

The first Zelda hit the market a few months after Super Mario Bros but the two games were far apart on the gaming spectrum.

“It was something of a pioneer of what open-world games would become.” “The scale of the game was huge at a time when most games were finished in an hour or two,” said Kiyoshi Tane, an author specialising in the history of video games. The first episode, The Legend of Zelda, plunged gamers into an unknown universe largely without instructions.Ĭreator Shigeru Miyamoto, who also gave life to Mario, was inspired by his childhood explorations of the Japanese countryside to offer a landscape of forests, lakes, caves and mountains. Yet the franchise’s 1980s launch was something of a gamble for a company then best known for Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. “Knowing that there is a sequel, which is coming out in an hour or a little less, it’s just incredible, it just makes me so happy.”Ĭlips circulating on the internet racked up millions of views before the release and the game was expected to be “by far the biggest contributor to Nintendo’s sales this year”, said Serkan Toto, an analyst at Kantan Games. “When ‘Breath of the Wild’ came out, it was a real revolution in the world of games,” he added, referring to the 2017 instalment of the saga.

“I’m going crazy actually because it’s been six years that we’ve been waiting for this game,” 19-year-old Taylor Meguira told the AFP news agency as he waited in line. They streamed in – some clutching Link toys or wearing elfin ears – to snap up the saga’s latest instalment, Tears of the Kingdom. In Paris, fans who lined up late at night applauded as a shop opened. The series featuring the exploits of Princess Zelda and the elf-like warrior Link has sold 125 million copies worldwide since its first edition in 1986.īut its main challenge this year will be to boost earnings for the Japanese gaming giant and prolong the life of its Switch console, which experts say is in its dotage after seven years on the shelves.

A six-year wait has come to an end for “Zelda” fans across the world following Nintendo’s release of the long-awaited next instalment of its 40-year-old gaming saga.
