You have to be right around the "perfect" age to really relate to what I am going to say here. Back in the 80's there wasn't really a massive group of gamers anywhere on the planet and if there was, they were probably referring to table-top games or D&D. Gaming up to the point of the mid-80's was something that we all enjoyed, but it hadn't yet become much of a lifestyle. It certainly was not the all-encompassing segment of consumerism the way that is it today.
Most games on earlier systems all kind of seemed the same with minor differences. Sure there were a few standouts on the Atari-2600 but for the most part every game on that console seemed to have a lot in common with many of the others. RPG's or action-RPG's were something that only a select few had ever really played because we simply didn't have the storage capacity at the time. There were a few people that enjoyed RPG's on PC but honestly, computers were something that you didn't often see anywhere back in those days. So when one day a game called "The Legend of Zelda" started to be advertised and eventually became available, most of us didn't really know what to make of it.
The gold cartridge was almost enough of a selling point on its own because to my knowledge, there were no other tames like this at the time. All NES games were grey with a sticker on it so Zelda really stood out from the pack.
When you first started playing, people around my age - or really anyone else I would imagine, didn't really know what to make of what we were seeing at first.
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If you know, you know
The game just starts you out in this field and you are presented with directions to go in, there isn't until far later in the game anything that is really preventing you from going any way that you want. This was in stark contrast to the almost completely linear way in which almost any other game had operated up to that point. Although small by today's standards, the map was absolutely huge and since there was no internet, we had to rely on our own memories about the layouts especially once you went beyond the boundaries of the included paper map.
I can distinctly remember going over to friends' houses and seeing how they had penciled in crude additions to the squares that were blank when you first opened the pack. There were also a relatively high number of dungeons that the pack didn't include any maps of so if you wanted to master those, you either had to draw your own manually or just have one hell of a memory.
In a way this was the first "open world" game that any of us had ever played. There was nothing stopping you from going to almost any part of the map that you wanted even though this ran the risk of you being seriously underpowered. The game wasn't linear and if you look through the history of the game you will see that the dev team that worked on the game was encouraging to make the game more linear because the testers kept getting lost. Thankfully, the head designer did not budge on his original idea and as it turns out that is what made Zelda so special. We would talk about it in school and get together and exchange tricks and tips. Keep in mind there was no YouTube at the time, so if you got stuck somewhere, you were just stuck until you figured it out.
There was also a ton of stuff that could be discovered by burning trees using the candle item, and also simply by pushing rocks, gravestones, and statues. This would probably drive people a bit nuts today but I am quite certain that me and everyone else I knew that was into NES at the time probably burned and pushed anything that we possibly could in the hopes that we would hear that wonderful sound that let us know we had found something secret. Of course it wasn't mandatory that you find any of these things and that was part of what made the discovery so awesome.
Looking back at my time in gaming I think this was the first time that I was just completely engrossed in a game. I played it for hours a day and would even dream about it. The conversation about the game dominated the playground chat and even after defeating it most of us went and decided to play through the entire thing again. This was not something that you generally did with other games on the NES and most of the games that came before were "high score" games that never actually ended anyway.
I don't know of Zelda was ever considered a risky release. I suppose it could have been because the actual cartridge was considerably more expensive to produce because it had an extra RAM chip on it as well as the first on-board battery to allow for easy saving of games. Prior to that, if you had anything that resembled an RPG you would be subjected to writing down massive codes to save your progress. Lose that piece of paper or have sloppy handwriting and all your progress would be lost.
I have had some wonderful experiences with various games throughout the years but I honestly think that The Legend of Zelda was the first one that completely caught and kept my attention from start to finish. There was literally never a dull moment in this amazing game and it deserves its place at the top of most lists as one of the best games ever made. It's old as hell now and of course has been completely surpassed in all technological ways but there was a time when this one game was something that completely changed how a lot of people felt about video games. What a glorious time to have been just the right age to completely appreciate it!