[News] Feature: The Legend Of Zelda Is The Robinson Crusoe Of Video Games

[#Drennn.]

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, we're running a series of features looking at a specific aspect — a theme, character, mechanic, location, memory or something else entirely — from each of the mainline Zelda games. Today, Alan looks back at the game which laid the groundwork not just for the series, but a whole new style of video game thirty-five years ago today... Here’s some free advice: don’t ever get caught in the mired mixed-medium comparison game. You know, it’s whenever someone says “X is the X of X”. (Dark Souls to the front of line, please.) There may be a morsel of insight to mine from equating one unrelated milestone to another, but considering the burden of context every art piece, every packaged-together idea carries with it, usually you only end up with a metaphor collapsed in on itself. Yet, here I go. Am I looking forward to the literary essay rebuttal to this piece? No, I am not. The Legend of Zelda (1986) for the NES is the Robinson Crusoe (1719) of video games. Robinson Crusoe, yes, the 300-year-old text by Daniel Defoe, is a rollicking story of an adventuresome Englishman. It’s about a dude wrecking ships all over the ocean while looking down the barrel of misadventure, then getting stranded for decades on some remote island fraught with whatever monsters, people, and inhumanities the English mind could conjure at the time. As Crusoe was written as a first person account mimicking the tone of a letter or a diary, it stretched the minds of the Western hemisphere reader, confusing 18th century literaries into actually believing it was a true story. In doing so, the book blazed forth a new sub-genre: “realism in fiction”. As follows in the high school texts, it inspired endless imitation, was republished untold times, and is routinely cited and debated to pretty much be the first English novel.

  

Here’s the first problem with this comparison: the original Legend of Zelda stars nobody. Well, it technically stars a green sprite with little to nothing in the way of exposition, other than, apparently, it’s dangerous to go alone. The whole story fits on one page. Meanwhile, the titular Crusoe has a whole book of elaborated motivation (never mind the book’s frothing imperialist overtones and xenophobic strokes). And anyway, Zelda was written with more of a medieval backdrop, and it’s always had kind of a Tolkien vibe. But before we move away from this tortured analogy, here’s the point: while Crusoe may have been a character inhabited, by critically shifting the literary perspective to the first person, then combining that with a story-driven narrative just believable enough, it allowed readers to hop into Crusoe’s shoes, you might say much the same way players pick up a sword in Zelda. Without much of anything providing conflict between Crusoe’s thoughts and his actions, when you’re reading that book, you may as well be sailing those waters yourself. 265-odd years after that seismic shift, The Legend of Zelda for the NES, more than anything else of that time, stands tall as the inherent promise of video games delivered; it puts you in the vantage point of somebody else with the explicit means of gaining a new experience, but then you get to control them. The original game arguably pulled this off more effectively than any single game before itself, and remarkably, still is quite potent in 2021. Really, it is.