Some of the original concept art for the first Legend of Zelda game was dug up and released recently. It’s pretty cool, actually, to get a look into the design process–especially since a lot of the elements, especially  the monster and item sheet, are still referenced for the Zelda series nowadays.

According to them, working on this project felt like getting together at an after-school club. I want their job.

Gaming history: looks like something every kid gamer has in their drawing book.

It’s interesting to see how the dungeon designs, etc, developed — the older Zelda games, especially the N64 ones, have some of the most complex and interesting dungeon layouts I’ve seen in a roleplaying game. I don’t think I ever got bored, or felt like I was “grinding out” a dungeon, thanks to the amount of puzzles and things.

When you think about it, they’re pretty repetitive — go into the dungeon, get a map, get a compass, kill a middle boss, get a boss key, kill a boss. But it didn’t feel repetitive.

Except for every single water-themed dungeon. Fuck you, Great Bay.

Items and enemies, looks like it's showing relative tile size, I think.

Apparently Ganon’s original/working name was Hakkai – like the pig character from Saiyuki. Which makes sense, because…well, he looks like a pig.

Part of the overworld map. I wish I'd been able to find a larger scan.

Tezuka and Miyamoto would get long sheets of paper, and sit side-by-side and draw. And that’s how they came up with the world map. Here’s a slightly larger/longer version.

Above are the first dungeon maps for The Legend of Zelda. Due to the limited data capacity of the NES, all the dungeons had to be laid out sort of like a jigsaw puzzle — using one square per room, so everything fit together with the least amount of space wasted.

When it came time to put them together, Tezuka made a mistake and only used half the data. Miyamoto liked it the way it was, so they recycled the leftover data and made the Second Quest — if he hadn’t screwed up, there wouldn’t be one!

The first map shows the original dungeons, the second map is the Second Quest map (after completing the game the first time, the Second Quest allowed you to replay it with greater difficulty).

You can see what they at Nintendo had to say about it in this issue of Iwata Asks.