I played this in the 80’s when it was still the nes era, but never beat it. It wasn’t until 1995 or 96 that me and my best friend found a copy of Zelda at a thrift store that we decided to beat it together one summer. We tried and tried but kept getting turned around, so we made a map. The copy we found was just a loose cart, and the Internet wasn’t what it is now, so we decided we needed a map. 3 big squares of old school computer print out paper (the kind with the perforated edges you needed to tear off) taped together. I used a ruler to make a big grid and we went screen to screen as I drew everything on screen within the little boxes of the grid I had made. We bombed every wall, burned every bush, marked down which bombable walls had guys that gave you money, which ones charged you for damages, where items were hidden, heart containers, where each dungeon was, it was quite the accomplishment for us back then. The nes stayed on all summer, and after many nights drinking Mountain Dew and eating Kraft singles till the sun came up, we beat the game. We collected a lot for the nes back then when you could find those at thrift stores everywhere, and we beat a lot of games that way. Double dragon 2, bubble bobble, chip and dale, a boy and his blob, it was fun times. Wouldn’t change a thing about it except all the junk food! lol.
I'm gonna pin your comment for a bit 'cause that's a really nice story. Including the junk food! There was a period in the UK where you could buy those cheesy slices but they didn't have enough cheese in them to be legally called "cheese" which gave rise to the term "cheese-flavoured food slice" but I think they just put cheese in them now. It sounds like an awesome time and a great memory to hold onto. Thanks for sharing it.
@TheRetroSofa oh man, thanks for pinning my story! To add to it, later in high school I was part of a program that mentored kids in elementary school. I got paired with a kid who had a hard time making friends, and didn’t talk much. Turns out his older brother had given him his old Nintendo, and the kid was also playing Zelda. It was about the only thing we could connect on. I went over to my best friends house and we dug through old boxes till we found the map we had made and I made a photocopy of it. The next time our class took the trip to the elementary school, I brought it with me and gave it to him. Rolled it up like a scroll, and tied it with a string to look like something you might see in a Zelda game. Told him the story of how me and my best friend made it one summer and how it enabled us to beat the game. Said something like “knowledge is power, and now you’re playing with power”. lol. It’s funny how games can bring people together. I swear, if it wasn’t for this kids love of Zelda, I don’t think he would’ve opened up at all. At the end of the year, he even wrote me a letter thanking me for the map. It was a cool experience.
@@fourlightsorchestra Thanks for sharing, that's really sweet. I love how this video has brought out all these awesome stories about this game bringing people together and I really feel like that was one of Nintendo's design goals with it, you know? Games always help people to connect but Zelda more than most.
@400KrispyKremes the map was not complete, at least not the one I got. There was a majority empty space on the grid, it was white so you could draw it in.
100% beat that game in the late 80s. No guide, no Nintendo Power, and no friends that played it. I didn't get a lot of games when I was a kid, so I played it over and over. To this day, I can sit down and 100% it in a single sitting from memory.
@@BobCassidy We only had one at first. Until my parents got tired of having to kick me off the TV any time they wanted to watch it! So they went out and got me a small used TV for my room!
I got pretty far as a kid but got stuck on the flute and lake bit. One day after school I find my mom playing it and she “figured it out” to this day I think she pitied me for being stuck for probably weeks and found a magazine or called a help line or something
Does that mean you spent endless amounts of frustration in the second quest? I couldn't do it without a guide, but the first quest I took down without.
i was 8 years old in christmas 1987 then we got the NES. my dad and i finished zelda together, but it took a few months. no guidebooks, no youtube, etc. not many people in small town alabama had the NES at that time, so we were on our own. we brute forced the game- we burned every bush, pushed every block, and bombed every wall. when we finished the game we noticed at the save file selection that link was holding a sword. we selected the game to just do another runthrough just for fun, and the majority of the world was different! the second quest was significantly harder, and after several weeks we conquered that too. to this day, i still remember the location of each and every single item and all puzzle solutions.
Thanks for sharing! That's a really cool memory and although you didn't have the whole community around it, you got to work through it with someone you love and that's a great way to experience anything.
Very similar experience but it was eastern NC, I was 6, 1990, and it was with my mom as my parents were divorced. I played it again recently with my son and interestingly enough I seem to remember more from the second quest. I think I didn’t really revisit the first quest much after the initial playthrough. I played the second quest to death though. I had it to the point I was doing a 6 year old version of speed running. Good memories. Thanks for sharing and helping me relive my own.❤
That’s awesome man, me and my best friend did the same thing together. It’s funny how much of an undertaking it is, and how much that makes it stick with you. Me and my buddy ended up drawing a map of the entire overworld so we could stay on track. I got pretty good at navigating from those times, and would usually be the navigator on trips back before gps and map quest.
@@deepzone31second one is way harder. All I’ll say is “false walls”. Good grief, I was scratching my head on some dungeons before I accidentally walked through one trying to avoid an enemy.
The problem you're describing isn't really an issue with Zelda, but with gaming in the age of information in general. For instance, does anyone organically discover all the crafting recipes in Minecraft? It also comes down to the amount of gaming options available these days. When I was a kid new games were a rare occurrence and I extracted every last drop of gameplay from any game I had even if it sucked. Today there are so many games(and free games) that if someone loses patience they either look at a guide or move on to something else.
This is also the case where games are so deeply optimized on the gameplay side now. To the point where the fun is just gone! As if there's a specific "Right" Way to play a game!
@@Mii-MinGames have always been this way, some are open, and some strict. Some are Mario Bros 3, and some are Castlevania 1. Just how it's always been.
@@aureateseigneur5317 Very true. However, that's not the argument I was making. I was talking about players optimizing the fun out of a game. METAS and the like. Treating everything as a competition. It's hard to describe, but it feels like there's a cultural expectation in modern games to do things one way! Or be told you're not a good player of something unless you know some obscure glitch or trick. It's. Difficult to quantify!
I thought about that too, but it's not true you can't play it without that, you could play one single binge session and beat both quests in one sitting. Or, as some of used to do, pause the game, leave the nintendo on, but shut the tv off until you are ready to play again. Only thing is cable tv used channel 3, which the nintendo often did, (not sure about Britain or Australia though) so if someone wanted to watch tv they'd need to turn off the nintendo.
My cartridge’s battery stopped working in the 90’s but if I left the cartridge in the NES and didn’t unplug it or change the game, it would keep the save file working. That was how I finished the game, because I was motivated to finish it so I could play a different game. If my brother took the cartridge out to play a different game I would have to start over, so I had to memorize a lot of the game.
@@Cyclingismywholelife as I understand it, even a battery that is NOT is use will eventually lose it's charge, when you buy insertable batteries at a store they have an expiration date. And, no it's not true if you take the game out of the nintendo that it loses it's charge, we took Zelda out several times and when we put it back in we could load the saves
The guide being so easily available does change the feel of it though. There's a reason escape rooms don't have the solution written out on the wall to optionally look at.
IIRC, I followed the Nintendo Power Guide for the first run thru but solved it myself for the second world. Yeah a lot of tedious bombing, whistle blowing, etc. but it IS possible without a guide.
Nowadays, 10 minutes BEFORE a new open world game is released, dataminers have already posted every single obscure hidden secret you could possibly find.
I got Echoes of Wisdom on release day and full guides were being posted before I could get home from work and play it. Yeah you can avoid it but part of me thinks we'd all have a lot more fun if there was an embargo on that sort of thing. There's a reason escape rooms don't give you a little envelope with the solution and say "in case you get stuck". The temptation and knowing the solution can be attained so easily makes you less willing to put the time in and less satisfying if you do.
To be honest, I don't really mind that these days. I like the collection aspect of open world games. Obtaining new items and opening up more and more of the world as you progress. But as was said in the beginning of the video, open world games are often padded with empty space while the secrets aren't really secret anymore. It just makes for a lot of busywork resulting in games that take very long to complete even with guides to speed things up even more. I am no longer in a position where I need to make a game last for half a year, so I am not interested in padding. I also want to put some extra attention to the emptiness of the space in between secrets in many modern games. The original Zelda had a rumour where it was said that each screen contained a secret. And while not completely true, it made a good attempt. But what most screens also contained was monsters. I find that a lot of open world games really do a bad job at making the space in between points of interest fun to travel. The Switch Zelda games are some of the best examples of this. I am not interested in spending literal minutes looking at walls to climb. And with the weapon durability being the way it is, I am not encouraged to fight monsters. There's a good reason why in TOTK, the simple flying scooter was one of the most shared builds out there, because it allowed you to skip all that. In my opinion, if so many players want to skip a certain part of your game, you need to wonder if that part maybe needs some work, or perhaps be removed so that the game's fun can be condensed.
@@TheRetroSofa Nintendo games do usually leak a couple weeks ahead of time if not more. Echoes was in the wild 3-4 weeks before release. More than enough time to 100% it and write it all down into a guide and still have weeks to wait for the embargo to lift. It just ends on release unless a company is trying to hide that their game sucks. Nintendo tirelessly slaps people all day long for weeks until the release date.
I developed a randomizer for the original Legend of Zelda called Infinite Hyrule. It procedurally generates whole new overworlds to explore, with some options to make it easier or harder. It also works with Z1R, which randomizes item locations and dungeon layouts. I think you'd have a lot of fun with it, especially if you do have friends to try the same seed with and include all the difficulty settings and want to experience LoZ the way it was designed.
The kid on the playground who spoiled everything was just as much a part of the experience as the internet is today. In fact, game designers counted on it in the early days when there wasn't much room in the code for exposition and hand holding. When games came to the US they had to come up with a way to give rural American kids the same experience and Nintendo Power and the Nintendo Hotline were born.
@@rrudeljr I think I had the one you're talking about. It had a set of stickers in it. Then there were Nintendo Power magazines, game magazines in stores, and game books, often with just text and no screenshots at all, that I used to get from the library.
The biggest hurdles was finding out that whistles reveal secrets and Second Quest's hidden doors. I wasn't enthused to see there was another half to the game.
@michaelpolcyn5187 omg yes! I remember searching for days trying to get to that last portion of dungeon, but kept thinking there couldn't POSSIBLY be a secret in that room.
My dad bought this for me when I was in 1st grade, 1991, thinking only that its cartridge stood out. Little did we both know how this series would evolve over the years, but still something so integral to our relationship over the last 30-years. Thanks, dad.
The same could be said for modern MMOs. Heaven forbid you join a boss fight without first reading every guide, watching every TH-cam video, and being told exactly what to do by everyone else in the party. The age of discovery is over.
Modern MMOs feel more like a blackjack table, where if you don't play it "perfect" every card you're the most hated person in the building (THAT SHOULD'A BEEN MY ACE!)
It's very playable. But its mystery is only intact if the player makes an intentional choice not to look at a guide. With one, the mystery is just a "game mechanic", like using the flute at the dry fairy fountain for a dungeon to appear, or blowing open a wall and having to pay a repair fee. Which, if I'm being honest, is the most random thing to encounter in any game.
It's pretty funny though. The problem is if you go in completely blind you're in for a world of frustration. You want some guidance but not all the guidance and I don't know how you do that in 2024.
@@TheRetroSofa I don't think is hard not to look at a guide. You just start playing, actually that is what i do for all my games because i find it no fun trying to follow everything as should be done and not making mistakes etc. Not to mention even more troublesome since i can't just start playing but have to study guides which is no fun when i want to just play. Then am not playing, i am just doing instruction following and the game is ruined because nothing surprising or cool since you expect everything after seeing them on a guide. The frustration issue for me is easily solved. When am stuck somewhere and nothing is happening and i start feeling annoyed i always take a break. Usually when you let some time pass and come back to it with a fresh mind you start having new ideas you could possibly think when you were stuck in your ways and frustrated at the moment. But even if i try again and again a few different times and nothing gets going then i just try to get some tips or see what other players do at that point, not follow a full guide. Even if i get a bad ending or i didn't get everything i could or if i end up not being able to finish and win because i didn't built my character correctly etc is not much of a problem because i consider it a full playthrough since i played as far as my abilities could master and there was no helping it about not getting the ending if i did things wrong at the start. I can just do another playthrough doing things differently. Games are all about trial and error in the end. If you really enjoy playing a game then you don't mind. That is why is important to not play games just because they are popular or they are supposed to be great if you don't enjoy them and just play games that get you going and can't put them down. Some of my most favorite games are games others go "what is that?" or "isn't that just some below average game?". Well i don't care, i got addicted to them and i played them again and again because i loved them. I tried game that were called masterpieces and i felt disappointed if i did anything wrong because it meant i had to play more to get things right. At that moment is when i pause and think "Wait! if hate the idea of the possibility of playing more of this, why am i playing it in the first place?"
The hints came in the form of paying rupees for information to the old men. That's how the game was intended to be played. In link to the past it was called a fortune teller and they had the same equivalent in the nes original. That's how I progressed when I was stuck
You are spot on! 7 year old me loved this game, and I had indeed never completed level 9 without guidance. But here’s my rebuttal: 43 year old me is starting to forget things! So I have had to roam around again and try to remember where things are. And boom! The magic had returned! I just started a new game 3 days ago, and I’m yet again lost in death mountain!
Ha! I'm the exact opposite. I'm 42, and I remember where every single item and secret is in this game. Not so much for the second quest, because those last three levels were brutal with the secret passages leading you back where you started.
I had LoZ in “87… I was eleven years old. My uncle who was a few years older than me and myself, played it literally every day for months until we beat it. None of my school friends had it and we didn’t have any guides or anything like that … kids that would talk about it were mostly making things up… but my uncle did play a lot of D&D back in the early 80’s so I’m assuming that gave him an advantage. Long story short is this, Having played that game so intently in my formative years left such a lasting impression on me… that I still remember every item location, dungeon and burned bush to this day. Every 5 or so years I pop it in and can run through it in a few hours.
That's so cool that you got to play it back in the day with your uncle and get through it. Maybe you didn't have as much help as you could have had but the two of you persisted through it and figured it out together and that's probably about the best Zelda experience you could have had. Thanks for sharing the memories.
Tunic today is the closest to old school Zelda's external meta you can get in a modern context and it was excellent for it. There's certainly similar games before it like ESA, Fez, and La Mulana among many many others, but few wear the Zelda paint like Tunic did. The game asks you to solve a cryptic language and refer to the lovingly 80's styled manual in game. It's puzzles get so esoteric and hands off that it naturally spurred it's own community eager to chip away at it's secrets. That was intentionally made for the age of Reddit and Discord. It's a digital love letter to a physical age and it was seriously a treat. It's interesting how the fleeting nature of certain extrinsic qualities of a game affects it going forward. Competitive games come to mind chiefly, but we don't really think about this with the search action genre. We often forget about the cultures older titles were spurred by and developed for. I think this is why remakes bother a lot of people. The context in which a game is created, the mindset of it's developers during it's inception, cannot simply be emulated and certainly not reproduced. You couldn't simply remake Zelda 1 and release it today with the same impact. It's truly something of it's time and must be understood on *it's* own terms to be enjoyed in a modern sense.
I bought Tunic after reading the comments to this video and I'm looking forward to playing more of it. I have limited time for non-retro games these days. 'Extrinsic', that's a word I could have used and forgot existed. Beautifully put. I don't disagree with anything in your second paragraph and part of me wishes you'd made this video rather than me! What you say applies to all art but I think even more to games both because of the technology of the time and the interactive element. Art is always informed by the time of its creation, as is the way we appreciate it either at the time or looking back on it, but uniquely with video games how we interact with games and our expectations also come into play. Zelda can be enjoyed today or in 1987 but how gamers today approach it compared to gamers then has changed significantly.
Odyssey inparticular had an absolutely incredible world full of beautiful scenery and interesting characters. Unfortunately you couldn't do anything with it. With no emergent gameplay and map markers I just ended up taking almost a straight line to where I needed to be, not appreciating the world around me. Still an awesome game, I really enjoyed the story, the combat, and the missions, but it was open world for the sake of padding rather than to provide a true open world experience.
@@TheRetroSofa When a lot of younger programmers in a dev group I'm in ask about open world design, us older guys tend to push them towards learning world building before hand. So many of those kids just made large prodecurally generated worlds where only 5% of the km^2 has something in it, and the rest is just static scenery inbetween. Keep telling them it's not about large open spaces. In fact, size is not a primary attribute of open world, but a secondary and derived element. Open refers to accessibility. Encouraging them to practice making smaller worlds, but filled with interesting and interactable elements. Even programming an environment that undergoes changes depending on plot points and even mundane conditions like time of day or actions. The more two different playthroughs can feel like different experiences the better. The moment a player knows when and where to expect something you lose that "new car smell."
My uncle had the whole world mapped out on graph paper on a wall. My brother and i speed run it tag team style as a party trick. That way one of us can drink and take a smoko with friends between turns.
You can't make statements like that unless you qualify it with some for of "in my opinion" or "IMO". Internet people will attack you and tell you that you saying ALttP is the greatest game ever is your OPINION and not a FACT. They get really bent out of shape about that sort of thing. Especially if you preface your obvious opinion with something like "fun fact...". That really gets 'em mad.
Best part of playing games with english text as a non-english kid was writing down sentences and then running to mum to translate it, and then try to make sense out of that information... let's say sometimes it didn't work that good... At some point, though, we got some book with like guides for 20 NES games, and could solve a lot of stuff. It was also great advertising for the other games in it, bought several of them.
This comment section is absolutely hilarious. So many people here just got absolutely pissed off by the title and commented without watching the video itself. He even says it, the video is *not* about the quality of the game- it's the way we're spoiled by the unlimited wealth of knowledge on the internet rather than being able to play it as it was originally intended. Y'all gotta CHILL
I kind of get why some people are mad. The title is a bit clickbait-y, a bit misdirection-y, but I have to play the game to some degree if I want my channel to get seen. I'll never straight-up lie in a title though. All it has to do is hint at the video content and people can engage with it or not, their choice, and as long as I can defend the video and the title artistically and intellectually it's all good. Thanks for your comment though. I appreciate the support and the call for calm. Angry comments aside I really love some of the discussions and shared memories in this comment section and that's what it's all about. 🙂
I still don't understand this argument. I finished this game in the early 90s as an 8 year old with no Nintendo Power, no guides, and no friends to discuss this with. The only things remotely difficult are the "grumble grumble" moment and the final dungeon being outright labyrinthine.
@@thesnare100 It's simple: You try your items where it makes sense to do it. Games nowadays are way too hand-holding, and that numbs players' curiosity and creativity. Games of that era use that logic: you got something, you try something with it where it makes more sense, and sometimes to know where was ''the place that made sense'' it was needed to keep the clues you find on your way. Of course, some games are better than others for that matter. (I beated Castlevania 2 at 12, and that one was cryptic af, but still beatable) But if players are expecting the game to prompt them every time there is something required to do to progress, they will rarely pay attention to hints or try to think by themselves. And under that scenario, if you give them Zelda 1, they will say it is unplayable.
I beat the Game the year it was released I was 9 years old at the time no guides or hotline i just explored and tried everything figured out the mechanics pretty quickly it was the first game of its type as far as I knew I was hooked from start to finish i didn't play any other game while i was playing it the only thing i looked at was the manual I'm now 49 and still have fond memories of the game and its still my one favorite game series of all time.
Cool! You're more patient than I am to have done it without hints. I'm not so much and I feel like for me there's a sweet spot inbetween "full walkthrough" and "nothing" where the game is the most enjoyable. It's a great game but like many great things it's worth taking care in how you experience it.
Yeah. Super Metroid + A Link To The Past Randomizer hits that sweet spot for me where I can make progress in the time I've got and feel rewarded for it.
I disagree with this general sentiment as someone who loves exploration but also loves info. The key that this video misses is how info is presented nowadays. In the past, there were guides (physical then things like GameFAQs). Now there are wikis. I can look up slices of information without ruining a game. I just played through Skul. I could read through wiki pages on every skull without once reading a page on the main plot
Wikis are kind of hit-and-miss though I find. If I want to be sure to avoid spoilers I tend to stay away from them entirely. It is a good point though. As long as you know how to use them and which ones to trust it is another way to get the bits and pieces while filling in the whole picture yourself.
@@fiuza78 Coolest thing ever for 15 year old me was to see that ASCII stream start flying across the screen when it worked. It was pure sorcery. Internet beta version! Then a phone call could come in and would break everything.
I hate it when people say a game is unplayable. If we could play it back then, why can't a new generation play it now? I beat it for the first time in 2024, which the title of this video suggests is impossible. I'd argue that with the Internet today, Zelda is even more playable than it was back then
I think if you go a bit further than the title though you'll see what I mean. The game is, in some form, playable (and still a great game) but not the original experience.
@@TheRetroSofa settle down there, homie. I watched the whole video before commenting, which is why I said the title suggested it's not playable, not you. And you talked about the Internet being a reason it's not playable anymore, which I said makes it even more playable in 2024. Maybe if you had made it through my whole comment you'd have seen that. My issue is with the word "unplayable." If you title a video with something you know is controversial, you better be prepared for people to disagree with you
@@Packers4Evar12 Fair enough. I'm sorry, I misunderstood the point you were making. I did try to get the title to include the word "experience" or "as-intended" but it ended up too clunky and I went for brevity. It is only a title though and I hope the point in the video stands. The original experience the game offered is, sadly, no longer available. That does not mean there isn't fun to have with it or that it's impossible to beat unassisted.
Frankly, to call a game unplayable is atrocious unless the theme of the game or controller schematics don't match what you want for example. I play games with a guide, but only because I don't feel like I have a lot of time on my hands for them and I actually want to check if the guides offered for a game work as intended. There are still some today making mistakes or outright lying like a school kid back in the day could.
@@TheRetroSofahow is it no longer available? Looking up a guide or not is a choice, not something you have to do, or something pushed in your face in any way, if you want to play games without a guide, just don't look up guides, simple.
Tunic replicates that OG feeling by couching the manual and the mechanics and its tutorials behind layers of ARG mystery and a made-up language that slowly you will comprehend given enough time and exploration with the game. Little by little, bit by bit, you unfold the layers of mystery behind that game and then stand in awe at what you find as your mind gets shattered by the revelations it has.
This is why I personally think the Game Boy and Game Boy Color have much better 8-bit offerings than the NES. I went through an NES phase where I collected a lot of games for the system and unlike other systems I collected for, my interest in the NES much shorter-lived because very few of the games really clicked with me. The NES was an odd period of time where games were figuring out how not to be arcade-like or dependent on a strategy guide or telephone guide service. By the mid to late 90s, games for the 8-Bit Game Boy and Game Boy Color we're much more complete experiences.
I played this in 87 when I was 9 and could not have finished it without my mother. She drew a full size map taking up half my bedroom with every screen of the game on one A4 paper. It had every bush, rock and enemy. She would go out and play the game burning every bush, bombing every rock, pushing every stone and that's how we found every item. I would do all the fighting and finally beat ganon. So grateful for that wonderful time adventuring in Zelda with my mother
I watched my parents play the original Legend of Zelda when I was little. My dad recently gave me my mom's meticulous notes that they built as they played through. It includes handdrawn maps, which is most interesting for the final levels - there were like a dozen secret passages that she color coded as they explored where each one went in the dungeon.
@TheRetroSofa It really is, and a large part of why I love the franchise. I don't think I ever beat it myself, though. I did beat ALttP and Link's Awakening repeatedly, though. The latter is the first game my little brother or I owned (we each got the Game Boys with LA as the pack-in game).
@@lyandraangel Those are both great games and I'm really looking forward to introducing my nephew to both. He's just seven so he needs to get a little more comfortable reading to get the most out of them, but I can't wait.
The same thing happened to MMOs- In early WoW, people barely understood game mechanics, much less optimized character builds, or raid bosses. My favorite times were the vanilla raid encounters. I remember pulling bosses for the first time, then spending 20 minutes talking with everyone about what happened and what we could see in the combat logs. That mystery doesn't exist anymore at all- there are now optimal builds, specific gear to wear, and (worst of all) you are expected to know everything about a boss before you even set foot in the raid.
A fine comparison. Early WoW hit different. I remember being excited to try WoW Classic but never did in the end. It wouldn't have been the same anyway.
I was explaining to my 13 year old son how I experienced this game as a kid. You nailed it. New information reached me on the whispers of fellow gamers. Sometimes from friend and often from foe we would spread the word of anything that helped us the previous day. Yes I said foe. I would get lots of precious intel from kids who I hated. My dad played as well but lacked the network of kids at work so he’d often walk into the house after work and say so what did you find out today? This video brought back some memories!
That's so kind, thank zou. Good memories too of how video games would just occasionally build little bridges. I had that experience too. They didn't last long, but sharing tips with the school bully at least let you see each other's humanity for a brief moment. Glad the video brought back memories and thanks too for sharing yours. That's why we're here! 🙂
and then sometimes your friend would troll you by giving out fake secrets that don't actually work and you waste hours trying to figure out before realizing that you've been duped. those were the days...
My friend knew a guy who knew someone that said when you beat Zelda 9 times, the world in round 10 was completely different. So of course we played the game relentlessly only to find it was bunk. But, those urban video game legends are what made those days so fun.
I hadn't heard that one! There were so many rumours around back then and there was no way for us to know what was real and what wasn't. A more mysterious time.
I didn't get a Nintendo until 1990. But my friends and I discovered it like it was a brand new game. Working together to explore - the truths and myths traded around on the playground.. those were great days. I beat it a year or two later. The internet ruined that for people now. It's kind of like the old PC RPG games. The point was to draw a map of your travels - I had all sorts of random sheets of graph paper laying around the computer mapping out a random town, or dungeon, or whatever... the internet has everything mapped out for you - like a GPS with Eddie Murphy from Delirious narrating the navigation. I miss those good ol' days.... Great video! Subscribed!!
Thanks! That sounds like a great time and yeah, you can't quite do it now. Streaming is the closest I've managed to get where you ask chat for advice rather than looking stuff up but it'll never be the same as it was back then. I can't imagine drawing my own map for a video game these days. Even just the temptation of being able to find everything online takes away a lot of the motivation to put in the work I think.
Why cant you just get the game and the manual it came with and just...play the game? Not only that, back in the day game magazines were really popular, and tons of people used the guides Nintendo made themselves in Nintendo Power. I actually just had a similar, pretty pure experience with Metroid and its original manual. I even drew my own map like the manual suggests. I think youre off base on this one.
That's funny because I agree with everything you said. 🙂 Back in the day whether it was friends or magazines we got enough information to draw our own maps and figure it out. These days I'm not going to have the fun of drawing my own map, I'm just going to download a map. Or watch a video. Or if one guide doesn't explain something clearly enough for me to understand rather than expend the energy figuring it out I'll find another guide. And I don't think that's entirely a me problem, I think that's a human problem and unless we're conscious of it we all to some degree ruin our own fun by getting too much information and not enough discovery. The problem is these days that it's very hard to find anything between basically a map with arrows on it telling you screen by screen where to go and "EASTMOST PENNINSULA IS THE SECRET".
@@TheRetroSofa Watch some players play then(Not the ones knowing everything). You will see things they thought and checked that you didn't but also things you got and did that they missed and they made wrong etc. Is similar to watching a friend play and seeing him do things differently and learning from it. Just don't watch after the point you are in a game. I do that when i feel very lost and stuck.
here's the thing I love to play video games for escapism. I'm a 35 year old mom with an incredibly emotionally draining job... I live in Canada where Switch games cost $90 after taxes - that's a significant investment. I love exploring and figuring things out in games.... but I have limited "me" time and If I'm incredibly stuck on beating a monster or can't figure out what to do next... I'm gonna look it up.
Absolutely. In Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe there's an interview with comedian Dara O'Briain where he says games are the only media that lock content you paid for if you're "not good enough". He's right and it's worth looking up. For someone who runs a video game channel I'm pretty bad at video games so I also feel no shame in using cheats, guides, or lower difficulty settings to get the maximum enjoyment out of the limited time and money I have available to spend on gaming. The difference is that you can't get a hint anymore, you can really only get the full solution. Sometimes I don't want a complete dungeon guide, I want "you'll find the item you need in a nearby cave to the north" and that's enough to figure out the rest myself.
Zelda was the game that truly took me on an adventure as a 9 year old kid and yes a bombed every stone wall and burned every possible bush. 😅😅❤. I sometimes forget how special that game was to me.
It's an incredibly special game and I'm lucky to have memories of it from when I was a kid as well. It was my nan's cartridge so I could only play it when we visited her. Maybe if I'd taken it home I'd have had more time to get into it.
I'm so happy you showed the map, the hint book, and mentioned the Nintendo hotline! I remember all of those vividly from when I was a kid playing A Link to the Past. Thanks for a great video!
I think the closest thing to Zelda today is Dark Souls. The way the game doesn't hold your hand, the sense of discovery and accomplishment when you find a new area or beat a boss.
For me Tunic really captured the spirit of TLoZ1's cryptic world while giving you an equally crptic in-game guide. There's enough info in there that you dont need to go to the internet, but not enough info that it just tells you what to do. Oh wow, that Super Metroid + LTTP randomizer looks sick
I remembered after posting this video that I really gotta play Tunic. And you really gotta play that randomiser because if you're familiar enough with both games to muddle your way through it's just a great time.
They have gone even further beyond with the randomizer combos recently my adding both Zelda 1 and metroid 1 to the game. So its a lttp + super metroid + Zelda 1 + metroid 1 into a giant randomizer game
came here to say this. Tunic was so great (and manual and translations are available online for folks who DON'T want that experience), but it definitely brought me back to playing Zelda for the first time as a kid. I loved it, start to finish. I'd argue that's more like the original experience than a randomizer, since it's still a designed game, with puzzles that seem impossible...but all the information you need is in the game, and it's so rewarding figuring it out! not saying randomizers aren't fun, but it feels like a different experience to me
Im 25 and i started collecting retro games this summer. I was always a zelda hater for a lot if reasons you described, but i saw a copy of this game at a shop and knew i had to pick it up. Something about playing it on the original cartridge is so different than the ported versions. My friend and I ended up giving a chance and we ended up immediately loving it and we went through and beat the whole game using knowledge we picked up over the years. So intead of a friend telling us at school, it was us remembering zelda references from 20 year old AVGN videos. We were strict with not using the Internet, but we did have to look up one thing to find a dungeon. Still, I feel like we did capture some of the magic of playing this game in the old days. The fact that you can enjoy it today for different reasons is a testament to its greatness.
That's really cool that you go to have the Zelda adventure with a friend in modern times. It sounds like an awesome experience and definitely like you captured the magic. It's a great game for sure but I feel like how much fun you have with it depends a whole lot on how you approach it and yours sounds pretty much spot on.
I beat Zelda about 5 years ago for the first time. And did it without following a guide, kind of. I had a friend that I knew wasn't going to play the game himself look up a guide, and when I got too stuck I'd tell him to point me in a direction or give me a vague hit. Still the way I play most games like this. No it's not the exact same, but it is closer. It's not that you can't play it like it was done in the old days, it is that most people will choose not. Which is a shame, but I'm not going to police people on how they play games.
Oh yeah I'm not going to police anyone either. I'm lamenting a way of playing games that you don't get so much any more. Sounds like you found a good friend and a decent imitation of it. Play how you want to play but the problem I have is that what I think is the optimal way to play Legend of Zelda is no longer available to me. But at least we have randomisers. 🙂
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah. I think the biggest difference was back in the day we didn't have a choice, and now you have to actively make that choice. I wouldn't say the old ways are dead, but they are definitely 1000x more difficult to do. Because even if you want to play games that way you kind of need a community that also wants that experience.
woah! i remember so much what you’re talking about!! the first zelda… i had no clue… i spent years on that, hardly any friends were playing and they weren’t a big help either… i seriously ran around flaming every single bush on the map!! and with the blue flame that was! :D i asked my parents to translate useless dialogue because my english was ridiculous… well, i was 6… so what do you expect. also called the nintendo hotline a few times… i came pretty far i remember but i also just beat it about two decades later. games are played so differently these days… a complete guide already online before the game releases… we really enjoyed the golden days, man! so thankful for that! cheers!
Thanks for coming by and reminiscing with us in the comments! We had some persistance as kids! Today's gamers maybe not so much but we'll see. There'll always be joy in discovery.
Hi there - congratulations on getting monetized! I really, really enjoyed your video and I particularly love your unique take on it - not that the game itself is impossible to play, but that the original experience is impossible to get. I, too, play Link to the Past Randomizer (though I turn on the full boss randomizer as well) and I have played nearly 250 seeds and it is FUN. I also find it interesting that the pack-in items are gone too - when I open up a Switch game, it's just the cartridge in there and nothing else (though they still have the clips in the case for some reason). Well done, sir!
Thanks so much! I'm on SMZ3 randomiser right now but I've tried the boss randomiser and keysanity on ALTTPR too and they add a really fun extra layer. I miss pack-ins too and opening up Tunic's deluxe physical edition gave me so much joy. I recommend it, if you haven't already. I haven't even played the game yet really. I'm recommending the game solely on the experience of opening the box and looking at all the things.
Adventure for the Atari 2600 was the first open world game I'd ever played. The Legend of Zelda wouldn't come out for another 6 years, but in that short amount of time, the graphics and sound improved astronomically.
I do actually play Adventure (on real Atari, btw) to this day and it's always a great experience, on level 3. My 6yo kid also loves it and plays regularly. It's a 1980 game, but it's true timeless.
It makes a lot of sense. It kinda reminds me of EU IV with the "institutions" system it has and has been having for some years now. The printing press is in fact one of them. You get global trade at some point, manufacturies, finally industrialisation near the end... And each time, the text at the bottom reads "This changes everything..." and it really does. In-game, one needs to have those institutions present in their country to a certain degree before they can be "embraced", and doing that essentially allows to catch up with new technology. The way it spreads both naturally and can be sped up tries to emulate the spread of new information how it happened in the real world, and I think it works really nicely. And really, the same principle applies here. When it comes to video games, magazines such as nintendo power could be viewed as an "institution" the same way as later the internet or youtube in particular is. (Funnily enough, with mods that allow the game - EU IV - to run until modern times, the internet itself is also one of those institutions) So yeah. It makes perfect sense :D
You are correct about how we played this - my whole neighborhood was on the case. I was maybe 7 or 8. We would play together and separately. Nintendo power helped a little. And all of our hand drawn maps. So many maps. Now I don't need a guide - it's all up in my head - I don't like to think of the knowledge I could have stored there instead. I can practically speed run it these days thanks to all of the secrets I remember.
That's really cool! Sounds like you got the optimal Legend of Zelda experience there and the one we'll never have again. Even my seven year old nephew is on TH-cam watching gameplay videos and one time we played some Super Mario World together and he was telling me where the hidden blocks were!
@@TheRetroSofa Thanks for this video, because until now, I didn't realize that I got the proper 1987 Zelda experience - I never played it on my own before I knew the answers, so I didn't even think about how hard it would have been without the gang.
My friends and I also hand drew the maps. Sadly my game cartridge got run over by a friend's older sibling that was mad at us for using up all the tv time.
My grandma loved Zelda. Beat it on her own, after countless hours, then beat the second quest the same way. She was so protective over the save and that cartridge she bought the kids their own.
My 10yo son would beg to differ. He started playing at seven and beat it by the age of nine. I gave him little help and didn’t let him look up info to help. Which is what he usually does w/ most games. He’s never been happier to beat a game. As a child I had the help of a few friends. But this is how anyone w/ friends experienced it. We did it w/ all games. Beating Super Metroid in three days w/ my best friend is one of the best memories from my childhood. My sons get to experience this type of thing w/ each other.
He'd beg to differ but also you did help him a little. It sounds like you had a great time though and it's great that you're sharing these games with your sons and they can share games with each other. Good job on Super Metroid too. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I don't really get your argument. Why specifically THIS game? Why not any other open world game before or after it? Internet didn't spoil just this game it spoiled ANY game. Or rather it spoiled the experience of discovery.
@@TheRetroSofa This isn't true for any games. It is only true for certain people who need hand held to play a game or are incapable of preventing themselves from going and looking up stuff on the internet. The games are just as playable today as they were intended to be as they were when they came out. It is the people that changed.
I played al caslevanias, but zelda is to criptyc for me. I can't get a hold what direction i need to go in or what the next target is. What item i need for what.
I can still play the original Zelda to this day without a problem. I just recommend a guide. Yes, the NES game didn't age well compared to later games like A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, or Breath of the Wild, but there's no denying that it was revolutionary for 1986.
Absolutely. My problem though is I followed a step-by-step guide to closely and I think I didn't enjoy it as much because of it. People in the 80's weren't playing it like that.
@@TheRetroSofa ...Yes, they were, guides existed. Zelda 1 was one of the first console games to get notable guide books. Even the manual had a basic walkthrough up to the 2nd dungeon. The resources that exist today existed back then in a different, less thorough form, but existed nonetheless.
@@cat_ann_ Okay sure some people were but guides were much rarer. I think the first paper guide I got for a game was Discworld II on PC. Up until that point I never had the money for guides and neither did any of my friends. Now you've got hundreds of guides for every game ever released in your pocket it's kind of different.
I actually just replayed this on my original Nintendo with my 5 year old. It was as killer as I remember it when it first came out. We had a blast, especially when he realized the 2nd play through was going to be more difficult.
This got my attention because I literally replayed this game earlier this year (not gonna lie, beat it hella fast - felt like it took forever when I was a kid)
A Link To The Past and Link's Awakening defined the series. The two NES games are, sadly, in my opinion both just a little *too* broad in scope, and a little *too* cryptic. I wouldn't go as far as to call them unplayable, mechanically they play well enough, but the game design lacks the finesse of the Super NES and Gameboy titles.
The gameplay of both the first Zelda games is pretty solid. The problem is they're hard to get into going blind and if you get a full guide you spoil the experience.
I can’t disagree more with you. If you lived in that time it was complete magic and the community involvement needed to complete the game was basically part of the game.
@@ender7278 It was trying to be more of an RPG sidescroller. Which just fundamentally doesn't play well. Especially with the relentless random battles on the overworld.
Your view is flawed. Just because you have all the information about the game available doesn't mean that you _must_ play the game using it. You can just try to explore the game on your own as far as you can until you can't figure out how to advance, and _then_ look up the answer to that from Internet and continue exploring without any additional information. That's what I did when I played it for the first time. So, not unplayable.
I don't know, I'm kind of glad the internet was there to finally solve Battletech the Crescent Hawks Inception communication room puzzle that kept me from beating it since 1992. I don''t regret the exploration of every inch of the map before that though, finding random villages every so often. Nor discovering for myself how you can hijack a Locust mech from the gladiator games by breaking down a wall and escapeing. And doing it again, because everyones face blind and security cameras aren't a thing apparently.
There is something to be said for everyone having access to everything they need to experience all corners of their games. I'm not saying things were better then, just different. I think you make the best of it by only opening the guide when you need to and resisting reading further than the current problem.
I went thru that game about a decade ago and I remember spending 20 hours on that puzzle but I got it in the end thru trial and error and luck. It is the most obtuse puzzle I have ever seen in a game.
@@jacobwilbers9852Yeah, that puzzle was cryptic. Simply finding the cache took forever, felt like a big achievement getting that far. I came close to solving it I think, had the paper map and realized the star markings meant something. But for whatever reason couldn't set it up properly, either I kept messing a step or simply couldn't decipher the maps code properly. I even went to the trouble of trying to trigger everything that was not starred, which took forever using an Apple II C.
I finished the original Zelda at age 42. And I found a very cool way to do it. I found a guide called "hand drawn game guide", by a bloke who does exactly that for a number of retro games. The guide isn't thorough enough for you to just go from A to B, it's more a sense of following an ancient diary towards a treasure. I highly recommend the experience.
this is not a good take at all. Seems people have forgotten how to play games that don't hold your hand. Because a game doesn't hold your hand with markers and maps now doesn't make one that does not have this trash unplayable. randomizers have no real story therefore no point in playing them, I hate randomizers or procedurally generated worlds...just no fun for me at all.
The original Zelda experience is unplayable today, as in you literally cannot play it as kids played it in the 80's. Doesn't mean the game's bad or that markers are inherently good. No shame in playing games for the story. People look for different things in their games and that's great because it just means more games. 🙂
Nah, I don't agree. There is a line between games that are so cryptic that they either require outside help or have people - as some commenters said - use every item on every tile, on every section of the map over and over again. If you look at Zelda, just look at A Link to the Past. Yeah, it's a little more modern, but not by much, and they had already gotten rid of those problems. Or indeed, the first two Final Fantasy games for the NES. With the first one in particular, there were SOME points that I deemed a little cryptic, but it was usually "talk to this person after you have done that", so it was much quicker and more natural to figure it out without help. And these two certainly didn't hold the player's hand - the GBA re-releases were much, much easier, but the NES versions are pretty brutal in comparison, both in comparison to the re-releases and compared to A Link to the Past. On randomizers; I get why people like them. It's another layer of challenge, really. I personally hate RNG and try to avoid it when possible, so adding additional RNG is absolutely not for me, either.
@@MarkKatz2772-jg3tc I figured out the first Final Fantasy myself but didn't get far in Final Fantasy 2. This was years after they came out of course because Europe didn't get JRPG's. The only Final Fantasy we had back in the day was Mystic Quest and it didn't even say Final Fantasy on the box. I like how A Link To The Past Randomiser avoids RNG. If you play the same seed as someone else (like the Reddit weekly challenges or whatever), you get the same experience. Agahnim will always put out the same number of blue balls and it's always the same number of digs to find the item in the digging game. That sort of thing. I get what you mean though it's trickier to play against yourself and know whether you did better or not.
The original Legend of Zelda, you either had to figure out all this on your own, take a friend who had gotten far in the game's word, or read the manual (which is why that game's manual is a big collector's item) to figure stuff out. Ocarina of Time was also like that for me as it was my first Zelda and I spent literal days trying to figure out the Water and Shadow temples each.
Forest temple really messed with my head needing to hookshot onto distant ceilings and chests, squinting into a tiny crt with terrible draw distance. The repeating hypnotic music certainly didn't help either.
Zelda 1 was definitely a product of its time. A time when we would play the same games over and over again, meaning trial and error, rumours at school, and magazines would help get us through games like this. It's historically significant but not worth playing beyond that
I take your point but it is still a great game if you can find a crew and some old copies of Nintendo Power and nothing else. A tall order in 2024, though!
Having had my own copy of Gold and I understand the hours of my life these machines devoured. But do not discredit the relief of escape this game can hold.
The Gutenberg line made me think we were going to talk about how vital the manual was to the self discovery experience of TLOZ. For anyone who hasn’t played it yet, Tunic is an amazing game, very much a spiritual successor to TLOZ. It even has an in game manual that you collect pages of that reveal more information and secrets of the game.
I've quit the new Zelda after two dungeons and gone back to Tunic. I'm enjoying it more I think. Really only just got started with it though so no spoilers! Looks great though. Mysterious in a way that few modern games are.
@@TheRetroSofa I think there is a slight debate on this… Earliest form of printing actually goes back to Korea apparently. It was block printing. China also used block printing, a few centuries later. But it wasn’t a printing press (a machine for printing). More like “stamping” with a tray of stamps which had to be manually stamped on the page. Yes stamping is technically pressing but press in Gutenberg sense was relating to a machine (there were other kinds of presses like pneumatic presses/hydraulic oresses etc for crushing rock, punching presses for making holes in something etc, or whatever. Block Printing was brought over to Europe by the Marco Polo and was used in Europe for almost a century before Gutenberg. Block printing was single use and each block has to be hand made so it was rather slow process… Chinese upgrades that with movable type which was reusable but process bur still functioned as a stamp rather than a machine. As far as I understand it… still slow process and inconvenient.. Both of these were a slow process and inconsistent since the stamps didn’t always press on paper with same amount of ink in consistent layers. So this was used more for personal scrolls and documents but not particularly useful for speeding the printed word to populous. Gutenberg’s invention was taking the stamps but adding them to a mechanical press machine making it slightly more automated and consistent so mass printing became viable and allowing reading to spread to the masses. If they had copyrights back then printing press would be considered an evolution of earlier technologies but printing press itself would be more like a brand name of a new technology.
@@Catman498 I'm not a historian but I have spent about ten minutes on Google and Wikipedia so I'm an expert now and you're right it's not clear. From what I can make out, Korea had block printing first then China invented movable type printing but it was a manual rather than mechanical process. What Gutenberg effectively did was to create a mechanical version of what Bi Sheng had done, which was made much simpler by having a much smaller alphabet. Before Gutenberg, printing in China and Korea was already using metal types. Sejong the Great came up with a Korean alphabet with only 24 characters which would have been great for printing but the cultural elite were appalled so it never happened. That would have been like 30-40 years before Gutenberg's press. My view on it is that we all learn in Europe that Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press and stop there when there's a strong argument that he only mechanised a process that was already working in China and Korea. And I reckon if Korea's cultural elite weren't such arseholes Sejong the Great would have beaten him to it. Point is in the west we've been historically pretty bad for nicking eastern inventions and passing them off as our own and I think it's reasonable that I give Bi Sheng a shout-out. Anyway this is way more about the history of printing than I need to know for a video about Zelda. All I need to know is who we blame for the easy availability of walkthroughs and I reckon it's split evenly between Johannes Gutenberg, Bi Sheng, and Tim Berners-Lee. The dicks.
@@TheRetroSofa I’m an archaeologist so definitely a bit more concerned with directions and influences of technology. If Marco hadn’t brought printing in general to Europe it would have been decades/centuries before Europe had it… well probably would have been other exporers too. But Marco was the one who brought Chinese influence for alot of things to Europe.
Not even parallel technology development in which two or more cultures end up with the same thing without any interaction which both cultures can be said to have invented it separately…. Just flat out evolution from Chinese into the European… different groups improving on other persons inventions.
Definitely beat this in 87 as a 10 year old without assistance. Took about 3 months and included me drawing a literal map of the game. It was one of the best gaming experiences of my life, followed by Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6, and Link to the Past.
Makes me glad that the zelda 1 redux romhack exists, fixes a bunch of bugs, add cracks to walls and slight blemishes to bushes, you can completely beat it guide-free.
I was born in 2002, I still remember the day my uncle gave us all of his old NES stuff. I loved the original Zelda, but probably only because I was lucky enough to get the NES Game Atlas with it. Just as cryptic as it was in the 80s!
You didn't watch much of the video before leaving your comment but that's cool. You don't have to. You're welcome to just come to the comments of my videos and just say what you want to say.
This brings up a point thats even more important now. Imagine a game like Elden Ring (Basically a modern "Zelda") without the internet. You'd have a drastically different experience than what most players are having with all these youtube videos giving them help. It makes you wonder if all these crutches are changing the experience for the worse.
They're changing it for the different, and that in turn affects how games are designed. It's not strictly worse I don't think but there's definitely a feeling of having lost something.
@@dimitrinicomanis Sweet! He's well on his way to being a gamer. My nephew's 8 and he's a big fan of Mario and I'm hoping to introduce him to A Link To The Past some day.
I don't believe a single person in this comment section making the claim that they "beat the game when it released without a guide." Complete and utter BS.
I dunno, some kids have a lot of time and patience when they're obsessed with something. I remember once at school drawing all the collectables in every Mario game that existed at the time and someone saw me drawing the heart from Super Mario Bros. 2 and went "look everyone Bill's drawing hearts" and of course at the time I was explaining to everyone "no no no it's a Mario power-up so I *have* to draw it" but boys should draw hearts if they want idc. What were we talking about?
@@TheRetroSofa The difference between those other game mentioned and LoZ, is those games were either much simpler in design, didn't require the finding of secrets to "power up" and weren't vague in their basic instructions. I still doubt anyone who completed the game without the Nintendo Power issue with the walkthrough, bought the Tips and Tactics guide or had rich parents and just called the hotline.
At 4:12 German text 😀: "Die Kunst des Setzers zeigt sich im optischen Ausgleich der Zeilen." which means in English: "The skill of the type setter shows up with the optical balance of the lines."
I spent nearly a year in the hospital when I was little. The staff was kind enough to bring me a NES and many games. Zelda being the one that caught my interest the most because they told me no one they knew had completed it. I had took it as a challenge, spending most of my time exploring and making notes and maps of various things I had explored. Even down to what npcs I had spoken with said when I last talked to them. Took me nearly 8 months but I completed the game. There were no ways outside of calling the Nintendo tip line which I couldn't do from the hospital anyways. Remains my most fond/agonizing memory to this day!
Obviously being stuck in the hospital sucks but that's still a cool story. I've supported Child's Play in the past and would do so again because I bet having Zelda made your recuperation much easier. I'll see if I can do a fundraiser for them when my channel's big enough to do fundraisers. Congrats on taking the challenge and beating it. Taking copious notes is a great way of brute-forcing your way through it and I bet a really rewarding way to play.
my dad, older brother, and i made comprehensive notes and hand drawn maps together of the original zelda. we had two NESes and two copies of zelda and played them together to find every secret. though we did it in the early 2000s, we still at that time didnt have internet access so we had to discover everything on our own
Great video my dude! I wish you the brightest of futures with this channel! Actually, I'd like to raise you with "Outer Wilds" or "Tunic". Games that teach you things / mechanics / techniques during your playthrough. These were always possible, you just did not know them. While yes you could look up play throughs, the Community is keeping everything vague and gives coded hints, if asked. And I would not have it any other way!
I have started Tunic! I'm not very far into it yet but a lot of people have recommended it and I'm looking forward to getting some more time with it. Thanks for your kind comments.
@@TheRetroSofa then I won't spoil too much and wish you a lot of fun. :) Maybe we will see a video on these two (or more?) games? The term metroid-brainia comed to mind. I really like your discussion on the points of a collective beating a game asynchroniously. Maybe a modern evolution on this is the ARG? Maybe in part since they cannot directly be data-mined? Interesting thoughts...
@@ToSMaster12345 Thanks! I could have gone into ARG's when I mentioned escape rooms. It's one way of doing a communal gaming experience on a larger scale I guess. You'll see me do a video on Tunic when it's retro. 😉
I had never really thought about the points your making till this. I was lucky, my Grandma started me into video games with her ColecoVision. When we purchased our NES, I had 3 siblings. mother, aunt, and grandmother who would all get together and game for hours. The Lolo games made for seemingly endless nights of group frustration. Thanks for the video, brought up some great old memories.
That's why we're here. Thanks for sharing your memories. You were lucky indeed. As was I with my nan, who originally owned this copy of Zelda, bringing all the cousins together to play every Sunday at her house.
I had a similar experience with Diddy Kong Racing. I could not for the life of me beat the "final" boss, Wizpig, he was running faster than my car. Turns out that the way to beat him (spoiler alert) is to release the accelerator when driving over boosters, which gives you a super-boost. I would never have thought to release the accelerator to go faster, and only managed to beat him over a decade later after reading about the booster trick online. My mind was blown when I beat him AND IT WASN'T EVEN THE FINAL BOSS RACE! There was an entire new space-themed world after that.
It reminds me of how we can't watch TV shows the same way anymore. In the past, new episodes would come out weekly (or longer). So between new episodes, we would discuss endlessly with friends and on forums our theories on what would happen next. Now with today's binge-watching, instant gratification streaming landscape, a whole season can be watched in a single day or weekend. And people don't experience TV episodes at the same time anymore, some choosing to wait sometime until a whole season is finished so they can binge watch it all at once. I'm not an old head complaining about technology though, lol. Streaming is so much better in almost every way.
I know what you mean. Nowadays when I talk about a new TV show with someone it goes like "Have you watched X?" "Yeah it's great isn't it! Binged the whole thing. Hell of an ending!" and then where do you go from that? I miss the group speculation of linear TV.
I played this in the 80’s when it was still the nes era, but never beat it. It wasn’t until 1995 or 96 that me and my best friend found a copy of Zelda at a thrift store that we decided to beat it together one summer. We tried and tried but kept getting turned around, so we made a map. The copy we found was just a loose cart, and the Internet wasn’t what it is now, so we decided we needed a map. 3 big squares of old school computer print out paper (the kind with the perforated edges you needed to tear off) taped together. I used a ruler to make a big grid and we went screen to screen as I drew everything on screen within the little boxes of the grid I had made. We bombed every wall, burned every bush, marked down which bombable walls had guys that gave you money, which ones charged you for damages, where items were hidden, heart containers, where each dungeon was, it was quite the accomplishment for us back then. The nes stayed on all summer, and after many nights drinking Mountain Dew and eating Kraft singles till the sun came up, we beat the game. We collected a lot for the nes back then when you could find those at thrift stores everywhere, and we beat a lot of games that way. Double dragon 2, bubble bobble, chip and dale, a boy and his blob, it was fun times. Wouldn’t change a thing about it except all the junk food! lol.
I'm gonna pin your comment for a bit 'cause that's a really nice story. Including the junk food! There was a period in the UK where you could buy those cheesy slices but they didn't have enough cheese in them to be legally called "cheese" which gave rise to the term "cheese-flavoured food slice" but I think they just put cheese in them now.
It sounds like an awesome time and a great memory to hold onto. Thanks for sharing it.
if you have children you have to tell them that story! so cool.
Bubble bobble is hard to beat not continuing
@TheRetroSofa oh man, thanks for pinning my story! To add to it, later in high school I was part of a program that mentored kids in elementary school. I got paired with a kid who had a hard time making friends, and didn’t talk much. Turns out his older brother had given him his old Nintendo, and the kid was also playing Zelda. It was about the only thing we could connect on. I went over to my best friends house and we dug through old boxes till we found the map we had made and I made a photocopy of it. The next time our class took the trip to the elementary school, I brought it with me and gave it to him. Rolled it up like a scroll, and tied it with a string to look like something you might see in a Zelda game. Told him the story of how me and my best friend made it one summer and how it enabled us to beat the game. Said something like “knowledge is power, and now you’re playing with power”. lol. It’s funny how games can bring people together. I swear, if it wasn’t for this kids love of Zelda, I don’t think he would’ve opened up at all. At the end of the year, he even wrote me a letter thanking me for the map. It was a cool experience.
@@fourlightsorchestra Thanks for sharing, that's really sweet. I love how this video has brought out all these awesome stories about this game bringing people together and I really feel like that was one of Nintendo's design goals with it, you know? Games always help people to connect but Zelda more than most.
9 year old me bombed every wall and burned every tree. No friend help or guide. My friends played sports titles.
Me too. I was surprised the first time I was "fined" by the NPC, then annoyed by how many were around.
The game came with a whole ass map man. lol
@400KrispyKremes the map was not complete, at least not the one I got. There was a majority empty space on the grid, it was white so you could draw it in.
@@jeffdavis6657 He said, "No Help". Not "some" help.
Ahh, when I had free time to do that.
100% beat that game in the late 80s. No guide, no Nintendo Power, and no friends that played it. I didn't get a lot of games when I was a kid, so I played it over and over. To this day, I can sit down and 100% it in a single sitting from memory.
Cool! I unfortunately didn't get to spend as much time with it back in the day.
"Tips fedora" lol
@@BobCassidy We only had one at first. Until my parents got tired of having to kick me off the TV any time they wanted to watch it! So they went out and got me a small used TV for my room!
I got pretty far as a kid but got stuck on the flute and lake bit. One day after school I find my mom playing it and she “figured it out” to this day I think she pitied me for being stuck for probably weeks and found a magazine or called a help line or something
Does that mean you spent endless amounts of frustration in the second quest? I couldn't do it without a guide, but the first quest I took down without.
i was 8 years old in christmas 1987 then we got the NES.
my dad and i finished zelda together, but it took a few months.
no guidebooks, no youtube, etc. not many people in small town alabama had the NES at that time, so we were on our own.
we brute forced the game- we burned every bush, pushed every block, and bombed every wall.
when we finished the game we noticed at the save file selection that link was holding a sword.
we selected the game to just do another runthrough just for fun, and the majority of the world was different!
the second quest was significantly harder, and after several weeks we conquered that too.
to this day, i still remember the location of each and every single item and all puzzle solutions.
Thanks for sharing! That's a really cool memory and although you didn't have the whole community around it, you got to work through it with someone you love and that's a great way to experience anything.
Badass. I only beat the first one. I could never master the second play-through. Respect!
Very similar experience but it was eastern NC, I was 6, 1990, and it was with my mom as my parents were divorced.
I played it again recently with my son and interestingly enough I seem to remember more from the second quest. I think I didn’t really revisit the first quest much after the initial playthrough. I played the second quest to death though. I had it to the point I was doing a 6 year old version of speed running.
Good memories. Thanks for sharing and helping me relive my own.❤
That’s awesome man, me and my best friend did the same thing together. It’s funny how much of an undertaking it is, and how much that makes it stick with you. Me and my buddy ended up drawing a map of the entire overworld so we could stay on track. I got pretty good at navigating from those times, and would usually be the navigator on trips back before gps and map quest.
@@deepzone31second one is way harder. All I’ll say is “false walls”. Good grief, I was scratching my head on some dungeons before I accidentally walked through one trying to avoid an enemy.
The problem you're describing isn't really an issue with Zelda, but with gaming in the age of information in general. For instance, does anyone organically discover all the crafting recipes in Minecraft? It also comes down to the amount of gaming options available these days. When I was a kid new games were a rare occurrence and I extracted every last drop of gameplay from any game I had even if it sucked. Today there are so many games(and free games) that if someone loses patience they either look at a guide or move on to something else.
Very true. Zelda is an example but there are many.
This is also the case where games are so deeply optimized on the gameplay side now. To the point where the fun is just gone! As if there's a specific "Right" Way to play a game!
I guess that's true of all entertainment to a point. Today artistic genius is tomorrows cringe.
@@Mii-MinGames have always been this way, some are open, and some strict. Some are Mario Bros 3, and some are Castlevania 1. Just how it's always been.
@@aureateseigneur5317 Very true. However, that's not the argument I was making. I was talking about players optimizing the fun out of a game. METAS and the like. Treating everything as a competition.
It's hard to describe, but it feels like there's a cultural expectation in modern games to do things one way! Or be told you're not a good player of something unless you know some obscure glitch or trick. It's. Difficult to quantify!
I thought this was going to be about how the save function no longer works on old cartridges without a battery replacement.
I've been pretty lucky with that. I'm afraid to turn on my Pokemon Yellow though. Got some Schrödinger's Pokemon in there.
I thought about that too, but it's not true you can't play it without that, you could play one single binge session and beat both quests in one sitting. Or, as some of used to do, pause the game, leave the nintendo on, but shut the tv off until you are ready to play again. Only thing is cable tv used channel 3, which the nintendo often did, (not sure about Britain or Australia though) so if someone wanted to watch tv they'd need to turn off the nintendo.
@@thesnare100 The UK had a specific channel for connected devices. 36, I think?
My cartridge’s battery stopped working in the 90’s but if I left the cartridge in the NES and didn’t unplug it or change the game, it would keep the save file working. That was how I finished the game, because I was motivated to finish it so I could play a different game. If my brother took the cartridge out to play a different game I would have to start over, so I had to memorize a lot of the game.
@@Cyclingismywholelife as I understand it, even a battery that is NOT is use will eventually lose it's charge, when you buy insertable batteries at a store they have an expiration date.
And, no it's not true if you take the game out of the nintendo that it loses it's charge, we took Zelda out several times and when we put it back in we could load the saves
They put the Zelda map in Nintendo Power magazine in 1988. That’s how I beat it.
The game comes with a map though. Although to be fair, there's a few spaces whited out for later areas.
Yeah but Nintendo Power told you where to get power ups and avoid paying for doors.
A former Nintendo employee once said some NES games were designed to sell Nintendo Power as you couldn't beat them without it
That was the same way I beat it too
That's how I got through the second quest. I still have that Nintendo Power -I believe it's the first issue.
You can totally play it today. Just have the self discipline NOT to read a play through that spoils everything. You can do it. I believe in you!
Honestly even with a guide it's still a fun game to play.
The guide being so easily available does change the feel of it though. There's a reason escape rooms don't have the solution written out on the wall to optionally look at.
It is still fun however you play it.
@@TheRetroSofano. Why cheat?
IIRC, I followed the Nintendo Power Guide for the first run thru but solved it myself for the second world. Yeah a lot of tedious bombing, whistle blowing, etc. but it IS possible without a guide.
Nowadays, 10 minutes BEFORE a new open world game is released, dataminers have already posted every single obscure hidden secret you could possibly find.
I got Echoes of Wisdom on release day and full guides were being posted before I could get home from work and play it. Yeah you can avoid it but part of me thinks we'd all have a lot more fun if there was an embargo on that sort of thing. There's a reason escape rooms don't give you a little envelope with the solution and say "in case you get stuck". The temptation and knowing the solution can be attained so easily makes you less willing to put the time in and less satisfying if you do.
@@TheRetroSofathat analogy is spot on!
To be honest, I don't really mind that these days. I like the collection aspect of open world games. Obtaining new items and opening up more and more of the world as you progress. But as was said in the beginning of the video, open world games are often padded with empty space while the secrets aren't really secret anymore. It just makes for a lot of busywork resulting in games that take very long to complete even with guides to speed things up even more. I am no longer in a position where I need to make a game last for half a year, so I am not interested in padding.
I also want to put some extra attention to the emptiness of the space in between secrets in many modern games. The original Zelda had a rumour where it was said that each screen contained a secret. And while not completely true, it made a good attempt. But what most screens also contained was monsters. I find that a lot of open world games really do a bad job at making the space in between points of interest fun to travel. The Switch Zelda games are some of the best examples of this. I am not interested in spending literal minutes looking at walls to climb. And with the weapon durability being the way it is, I am not encouraged to fight monsters. There's a good reason why in TOTK, the simple flying scooter was one of the most shared builds out there, because it allowed you to skip all that. In my opinion, if so many players want to skip a certain part of your game, you need to wonder if that part maybe needs some work, or perhaps be removed so that the game's fun can be condensed.
This is why I prefer living under a rock.
@@TheRetroSofa Nintendo games do usually leak a couple weeks ahead of time if not more. Echoes was in the wild 3-4 weeks before release. More than enough time to 100% it and write it all down into a guide and still have weeks to wait for the embargo to lift. It just ends on release unless a company is trying to hide that their game sucks. Nintendo tirelessly slaps people all day long for weeks until the release date.
I developed a randomizer for the original Legend of Zelda called Infinite Hyrule. It procedurally generates whole new overworlds to explore, with some options to make it easier or harder. It also works with Z1R, which randomizes item locations and dungeon layouts. I think you'd have a lot of fun with it, especially if you do have friends to try the same seed with and include all the difficulty settings and want to experience LoZ the way it was designed.
That's a really great idea! This, right? www.romhacking.net/utilities/1560/
The kid on the playground who spoiled everything was just as much a part of the experience as the internet is today. In fact, game designers counted on it in the early days when there wasn't much room in the code for exposition and hand holding. When games came to the US they had to come up with a way to give rural American kids the same experience and Nintendo Power and the Nintendo Hotline were born.
I couldn't find proof but I think you're right and they designed around the playground. Well put!
@@TheRetroSofamiyamoto quote about tower of druaga
plus people had strategy guides from the store.
@@TheRetroSofa they also had the old big black strategy guide that covered lots of Nintendo games.
@@rrudeljr I think I had the one you're talking about. It had a set of stickers in it. Then there were Nintendo Power magazines, game magazines in stores, and game books, often with just text and no screenshots at all, that I used to get from the library.
The biggest hurdles was finding out that whistles reveal secrets and Second Quest's hidden doors. I wasn't enthused to see there was another half to the game.
I'm fine with having done the first half.
That damn hidden door in second quests triforce room was easily what took me longer than anything else to find
@michaelpolcyn5187 omg yes! I remember searching for days trying to get to that last portion of dungeon, but kept thinking there couldn't POSSIBLY be a secret in that room.
My dad bought this for me when I was in 1st grade, 1991, thinking only that its cartridge stood out.
Little did we both know how this series would evolve over the years, but still something so integral to our relationship over the last 30-years.
Thanks, dad.
Beautiful memory and well-put. I'm glad it brought you together like that.
Something to one day reminisce over while that Bowie song inevitably plays.
"Back in MY day, we had friends".... 😢 Well, aren't we Mr. Braggity Brag now....
The same could be said for modern MMOs. Heaven forbid you join a boss fight without first reading every guide, watching every TH-cam video, and being told exactly what to do by everyone else in the party. The age of discovery is over.
Modern MMOs feel more like a blackjack table, where if you don't play it "perfect" every card you're the most hated person in the building (THAT SHOULD'A BEEN MY ACE!)
It's very playable. But its mystery is only intact if the player makes an intentional choice not to look at a guide. With one, the mystery is just a "game mechanic", like using the flute at the dry fairy fountain for a dungeon to appear, or blowing open a wall and having to pay a repair fee. Which, if I'm being honest, is the most random thing to encounter in any game.
It's pretty funny though. The problem is if you go in completely blind you're in for a world of frustration. You want some guidance but not all the guidance and I don't know how you do that in 2024.
@@TheRetroSofa I wondered why hint books back then were called "hint" books when they were blown 100% spoiler books
@@TheRetroSofa I don't think is hard not to look at a guide. You just start playing, actually that is what i do for all my games because i find it no fun trying to follow everything as should be done and not making mistakes etc. Not to mention even more troublesome since i can't just start playing but have to study guides which is no fun when i want to just play.
Then am not playing, i am just doing instruction following and the game is ruined because nothing surprising or cool since you expect everything after seeing them on a guide.
The frustration issue for me is easily solved. When am stuck somewhere and nothing is happening and i start feeling annoyed i always take a break. Usually when you let some time pass and come back to it with a fresh mind you start having new ideas you could possibly think when you were stuck in your ways and frustrated at the moment.
But even if i try again and again a few different times and nothing gets going then i just try to get some tips or see what other players do at that point, not follow a full guide.
Even if i get a bad ending or i didn't get everything i could or if i end up not being able to finish and win because i didn't built my character correctly etc is not much of a problem because i consider it a full playthrough since i played as far as my abilities could master and there was no helping it about not getting the ending if i did things wrong at the start.
I can just do another playthrough doing things differently. Games are all about trial and error in the end. If you really enjoy playing a game then you don't mind. That is why is important to not play games just because they are popular or they are supposed to be great if you don't enjoy them and just play games that get you going and can't put them down.
Some of my most favorite games are games others go "what is that?" or "isn't that just some below average game?". Well i don't care, i got addicted to them and i played them again and again because i loved them. I tried game that were called masterpieces and i felt disappointed if i did anything wrong because it meant i had to play more to get things right.
At that moment is when i pause and think "Wait! if hate the idea of the possibility of playing more of this, why am i playing it in the first place?"
@@TheRetroSofa Not at all true. Anyone who actually played the game when it was actually new knows that it wasn't actually frustrating.
The hints came in the form of paying rupees for information to the old men. That's how the game was intended to be played. In link to the past it was called a fortune teller and they had the same equivalent in the nes original. That's how I progressed when I was stuck
*I replay 1986 Zelda, and A Link to the Past on my Samsung Tab S9, all the time. I use an 8bitdo PRO 2 controller via bluetooth and a WAAAAY we go.*
Well EXCUUUUUUUUUSE me Princess.
You are spot on! 7 year old me loved this game, and I had indeed never completed level 9 without guidance. But here’s my rebuttal:
43 year old me is starting to forget things! So I have had to roam around again and try to remember where things are. And boom! The magic had returned! I just started a new game 3 days ago, and I’m yet again lost in death mountain!
Thanks! I'm glad you're getting to experience it again and enjoying the magic.
Ha! I'm the exact opposite. I'm 42, and I remember where every single item and secret is in this game. Not so much for the second quest, because those last three levels were brutal with the secret passages leading you back where you started.
@@AsuranFish I have yet to complete the second quest. You are truly worthy of the sword that seals the darkness my friend!
I had LoZ in “87… I was eleven years old. My uncle who was a few years older than me and myself, played it literally every day for months until we beat it.
None of my school friends had it and we didn’t have any guides or anything like that … kids that would talk about it were mostly making things up… but my uncle did play a lot of D&D back in the early 80’s so I’m assuming that gave him an advantage.
Long story short is this, Having played that game so intently in my formative years left such a lasting impression on me… that I still remember every item location, dungeon and burned bush to this day.
Every 5 or so years I pop it in and can run through it in a few hours.
That's so cool that you got to play it back in the day with your uncle and get through it. Maybe you didn't have as much help as you could have had but the two of you persisted through it and figured it out together and that's probably about the best Zelda experience you could have had. Thanks for sharing the memories.
Tunic today is the closest to old school Zelda's external meta you can get in a modern context and it was excellent for it. There's certainly similar games before it like ESA, Fez, and La Mulana among many many others, but few wear the Zelda paint like Tunic did. The game asks you to solve a cryptic language and refer to the lovingly 80's styled manual in game. It's puzzles get so esoteric and hands off that it naturally spurred it's own community eager to chip away at it's secrets. That was intentionally made for the age of Reddit and Discord. It's a digital love letter to a physical age and it was seriously a treat.
It's interesting how the fleeting nature of certain extrinsic qualities of a game affects it going forward. Competitive games come to mind chiefly, but we don't really think about this with the search action genre. We often forget about the cultures older titles were spurred by and developed for. I think this is why remakes bother a lot of people. The context in which a game is created, the mindset of it's developers during it's inception, cannot simply be emulated and certainly not reproduced. You couldn't simply remake Zelda 1 and release it today with the same impact. It's truly something of it's time and must be understood on *it's* own terms to be enjoyed in a modern sense.
I bought Tunic after reading the comments to this video and I'm looking forward to playing more of it. I have limited time for non-retro games these days. 'Extrinsic', that's a word I could have used and forgot existed. Beautifully put. I don't disagree with anything in your second paragraph and part of me wishes you'd made this video rather than me! What you say applies to all art but I think even more to games both because of the technology of the time and the interactive element. Art is always informed by the time of its creation, as is the way we appreciate it either at the time or looking back on it, but uniquely with video games how we interact with games and our expectations also come into play. Zelda can be enjoyed today or in 1987 but how gamers today approach it compared to gamers then has changed significantly.
Absolutely right. And I need to return to it. Totally forgot about it. I got hooked on Cocoon.
Your point about Assassin's Creed is spot on. Open world games that don't understand why they're open world are universally the worst.
Odyssey inparticular had an absolutely incredible world full of beautiful scenery and interesting characters. Unfortunately you couldn't do anything with it. With no emergent gameplay and map markers I just ended up taking almost a straight line to where I needed to be, not appreciating the world around me. Still an awesome game, I really enjoyed the story, the combat, and the missions, but it was open world for the sake of padding rather than to provide a true open world experience.
@@TheRetroSofa When a lot of younger programmers in a dev group I'm in ask about open world design, us older guys tend to push them towards learning world building before hand. So many of those kids just made large prodecurally generated worlds where only 5% of the km^2 has something in it, and the rest is just static scenery inbetween. Keep telling them it's not about large open spaces. In fact, size is not a primary attribute of open world, but a secondary and derived element. Open refers to accessibility. Encouraging them to practice making smaller worlds, but filled with interesting and interactable elements. Even programming an environment that undergoes changes depending on plot points and even mundane conditions like time of day or actions. The more two different playthroughs can feel like different experiences the better. The moment a player knows when and where to expect something you lose that "new car smell."
And that's why games like GTA, BOTW, and TOTK win.
My uncle had the whole world mapped out on graph paper on a wall. My brother and i speed run it tag team style as a party trick. That way one of us can drink and take a smoko with friends between turns.
That's pretty awesome.
friends, beer, joint and Zelda was a great weekend.
A Link to the Past is the greatest game ever. I didn't know randomizers existed. Now you've given me a new reason to master it again.
Cool, enjoy! ALTTPR's great.
You can't make statements like that unless you qualify it with some for of "in my opinion" or "IMO". Internet people will attack you and tell you that you saying ALttP is the greatest game ever is your OPINION and not a FACT. They get really bent out of shape about that sort of thing. Especially if you preface your obvious opinion with something like "fun fact...". That really gets 'em mad.
@@Randy_Reacts With A Link To The Past it's fine.
Taking notes was required back then. Between this, Bards Tale, Ultima III & IV, I used so much graph paper for maps and notes
Best part of playing games with english text as a non-english kid was writing down sentences and then running to mum to translate it, and then try to make sense out of that information... let's say sometimes it didn't work that good...
At some point, though, we got some book with like guides for 20 NES games, and could solve a lot of stuff. It was also great advertising for the other games in it, bought several of them.
This comment section is absolutely hilarious. So many people here just got absolutely pissed off by the title and commented without watching the video itself.
He even says it, the video is *not* about the quality of the game- it's the way we're spoiled by the unlimited wealth of knowledge on the internet rather than being able to play it as it was originally intended. Y'all gotta CHILL
I kind of get why some people are mad. The title is a bit clickbait-y, a bit misdirection-y, but I have to play the game to some degree if I want my channel to get seen. I'll never straight-up lie in a title though. All it has to do is hint at the video content and people can engage with it or not, their choice, and as long as I can defend the video and the title artistically and intellectually it's all good.
Thanks for your comment though. I appreciate the support and the call for calm. Angry comments aside I really love some of the discussions and shared memories in this comment section and that's what it's all about. 🙂
I still don't understand this argument. I finished this game in the early 90s as an 8 year old with no Nintendo Power, no guides, and no friends to discuss this with. The only things remotely difficult are the "grumble grumble" moment and the final dungeon being outright labyrinthine.
Well done! Our experiences were different but that's okay. Some people have a lot more patience than I do.
how would you/did know you could burn bushes/bomb walls, and play the recorder to reveal things?
And did you finish the second quest, too?
@@thesnare100 It's simple: You try your items where it makes sense to do it.
Games nowadays are way too hand-holding, and that numbs players' curiosity and creativity.
Games of that era use that logic: you got something, you try something with it where it makes more sense, and sometimes to know where was ''the place that made sense'' it was needed to keep the clues you find on your way. Of course, some games are better than others for that matter. (I beated Castlevania 2 at 12, and that one was cryptic af, but still beatable)
But if players are expecting the game to prompt them every time there is something required to do to progress, they will rarely pay attention to hints or try to think by themselves. And under that scenario, if you give them Zelda 1, they will say it is unplayable.
Dodongo dislikes smoke
@@randylivengood3112yeah and the bomb explosion generated multiple clouds of smoke.
I beat the Game the year it was released I was 9 years old at the time no guides or hotline i just explored and tried everything figured out the mechanics pretty quickly it was the first game of its type as far as I knew I was hooked from start to finish i didn't play any other game while i was playing it the only thing i looked at was the manual I'm now 49 and still have fond memories of the game and its still my one favorite game series of all time.
Cool! You're more patient than I am to have done it without hints. I'm not so much and I feel like for me there's a sweet spot inbetween "full walkthrough" and "nothing" where the game is the most enjoyable. It's a great game but like many great things it's worth taking care in how you experience it.
In games like this, I really want to discover the solutions myself, but I only have so much time (and patience) for that type of approach.
Yeah. Super Metroid + A Link To The Past Randomizer hits that sweet spot for me where I can make progress in the time I've got and feel rewarded for it.
@@TheRetroSofa never heard of it, sounds interesting
I disagree with this general sentiment as someone who loves exploration but also loves info. The key that this video misses is how info is presented nowadays. In the past, there were guides (physical then things like GameFAQs). Now there are wikis. I can look up slices of information without ruining a game. I just played through Skul. I could read through wiki pages on every skull without once reading a page on the main plot
Wikis are kind of hit-and-miss though I find. If I want to be sure to avoid spoilers I tend to stay away from them entirely. It is a good point though. As long as you know how to use them and which ones to trust it is another way to get the bits and pieces while filling in the whole picture yourself.
The Nintendo hotline at $3.99 per minute was a last resort. I used it 2 times and my parents never noticed 😂
Nice one. I remember figuring out modem based BBS back in the day for Sierra PC games just to get Quest for Glory hints.
Lol, me too! But I used for kings quest!
@@fiuza78 Coolest thing ever for 15 year old me was to see that ASCII stream start flying across the screen when it worked. It was pure sorcery. Internet beta version! Then a phone call could come in and would break everything.
I used it too a number of times for various games. I did however, ask first.
I hate it when people say a game is unplayable. If we could play it back then, why can't a new generation play it now? I beat it for the first time in 2024, which the title of this video suggests is impossible. I'd argue that with the Internet today, Zelda is even more playable than it was back then
I think if you go a bit further than the title though you'll see what I mean. The game is, in some form, playable (and still a great game) but not the original experience.
@@TheRetroSofa settle down there, homie. I watched the whole video before commenting, which is why I said the title suggested it's not playable, not you. And you talked about the Internet being a reason it's not playable anymore, which I said makes it even more playable in 2024. Maybe if you had made it through my whole comment you'd have seen that. My issue is with the word "unplayable."
If you title a video with something you know is controversial, you better be prepared for people to disagree with you
@@Packers4Evar12 Fair enough. I'm sorry, I misunderstood the point you were making. I did try to get the title to include the word "experience" or "as-intended" but it ended up too clunky and I went for brevity. It is only a title though and I hope the point in the video stands. The original experience the game offered is, sadly, no longer available. That does not mean there isn't fun to have with it or that it's impossible to beat unassisted.
Frankly, to call a game unplayable is atrocious unless the theme of the game or controller schematics don't match what you want for example. I play games with a guide, but only because I don't feel like I have a lot of time on my hands for them and I actually want to check if the guides offered for a game work as intended. There are still some today making mistakes or outright lying like a school kid back in the day could.
@@TheRetroSofahow is it no longer available? Looking up a guide or not is a choice, not something you have to do, or something pushed in your face in any way, if you want to play games without a guide, just don't look up guides, simple.
Tunic replicates that OG feeling by couching the manual and the mechanics and its tutorials behind layers of ARG mystery and a made-up language that slowly you will comprehend given enough time and exploration with the game. Little by little, bit by bit, you unfold the layers of mystery behind that game and then stand in awe at what you find as your mind gets shattered by the revelations it has.
A lot of people are saying this! I picked it up after posting this video and I'm looking forward to playing it through.
"It's all the fault of Johannes Gutenburg" I KNEW IT
This is why I personally think the Game Boy and Game Boy Color have much better 8-bit offerings than the NES. I went through an NES phase where I collected a lot of games for the system and unlike other systems I collected for, my interest in the NES much shorter-lived because very few of the games really clicked with me. The NES was an odd period of time where games were figuring out how not to be arcade-like or dependent on a strategy guide or telephone guide service. By the mid to late 90s, games for the 8-Bit Game Boy and Game Boy Color we're much more complete experiences.
I agree with you and that's very well put.
I played this in 87 when I was 9 and could not have finished it without my mother. She drew a full size map taking up half my bedroom with every screen of the game on one A4 paper. It had every bush, rock and enemy. She would go out and play the game burning every bush, bombing every rock, pushing every stone and that's how we found every item. I would do all the fighting and finally beat ganon. So grateful for that wonderful time adventuring in Zelda with my mother
That's a really sweet story, thanks for sharing. You were so lucky to get to collaborate with your mother and go on this little adventure together.
I watched my parents play the original Legend of Zelda when I was little. My dad recently gave me my mom's meticulous notes that they built as they played through. It includes handdrawn maps, which is most interesting for the final levels - there were like a dozen secret passages that she color coded as they explored where each one went in the dungeon.
Sounds like they had a great time. I don't feel that's an experience people are having with games today. It's a sweet memory.
@TheRetroSofa It really is, and a large part of why I love the franchise. I don't think I ever beat it myself, though. I did beat ALttP and Link's Awakening repeatedly, though. The latter is the first game my little brother or I owned (we each got the Game Boys with LA as the pack-in game).
@@lyandraangel Those are both great games and I'm really looking forward to introducing my nephew to both. He's just seven so he needs to get a little more comfortable reading to get the most out of them, but I can't wait.
The same thing happened to MMOs- In early WoW, people barely understood game mechanics, much less optimized character builds, or raid bosses. My favorite times were the vanilla raid encounters. I remember pulling bosses for the first time, then spending 20 minutes talking with everyone about what happened and what we could see in the combat logs. That mystery doesn't exist anymore at all- there are now optimal builds, specific gear to wear, and (worst of all) you are expected to know everything about a boss before you even set foot in the raid.
A fine comparison. Early WoW hit different. I remember being excited to try WoW Classic but never did in the end. It wouldn't have been the same anyway.
I was explaining to my 13 year old son how I experienced this game as a kid. You nailed it. New information reached me on the whispers of fellow gamers. Sometimes from friend and often from foe we would spread the word of anything that helped us the previous day. Yes I said foe. I would get lots of precious intel from kids who I hated. My dad played as well but lacked the network of kids at work so he’d often walk into the house after work and say so what did you find out today? This video brought back some memories!
That's so kind, thank zou. Good memories too of how video games would just occasionally build little bridges. I had that experience too. They didn't last long, but sharing tips with the school bully at least let you see each other's humanity for a brief moment. Glad the video brought back memories and thanks too for sharing yours. That's why we're here! 🙂
and then sometimes your friend would troll you by giving out fake secrets that don't actually work and you waste hours trying to figure out before realizing that you've been duped. those were the days...
My friend knew a guy who knew someone that said when you beat Zelda 9 times, the world in round 10 was completely different. So of course we played the game relentlessly only to find it was bunk. But, those urban video game legends are what made those days so fun.
I hadn't heard that one! There were so many rumours around back then and there was no way for us to know what was real and what wasn't. A more mysterious time.
I didn't get a Nintendo until 1990. But my friends and I discovered it like it was a brand new game. Working together to explore - the truths and myths traded around on the playground.. those were great days. I beat it a year or two later. The internet ruined that for people now. It's kind of like the old PC RPG games. The point was to draw a map of your travels - I had all sorts of random sheets of graph paper laying around the computer mapping out a random town, or dungeon, or whatever... the internet has everything mapped out for you - like a GPS with Eddie Murphy from Delirious narrating the navigation. I miss those good ol' days....
Great video! Subscribed!!
Thanks! That sounds like a great time and yeah, you can't quite do it now. Streaming is the closest I've managed to get where you ask chat for advice rather than looking stuff up but it'll never be the same as it was back then. I can't imagine drawing my own map for a video game these days. Even just the temptation of being able to find everything online takes away a lot of the motivation to put in the work I think.
Why cant you just get the game and the manual it came with and just...play the game? Not only that, back in the day game magazines were really popular, and tons of people used the guides Nintendo made themselves in Nintendo Power. I actually just had a similar, pretty pure experience with Metroid and its original manual. I even drew my own map like the manual suggests. I think youre off base on this one.
That's funny because I agree with everything you said. 🙂
Back in the day whether it was friends or magazines we got enough information to draw our own maps and figure it out. These days I'm not going to have the fun of drawing my own map, I'm just going to download a map. Or watch a video. Or if one guide doesn't explain something clearly enough for me to understand rather than expend the energy figuring it out I'll find another guide. And I don't think that's entirely a me problem, I think that's a human problem and unless we're conscious of it we all to some degree ruin our own fun by getting too much information and not enough discovery. The problem is these days that it's very hard to find anything between basically a map with arrows on it telling you screen by screen where to go and "EASTMOST PENNINSULA IS THE SECRET".
@@TheRetroSofa Watch some players play then(Not the ones knowing everything). You will see things they thought and checked that you didn't but also things you got and did that they missed and they made wrong etc. Is similar to watching a friend play and seeing him do things differently and learning from it.
Just don't watch after the point you are in a game.
I do that when i feel very lost and stuck.
here's the thing
I love to play video games for escapism. I'm a 35 year old mom with an incredibly emotionally draining job... I live in Canada where Switch games cost $90 after taxes - that's a significant investment. I love exploring and figuring things out in games.... but I have limited "me" time and If I'm incredibly stuck on beating a monster or can't figure out what to do next... I'm gonna look it up.
Same, nothing wrong with that if you’ve given it a solid try first 😊
Absolutely. In Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe there's an interview with comedian Dara O'Briain where he says games are the only media that lock content you paid for if you're "not good enough". He's right and it's worth looking up. For someone who runs a video game channel I'm pretty bad at video games so I also feel no shame in using cheats, guides, or lower difficulty settings to get the maximum enjoyment out of the limited time and money I have available to spend on gaming. The difference is that you can't get a hint anymore, you can really only get the full solution. Sometimes I don't want a complete dungeon guide, I want "you'll find the item you need in a nearby cave to the north" and that's enough to figure out the rest myself.
Same! I, too, play games for escapism. Sometimes, it's just nice to leave the real world behind for a little bit.
Zelda was the game that truly took me on an adventure as a 9 year old kid and yes a bombed every stone wall and burned every possible bush. 😅😅❤. I sometimes forget how special that game was to me.
It's an incredibly special game and I'm lucky to have memories of it from when I was a kid as well. It was my nan's cartridge so I could only play it when we visited her. Maybe if I'd taken it home I'd have had more time to get into it.
This is great, I was the kid taking the notes digging in and figuring the game out. This is a fun informative well made video - subbed Thank you
Thanks! Glad you liked it and sounds like you had a great time with Zelda back in the day too.
I'm so happy you showed the map, the hint book, and mentioned the Nintendo hotline! I remember all of those vividly from when I was a kid playing A Link to the Past. Thanks for a great video!
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
I think the closest thing to Zelda today is Dark Souls. The way the game doesn't hold your hand, the sense of discovery and accomplishment when you find a new area or beat a boss.
Congratulations on channel monetization. Subscribed due to the DOOM SNES video AKA day one.
Thanks, and thanks for sticking around!
For me Tunic really captured the spirit of TLoZ1's cryptic world while giving you an equally crptic in-game guide. There's enough info in there that you dont need to go to the internet, but not enough info that it just tells you what to do.
Oh wow, that Super Metroid + LTTP randomizer looks sick
I remembered after posting this video that I really gotta play Tunic. And you really gotta play that randomiser because if you're familiar enough with both games to muddle your way through it's just a great time.
@@TheRetroSofa You REALLY gotta play it. It's absolutely wonderful
They have gone even further beyond with the randomizer combos recently my adding both Zelda 1 and metroid 1 to the game.
So its a lttp + super metroid + Zelda 1 + metroid 1 into a giant randomizer game
came here to say this. Tunic was so great (and manual and translations are available online for folks who DON'T want that experience), but it definitely brought me back to playing Zelda for the first time as a kid. I loved it, start to finish. I'd argue that's more like the original experience than a randomizer, since it's still a designed game, with puzzles that seem impossible...but all the information you need is in the game, and it's so rewarding figuring it out!
not saying randomizers aren't fun, but it feels like a different experience to me
SMZ3 can be lots of fun.
Entertaining editing and interesting commentary. Im glad youtube showed me this gem of a channel.
Thanks so much! Very kind of you to say.
Im 25 and i started collecting retro games this summer. I was always a zelda hater for a lot if reasons you described, but i saw a copy of this game at a shop and knew i had to pick it up. Something about playing it on the original cartridge is so different than the ported versions. My friend and I ended up giving a chance and we ended up immediately loving it and we went through and beat the whole game using knowledge we picked up over the years. So intead of a friend telling us at school, it was us remembering zelda references from 20 year old AVGN videos. We were strict with not using the Internet, but we did have to look up one thing to find a dungeon. Still, I feel like we did capture some of the magic of playing this game in the old days. The fact that you can enjoy it today for different reasons is a testament to its greatness.
That's really cool that you go to have the Zelda adventure with a friend in modern times. It sounds like an awesome experience and definitely like you captured the magic. It's a great game for sure but I feel like how much fun you have with it depends a whole lot on how you approach it and yours sounds pretty much spot on.
This is quite simply....
A git gud moment.
Not in an insulting way, but literal.
Ah yes but it's all about how you git gud and how we got gud back in the 80's was different to now.
1:58 had me dying😂😂😂
I beat Zelda about 5 years ago for the first time. And did it without following a guide, kind of. I had a friend that I knew wasn't going to play the game himself look up a guide, and when I got too stuck I'd tell him to point me in a direction or give me a vague hit. Still the way I play most games like this. No it's not the exact same, but it is closer.
It's not that you can't play it like it was done in the old days, it is that most people will choose not. Which is a shame, but I'm not going to police people on how they play games.
Oh yeah I'm not going to police anyone either. I'm lamenting a way of playing games that you don't get so much any more. Sounds like you found a good friend and a decent imitation of it. Play how you want to play but the problem I have is that what I think is the optimal way to play Legend of Zelda is no longer available to me. But at least we have randomisers. 🙂
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah. I think the biggest difference was back in the day we didn't have a choice, and now you have to actively make that choice. I wouldn't say the old ways are dead, but they are definitely 1000x more difficult to do. Because even if you want to play games that way you kind of need a community that also wants that experience.
woah! i remember so much what you’re talking about!! the first zelda… i had no clue… i spent years on that, hardly any friends were playing and they weren’t a big help either… i seriously ran around flaming every single bush on the map!! and with the blue flame that was! :D i asked my parents to translate useless dialogue because my english was ridiculous… well, i was 6… so what do you expect. also called the nintendo hotline a few times… i came pretty far i remember but i also just beat it about two decades later. games are played so differently these days… a complete guide already online before the game releases… we really enjoyed the golden days, man! so thankful for that! cheers!
Thanks for coming by and reminiscing with us in the comments! We had some persistance as kids! Today's gamers maybe not so much but we'll see. There'll always be joy in discovery.
Hi there - congratulations on getting monetized! I really, really enjoyed your video and I particularly love your unique take on it - not that the game itself is impossible to play, but that the original experience is impossible to get. I, too, play Link to the Past Randomizer (though I turn on the full boss randomizer as well) and I have played nearly 250 seeds and it is FUN. I also find it interesting that the pack-in items are gone too - when I open up a Switch game, it's just the cartridge in there and nothing else (though they still have the clips in the case for some reason). Well done, sir!
Thanks so much! I'm on SMZ3 randomiser right now but I've tried the boss randomiser and keysanity on ALTTPR too and they add a really fun extra layer. I miss pack-ins too and opening up Tunic's deluxe physical edition gave me so much joy. I recommend it, if you haven't already. I haven't even played the game yet really. I'm recommending the game solely on the experience of opening the box and looking at all the things.
Adventure for the Atari 2600 was the first open world game I'd ever played. The Legend of Zelda wouldn't come out for another 6 years, but in that short amount of time, the graphics and sound improved astronomically.
I do actually play Adventure (on real Atari, btw) to this day and it's always a great experience, on level 3. My 6yo kid also loves it and plays regularly. It's a 1980 game, but it's true timeless.
You did NOT seriously flashback to Gutenberg inventing the printing press, omg. NO. You're doing TH-cam WRONG.
0:32 😂
damn you, gutenberg!
The guy from the Police Academy movies? Huh...You learn something new every day...
It makes a lot of sense. It kinda reminds me of EU IV with the "institutions" system it has and has been having for some years now.
The printing press is in fact one of them. You get global trade at some point, manufacturies, finally industrialisation near the end... And each time, the text at the bottom reads "This changes everything..." and it really does. In-game, one needs to have those institutions present in their country to a certain degree before they can be "embraced", and doing that essentially allows to catch up with new technology. The way it spreads both naturally and can be sped up tries to emulate the spread of new information how it happened in the real world, and I think it works really nicely.
And really, the same principle applies here. When it comes to video games, magazines such as nintendo power could be viewed as an "institution" the same way as later the internet or youtube in particular is. (Funnily enough, with mods that allow the game - EU IV - to run until modern times, the internet itself is also one of those institutions)
So yeah. It makes perfect sense :D
You are correct about how we played this - my whole neighborhood was on the case. I was maybe 7 or 8. We would play together and separately. Nintendo power helped a little. And all of our hand drawn maps. So many maps.
Now I don't need a guide - it's all up in my head - I don't like to think of the knowledge I could have stored there instead. I can practically speed run it these days thanks to all of the secrets I remember.
That's really cool! Sounds like you got the optimal Legend of Zelda experience there and the one we'll never have again. Even my seven year old nephew is on TH-cam watching gameplay videos and one time we played some Super Mario World together and he was telling me where the hidden blocks were!
@@TheRetroSofa Thanks for this video, because until now, I didn't realize that I got the proper 1987 Zelda experience - I never played it on my own before I knew the answers, so I didn't even think about how hard it would have been without the gang.
Heh. Your experience sounds pretty cool. A lot different to my rural Australian one (except for the maps!)... 😅
My friends and I also hand drew the maps. Sadly my game cartridge got run over by a friend's older sibling that was mad at us for using up all the tv time.
@@kweejee Man, that sucks. Sounds like you were having a great time up until then!
My grandma loved Zelda. Beat it on her own, after countless hours, then beat the second quest the same way. She was so protective over the save and that cartridge she bought the kids their own.
My Zelda belonged to my nan but she was more into her Dr Mario. Your grandma sounds cool too.
My 10yo son would beg to differ. He started playing at seven and beat it by the age of nine. I gave him little help and didn’t let him look up info to help. Which is what he usually does w/ most games. He’s never been happier to beat a game.
As a child I had the help of a few friends. But this is how anyone w/ friends experienced it. We did it w/ all games. Beating Super Metroid in three days w/ my best friend is one of the best memories from my childhood. My sons get to experience this type of thing w/ each other.
He'd beg to differ but also you did help him a little. It sounds like you had a great time though and it's great that you're sharing these games with your sons and they can share games with each other. Good job on Super Metroid too. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I don't really get your argument. Why specifically THIS game? Why not any other open world game before or after it? Internet didn't spoil just this game it spoiled ANY game. Or rather it spoiled the experience of discovery.
Because this is the one I was playing when I realised. You're right though, this is true of lots of games.
@@TheRetroSofa This isn't true for any games. It is only true for certain people who need hand held to play a game or are incapable of preventing themselves from going and looking up stuff on the internet.
The games are just as playable today as they were intended to be as they were when they came out. It is the people that changed.
The internet has spoiled everything
You had to be there.
I played al caslevanias, but zelda is to criptyc for me. I can't get a hold what direction i need to go in or what the next target is. What item i need for what.
I can still play the original Zelda to this day without a problem. I just recommend a guide. Yes, the NES game didn't age well compared to later games like A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, or Breath of the Wild, but there's no denying that it was revolutionary for 1986.
Absolutely. My problem though is I followed a step-by-step guide to closely and I think I didn't enjoy it as much because of it. People in the 80's weren't playing it like that.
@@TheRetroSofa ...Yes, they were, guides existed. Zelda 1 was one of the first console games to get notable guide books. Even the manual had a basic walkthrough up to the 2nd dungeon. The resources that exist today existed back then in a different, less thorough form, but existed nonetheless.
@@cat_ann_ Okay sure some people were but guides were much rarer. I think the first paper guide I got for a game was Discworld II on PC. Up until that point I never had the money for guides and neither did any of my friends. Now you've got hundreds of guides for every game ever released in your pocket it's kind of different.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah and you need to use exactly 0% of those guides. You can just turn on a game and play it exactly how someone would in the 80s.
TLDW; @3:50 , Mahoney from Police Academy ruined Zelda.
We drew our map by hand on paper as we explored. Way more fun than using Nintendo magazine.
That's how it's done!
I actually just replayed this on my original Nintendo with my 5 year old. It was as killer as I remember it when it first came out. We had a blast, especially when he realized the 2nd play through was going to be more difficult.
That's so cool! Getting him started early!
This got my attention because I literally replayed this game earlier this year (not gonna lie, beat it hella fast - felt like it took forever when I was a kid)
A Link To The Past and Link's Awakening defined the series. The two NES games are, sadly, in my opinion both just a little *too* broad in scope, and a little *too* cryptic. I wouldn't go as far as to call them unplayable, mechanically they play well enough, but the game design lacks the finesse of the Super NES and Gameboy titles.
The gameplay of both the first Zelda games is pretty solid. The problem is they're hard to get into going blind and if you get a full guide you spoil the experience.
@@TheRetroSofa Nah, the gameplay of AoL is garbage. No wonder Miyamoto all but disowned it.
I can’t disagree more with you. If you lived in that time it was complete magic and the community involvement needed to complete the game was basically part of the game.
@@ender7278 Your opinion is what's garbage.
@@ender7278 It was trying to be more of an RPG sidescroller. Which just fundamentally doesn't play well. Especially with the relentless random battles on the overworld.
Your view is flawed. Just because you have all the information about the game available doesn't mean that you _must_ play the game using it. You can just try to explore the game on your own as far as you can until you can't figure out how to advance, and _then_ look up the answer to that from Internet and continue exploring without any additional information. That's what I did when I played it for the first time. So, not unplayable.
I don't know, I'm kind of glad the internet was there to finally solve Battletech the Crescent Hawks Inception communication room puzzle that kept me from beating it since 1992. I don''t regret the exploration of every inch of the map before that though, finding random villages every so often. Nor discovering for myself how you can hijack a Locust mech from the gladiator games by breaking down a wall and escapeing. And doing it again, because everyones face blind and security cameras aren't a thing apparently.
There is something to be said for everyone having access to everything they need to experience all corners of their games. I'm not saying things were better then, just different. I think you make the best of it by only opening the guide when you need to and resisting reading further than the current problem.
I went thru that game about a decade ago and I remember spending 20 hours on that puzzle but I got it in the end thru trial and error and luck. It is the most obtuse puzzle I have ever seen in a game.
@@jacobwilbers9852Yeah, that puzzle was cryptic. Simply finding the cache took forever, felt like a big achievement getting that far.
I came close to solving it I think, had the paper map and realized the star markings meant something. But for whatever reason couldn't set it up properly, either I kept messing a step or simply couldn't decipher the maps code properly.
I even went to the trouble of trying to trigger everything that was not starred, which took forever using an Apple II C.
I finished the original Zelda at age 42. And I found a very cool way to do it. I found a guide called "hand drawn game guide", by a bloke who does exactly that for a number of retro games.
The guide isn't thorough enough for you to just go from A to B, it's more a sense of following an ancient diary towards a treasure.
I highly recommend the experience.
That does sound fun and reminds me I still really need to play some more Tunic.
this is not a good take at all. Seems people have forgotten how to play games that don't hold your hand. Because a game doesn't hold your hand with markers and maps now doesn't make one that does not have this trash unplayable. randomizers have no real story therefore no point in playing them, I hate randomizers or procedurally generated worlds...just no fun for me at all.
The original Zelda experience is unplayable today, as in you literally cannot play it as kids played it in the 80's. Doesn't mean the game's bad or that markers are inherently good. No shame in playing games for the story. People look for different things in their games and that's great because it just means more games. 🙂
Nah, I don't agree. There is a line between games that are so cryptic that they either require outside help or have people - as some commenters said - use every item on every tile, on every section of the map over and over again. If you look at Zelda, just look at A Link to the Past. Yeah, it's a little more modern, but not by much, and they had already gotten rid of those problems.
Or indeed, the first two Final Fantasy games for the NES. With the first one in particular, there were SOME points that I deemed a little cryptic, but it was usually "talk to this person after you have done that", so it was much quicker and more natural to figure it out without help. And these two certainly didn't hold the player's hand - the GBA re-releases were much, much easier, but the NES versions are pretty brutal in comparison, both in comparison to the re-releases and compared to A Link to the Past.
On randomizers; I get why people like them. It's another layer of challenge, really. I personally hate RNG and try to avoid it when possible, so adding additional RNG is absolutely not for me, either.
@@MarkKatz2772-jg3tc I figured out the first Final Fantasy myself but didn't get far in Final Fantasy 2. This was years after they came out of course because Europe didn't get JRPG's. The only Final Fantasy we had back in the day was Mystic Quest and it didn't even say Final Fantasy on the box.
I like how A Link To The Past Randomiser avoids RNG. If you play the same seed as someone else (like the Reddit weekly challenges or whatever), you get the same experience. Agahnim will always put out the same number of blue balls and it's always the same number of digs to find the item in the digging game. That sort of thing. I get what you mean though it's trickier to play against yourself and know whether you did better or not.
The original Legend of Zelda, you either had to figure out all this on your own, take a friend who had gotten far in the game's word, or read the manual (which is why that game's manual is a big collector's item) to figure stuff out. Ocarina of Time was also like that for me as it was my first Zelda and I spent literal days trying to figure out the Water and Shadow temples each.
The Water Temple was a nightmare for me to figure out too. 🌊🏛🤯
Forest temple really messed with my head needing to hookshot onto distant ceilings and chests, squinting into a tiny crt with terrible draw distance. The repeating hypnotic music certainly didn't help either.
Zelda 1 was definitely a product of its time. A time when we would play the same games over and over again, meaning trial and error, rumours at school, and magazines would help get us through games like this. It's historically significant but not worth playing beyond that
I take your point but it is still a great game if you can find a crew and some old copies of Nintendo Power and nothing else. A tall order in 2024, though!
Having had my own copy of Gold and I understand the hours of my life these machines devoured. But do not discredit the relief of escape this game can hold.
My first open world game was The Black Cauldron on an x286 using 5.25 floppy disks in monochrome.
Zelda on NES was such next gen.
-OLD SCHOOL GAMER
At the time it was! Zelda and Metroid felt like big leaps in what was possible with video games.
The Gutenberg line made me think we were going to talk about how vital the manual was to the self discovery experience of TLOZ. For anyone who hasn’t played it yet, Tunic is an amazing game, very much a spiritual successor to TLOZ. It even has an in game manual that you collect pages of that reveal more information and secrets of the game.
I've quit the new Zelda after two dungeons and gone back to Tunic. I'm enjoying it more I think. Really only just got started with it though so no spoilers! Looks great though. Mysterious in a way that few modern games are.
The printing press was actually invented in China centuries before Guttenburg
Thanks. Correction added at the top of the description.
@@TheRetroSofa
I think there is a slight debate on this…
Earliest form of printing actually goes back to Korea apparently. It was block printing.
China also used block printing, a few centuries later.
But it wasn’t a printing press (a machine for printing). More like “stamping” with a tray of stamps which had to be manually stamped on the page. Yes stamping is technically pressing but press in Gutenberg sense was relating to a machine (there were other kinds of presses like pneumatic presses/hydraulic oresses etc for crushing rock, punching presses for making holes in something etc, or whatever. Block Printing was brought over to Europe by the Marco Polo and was used in Europe for almost a century before Gutenberg.
Block printing was single use and each block has to be hand made so it was rather slow process…
Chinese upgrades that with movable type which was reusable but process bur still functioned as a stamp rather than a machine. As far as I understand it… still slow process and inconvenient..
Both of these were a slow process and inconsistent since the stamps didn’t always press on paper with same amount of ink in consistent layers. So this was used more for personal scrolls and documents but not particularly useful for speeding the printed word to populous.
Gutenberg’s invention was taking the stamps but adding them to a mechanical press machine making it slightly more automated and consistent so mass printing became viable and allowing reading to spread to the masses.
If they had copyrights back then printing press would be considered an evolution of earlier technologies but printing press itself would be more like a brand name of a new technology.
@@Catman498 I'm not a historian but I have spent about ten minutes on Google and Wikipedia so I'm an expert now and you're right it's not clear. From what I can make out, Korea had block printing first then China invented movable type printing but it was a manual rather than mechanical process. What Gutenberg effectively did was to create a mechanical version of what Bi Sheng had done, which was made much simpler by having a much smaller alphabet. Before Gutenberg, printing in China and Korea was already using metal types. Sejong the Great came up with a Korean alphabet with only 24 characters which would have been great for printing but the cultural elite were appalled so it never happened. That would have been like 30-40 years before Gutenberg's press.
My view on it is that we all learn in Europe that Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press and stop there when there's a strong argument that he only mechanised a process that was already working in China and Korea. And I reckon if Korea's cultural elite weren't such arseholes Sejong the Great would have beaten him to it. Point is in the west we've been historically pretty bad for nicking eastern inventions and passing them off as our own and I think it's reasonable that I give Bi Sheng a shout-out.
Anyway this is way more about the history of printing than I need to know for a video about Zelda. All I need to know is who we blame for the easy availability of walkthroughs and I reckon it's split evenly between Johannes Gutenberg, Bi Sheng, and Tim Berners-Lee. The dicks.
@@TheRetroSofa
I’m an archaeologist so definitely a bit more concerned with directions and influences of technology. If Marco hadn’t brought printing in general to Europe it would have been decades/centuries before Europe had it… well probably would have been other exporers too. But Marco was the one who brought Chinese influence for alot of things to Europe.
Not even parallel technology development in which two or more cultures end up with the same thing without any interaction which both cultures can be said to have invented it separately…. Just flat out evolution from Chinese into the European… different groups improving on other persons inventions.
Definitely beat this in 87 as a 10 year old without assistance. Took about 3 months and included me drawing a literal map of the game. It was one of the best gaming experiences of my life, followed by Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6, and Link to the Past.
Makes me glad that the zelda 1 redux romhack exists, fixes a bunch of bugs, add cracks to walls and slight blemishes to bushes, you can completely beat it guide-free.
I haven't tried it but that sounds like a good idea. There's a Zelda 2 Redux too that I've played a bit.
I was born in 2002, I still remember the day my uncle gave us all of his old NES stuff. I loved the original Zelda, but probably only because I was lucky enough to get the NES Game Atlas with it. Just as cryptic as it was in the 80s!
Sounds like a cool uncle!
That meow at the end came from the heart.
I'm trying to think back to when I recorded this and whether it might be near feeding time but I don't think it matters. Minerva's needy 24/7. ❤️🐱
I had my crew, and I beat the game as a child. I remember how they told me about where to find various objects and secrets. That was fun times.
No. The original Zelda is never unplayable. You either can play it cause ur not a noob or you just suck. 😂
You didn't watch much of the video before leaving your comment but that's cool. You don't have to. You're welcome to just come to the comments of my videos and just say what you want to say.
Wow a click bait title to tell everybody something they already know.
Classic
This brings up a point thats even more important now. Imagine a game like Elden Ring (Basically a modern "Zelda") without the internet. You'd have a drastically different experience than what most players are having with all these youtube videos giving them help. It makes you wonder if all these crutches are changing the experience for the worse.
They're changing it for the different, and that in turn affects how games are designed. It's not strictly worse I don't think but there's definitely a feeling of having lost something.
@@TheRetroSofa Maybe too much rush to finish a game rather than "experience" the game.
I think it absolutely still holds up today. I play it regularly and it never disappoints. My 10 year old son loves it too.
That's awesome. Does he come to you for help or are you playing it through with him?
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah we play together! Younger brains can't handle old games 😅 He did complete BOTW and TOTK pretty much by himself though!
@@dimitrinicomanis Sweet! He's well on his way to being a gamer. My nephew's 8 and he's a big fan of Mario and I'm hoping to introduce him to A Link To The Past some day.
I don't believe a single person in this comment section making the claim that they "beat the game when it released without a guide." Complete and utter BS.
Yeah for real. When they were 8. Loool
@@cosettapessa6417 Absolutely
I dunno, some kids have a lot of time and patience when they're obsessed with something. I remember once at school drawing all the collectables in every Mario game that existed at the time and someone saw me drawing the heart from Super Mario Bros. 2 and went "look everyone Bill's drawing hearts" and of course at the time I was explaining to everyone "no no no it's a Mario power-up so I *have* to draw it" but boys should draw hearts if they want idc.
What were we talking about?
@@TheRetroSofa The difference between those other game mentioned and LoZ, is those games were either much simpler in design, didn't require the finding of secrets to "power up" and weren't vague in their basic instructions. I still doubt anyone who completed the game without the Nintendo Power issue with the walkthrough, bought the Tips and Tactics guide or had rich parents and just called the hotline.
@@JoesGuylots of kids did. But there was a lot of being helped by friends. Discussion at recess etc. it was so common to do that in 86-88
At 4:12 German text 😀: "Die Kunst des Setzers zeigt sich im optischen Ausgleich der Zeilen." which means in English: "The skill of the type setter shows up with the optical balance of the lines."
They thought about what text to have in there for the demonstration!
I spent nearly a year in the hospital when I was little. The staff was kind enough to bring me a NES and many games. Zelda being the one that caught my interest the most because they told me no one they knew had completed it. I had took it as a challenge, spending most of my time exploring and making notes and maps of various things I had explored. Even down to what npcs I had spoken with said when I last talked to them. Took me nearly 8 months but I completed the game. There were no ways outside of calling the Nintendo tip line which I couldn't do from the hospital anyways. Remains my most fond/agonizing memory to this day!
Obviously being stuck in the hospital sucks but that's still a cool story. I've supported Child's Play in the past and would do so again because I bet having Zelda made your recuperation much easier. I'll see if I can do a fundraiser for them when my channel's big enough to do fundraisers.
Congrats on taking the challenge and beating it. Taking copious notes is a great way of brute-forcing your way through it and I bet a really rewarding way to play.
I really liked this video and thought that the title was a smart way to farm more views. Subscribed.
Thanks!
my dad, older brother, and i made comprehensive notes and hand drawn maps together of the original zelda. we had two NESes and two copies of zelda and played them together to find every secret. though we did it in the early 2000s, we still at that time didnt have internet access so we had to discover everything on our own
That sounds like a really cool way to play through it and experience it together. Thanks for sharing the memories.
Great video my dude! I wish you the brightest of futures with this channel!
Actually, I'd like to raise you with "Outer Wilds" or "Tunic". Games that teach you things / mechanics / techniques during your playthrough. These were always possible, you just did not know them.
While yes you could look up play throughs, the Community is keeping everything vague and gives coded hints, if asked. And I would not have it any other way!
I have started Tunic! I'm not very far into it yet but a lot of people have recommended it and I'm looking forward to getting some more time with it. Thanks for your kind comments.
@@TheRetroSofa then I won't spoil too much and wish you a lot of fun. :)
Maybe we will see a video on these two (or more?) games? The term metroid-brainia comed to mind.
I really like your discussion on the points of a collective beating a game asynchroniously.
Maybe a modern evolution on this is the ARG?
Maybe in part since they cannot directly be data-mined?
Interesting thoughts...
@@ToSMaster12345 Thanks! I could have gone into ARG's when I mentioned escape rooms. It's one way of doing a communal gaming experience on a larger scale I guess. You'll see me do a video on Tunic when it's retro. 😉
just subbed! love your content!
Thanks for the sub!
I had never really thought about the points your making till this. I was lucky, my Grandma started me into video games with her ColecoVision. When we purchased our NES, I had 3 siblings. mother, aunt, and grandmother who would all get together and game for hours. The Lolo games made for seemingly endless nights of group frustration. Thanks for the video, brought up some great old memories.
That's why we're here. Thanks for sharing your memories. You were lucky indeed. As was I with my nan, who originally owned this copy of Zelda, bringing all the cousins together to play every Sunday at her house.
"Unplayable"- Puts game in NES, starts playing.
Now, the"crew" is my sketchy memory of beating it 25 years ago.
That's a valid crew and it's how I like to replay a lot of games.
Outstanding. Subbed!
Much appreciated!
Great video, my man!
Thanks!
Its funny you mentioned this game. I was just playing it.
I had a similar experience with Diddy Kong Racing.
I could not for the life of me beat the "final" boss, Wizpig, he was running faster than my car.
Turns out that the way to beat him (spoiler alert) is to release the accelerator when driving over boosters, which gives you a super-boost.
I would never have thought to release the accelerator to go faster, and only managed to beat him over a decade later after reading about the booster trick online.
My mind was blown when I beat him AND IT WASN'T EVEN THE FINAL BOSS RACE! There was an entire new space-themed world after that.
I had the same experience! Diddy Kong Racing was *brutal*.
It reminds me of how we can't watch TV shows the same way anymore.
In the past, new episodes would come out weekly (or longer). So between new episodes, we would discuss endlessly with friends and on forums our theories on what would happen next.
Now with today's binge-watching, instant gratification streaming landscape, a whole season can be watched in a single day or weekend. And people don't experience TV episodes at the same time anymore, some choosing to wait sometime until a whole season is finished so they can binge watch it all at once.
I'm not an old head complaining about technology though, lol. Streaming is so much better in almost every way.
I know what you mean. Nowadays when I talk about a new TV show with someone it goes like "Have you watched X?" "Yeah it's great isn't it! Binged the whole thing. Hell of an ending!" and then where do you go from that? I miss the group speculation of linear TV.