On August 22, 1987, Nintendo brought The Legend of Zelda to North American shelves for the NES, more than a year after it had already taken off in Japan. Players unwrapped a box with a corner cut away to show off a shiny gold cartridge inside — an unusual bit of packaging that made the game instantly recognizable and turned it into a must-have status symbol among kids trading tips on the playground.
The game itself was just as big a departure. Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, who were building it alongside Super Mario Bros. at the same time, Zelda deliberately went the opposite direction from Mario’s linear level-by-level structure. Instead, it dropped players into an open world of Hyrule they could explore in almost any order, hunting for secrets, dungeons, and upgrades at their own pace. That freedom, paired with a battery inside the cartridge that could actually save your progress — a rarity at the time, when most games made you write down a password — meant a sprawling adventure no longer had to be finished in one sitting. It’s a small piece of engineering that changed what a home console game could ask of a player.
The gamble paid off in a big way: Zelda became the first NES game to sell over a million cartridges in the U.S. in 1987 alone, and it went on to move more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. It’s since been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame and is routinely named among the most influential games ever made, spawning a franchise that’s still going strong nearly four decades later.
Also on this day: August 22, 1989 saw Voyager 2 return images confirming that Neptune has its own system of rings, just days before the spacecraft’s historic close flyby of the planet.
Source: Wikipedia — The Legend of Zelda (video game), Time Extension
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
