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition
• NES Pi: A 3D printed Mini NES Raspberry Pi games console — “In the end, this project turned into more of a love-letter to the NES than just printing a case. I learnt a lot of new things about Linux, 3D design, wrote my first Python program and had a blast doing it…”
• Learning lessons from Mario games to master Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker — “It turns out that playing loads of video games doesn’t necessarily make you a good designer. Who’d have thought it?”