When Zelda first was released on the NES in the mid-80's this was something that nobody in the world had ever seen the likes of before. I think it was quite a gamble on the part of Nintendo back in those days because they didn't really have any reason to think that it would be successful but then gain, the Nintendo in general was a gamble as well because up to that point videogames were mostly arcade style games that were short and had replay value based on getting high scores. In Zelda, there was no score, which seems just normal now but back in those times it was still a major part of gameplay.
So when a game came out that was complete with a very odd and mysterious ad campaign, we didn't really know what to make of it.
The Zelda game that we got with our cold cartridge was for most of us, something we had never experienced before and for me and everyone else that I knew, this was a wonderful turning of the page as far as gaming in general was concerned.
A lot can change over the course of 30 years and the image above comes from an article in the Japan Times that I think many older gamers would really enjoy reading. You can check it out here if you want a trip down gaming history lane.
But I don't want to get into analyzing the work of someone else. I want to look at my own experience and how massive the original Zelda game was and how amazingly small that world was compared to more recent Zelda games, even the ones that existed in the past 20 years.
Take a look at this map that I actually had as a paper copy when I was a young kid. This, compared to other games I had played up to that point, was absolutely huge. Now, looking back on it, that is pathetically small in comparison to the wildly huge worlds we are dealing with in games like Tears of the Kingdom.
The above is an original paper map that came with all of the original Zelda games and I know that this is an important piece of history because that piece of relative trash, which isn't even in very good shape, is regularly selling for $50 to $100 on ebay. An original and unopened NES Zelda game is a very rare treat and in 2021 one of these was sold at auction for a staggering $870,000. Wow! There are some collectors out there with some serious money.
Getting back to how massive the game worlds are these days, I think that the scope of something like Tears of the Kingdom would have given Zelda's brainchild, Shigeru Miyamoto, an aneurism of delight to think that his invention would grow to something so huge in the future. When the game was first designed, this tiny world of Hyrule was something so massive that it hadn't really been attempted before in gaming, and I think that is the reason why NES' Zelda will forever be in the history books as something extremely important. It is easy to assume that someone else would have made something similar had it not been for Miyamoto, but someone had to be first and in this case, it was him.
The original NES game is estimated and agree by gaming historians to represent about 225 square kilometers. The Hyrule that we see in Tears of the Kingdom on the other hand, is estimated by those same historians to be 86,000 square kilometers... and this is just the area on the ground. Once we factor in the depths and the sky kingdom, it is significantly larger.
Creating something on that scale in 1986 technically would have been possible, but when you consider that the cartridge was already pushing the limits of storage space available at the time, it wouldn't have been commercially possible to create something that huge at the time. If someone had tried to do so using the tech that was available in the 80's they would probably still be in development to this day. The dev time of NES' Zelda was already several years, even though by comparison to today, it was a very small world indeed.
Some extreme gamer did some complicated math to determine how long it would take for Link to walk from the north west of the map to the south east of the map and it was determined this would take about 2 and a half hours if there were no barriers. There are barriers in the game so it would actually take substantially longer than that. I wouldn't suggest anyone actually try to do that and I am certainly not going to do so but isn't it just wild that the game is this magnificently huge?
Looking back on the original Zelda game, we had absolutely zero concept of how massive games were going to become in the future. Hell, the original Zelda had a way of fast traveling and looking back that just seems absurd when you consider how minute the map is in comparison to the most recent Zelda game. There are other games whose world map is substantially larger than Hyrule is by a lot as well.
When you exclude games that are theoretically infinite such as Minecraft or No Man's SKy, the largest map in any game is Elite Dangerous whose map cannot be specifically determined, but is estimated to be around 400 billion star systems that all contain various planets with their own landmass that is largely explorable. In my mind that is too big and it is part of the reason why I have never played any of those games.
It was really fun to be alive when gaming took off in the 80's. If you are younger, and I presume a lot of you are, you have probably never known the extreme limitations that we had in the mid 80's or even worse, in the early 80's. We didn't mind it at the time because we didn't know any better. The way that games are now though has me wondering what sort of wonders we will see in 20 years from now. I think "how can the games possibly get any bigger?" but that is a silly way to think because we said the exact same thing back in the 80's.
I hope I live long enough to see what the next step is because at the way that technology is growing, it is likely going to be something inconceivable to us right now.