“Don’t despair. With a little luck and a lot of courage, you’ll conquer your adversaries, unite the Triforce fragments and unravel the mystery of the Legend of Zelda!”

Like Super Mario Bros. (1985) from the previous year, The Legend of Zelda drops the player into the game world without much fuss and quickly teaches them the ropes through smart level design instead of enervating tutorials. Try any of the three initial pathways and you’ll encounter enemies that you cannot attack. In fact, the buttons you’d expect to press to fire a weapon or the like do absolutely nothing. If you bum-rush the curious looking adversaries, you’re bound to die, but that’s okay because you’ll just be transported back to that initial fork in the road. This isn’t one of those games that forces you to start from the beginning every time (the first such console game thanks to an internal battery on the cartridge). Anyway, so you backtrack or respawn and try the little cave instead. Ah, yes, a sword. Thank you Sword-Giving Old Man. Now, let’s try those attack buttons again. Perfect. Time to go explore Hyrule in earnest.

And to be sure, exploration is the key thing here. Combat is smooth but basic, and the elemental fantasy aesthetic is memorable, but it’s the level design and lack of hand-holding that ensure players will spend many hours as the elfish Link, navigating through the dungeons of Hyrule and battling a variety of monsters as they seek to collect Triforce fragments. Though I’ve not yet played most of the other games in the series, it appears that the majority of the franchise’s fundamental building blocks are already present in the original game—bows and arrows, bombs, boomerangs, environmental puzzles, magical musical instruments… I believe a few of the bosses even reappear in later titles. Not to mention that the entire map is open to the player from the start or the game’s unique, pleasurable sense of dread, characterized by allies hiding out in cramped grottos and savage devils prowling around the overworld. (I have read, but have not verified, that the game is so open-ended that players can confront the final boss without ever picking up a sword.)

While that freedom to explore is extremely rewarding, it has its downsides. Chief among them is that a player going in blind will certainly be forced to resort to a walkthrough. This is not a fault of the game itself, per se, although the in-game hints are frustratingly vague and the secrets not just hidden but totally obscured (which means finding them often comes down to trial and error, or google, rather than intuition or attention to detail). The manual gives you a lot of information and moseying around finding hidden rooms is part of the game’s appeal. But another part of its appeal when it initially came out was that the player could make a little bit of progress, find a secret or two, and then share their insights with their friends, who had made different discoveries. That’s perfect for a game that millions of people are playing all at once without access to online forums, but I was not yet a twinkle in my daddy’s eye during the NES days, and so without the communal aspect I found myself looking up hints a little more frequently than I’d like to admit.

Though it shows its age in a number of areas, The Legend of Zelda is by no means obsolete, and has been too massively influential on the videogame medium for its reputation as a foundational title to dwindle in any significant way.