Hyrule and the Master Sword: A Legend of Zelda Quiz

Trivia Quizzes Video Games

The first screen of The Legend of Zelda offers a field, four exits and no instructions. Walking into a cave produces an old man, a sword and a line about the danger outside, after which the game stops explaining itself. Hyrule is a grid of screens containing nine labyrinths, several of them hidden well enough that finding one counts as an achievement, and the tools recovered inside open routes elsewhere. Link is the boy doing the walking, Zelda is the princess holding one part of the Triforce, and Ganon is the thing at the end holding the other.

The game arrived in Japan in February 1986 on the Famicom Disk System, a peripheral that used rewritable magnetic disks, and reached North America the following year in a gold coloured cartridge with a battery soldered inside it. That battery is the reason the design works at all. Console games of the period had to be finished in one sitting or resumed from a written password, and a saved file meant a player could be dropped into a world too large to map in an evening. Shigeru Miyamoto has traced the structure back to his childhood outside Kyoto, where he explored hillsides, a lake and a cave he went into with a lantern. The princess took her name from Zelda Fitzgerald.

Ocarina of Time moved all of it into three dimensions in 1998 and solved the resulting camera problem with Z targeting, a lock-on system that let a player circle an enemy while still facing it, which many action games copied afterwards. The ocarina made music into a control input, with six songs warping Link across Hyrule and others changing the weather or the time of day. Koji Kondo scored it. He had assembled the series title theme overnight back in 1986, arranging it out of overworld music he had already written, after a plan to put Ravel's Bolero on the title screen collapsed over its copyright status. Epona, the horse Link raises and calls with a tune, arrived in the same game.

Each entry since has broken a different assumption. Majora's Mask put the same engine under a three day countdown to the end of the world and made the player repeat those days while learning the schedule of everyone in town. The Wind Waker flooded Hyrule and replaced the fields with an ocean and a talking sailboat, its cel shaded characters causing a public argument on release and looking better than their contemporaries two decades later. Twilight Princess turned Link into a wolf and gave him Midna, an imp riding on his back who does most of the thinking. Skyward Sword put the land in the sky and the sword in the form of Fi.

Breath of the Wild launched the Nintendo Switch in March 2017 and went back to the 1986 design on purpose. Climbing was made possible on nearly every surface, physics and weather were built to interact with each other and with the player's equipment, and the four main objectives were made available in any order, including immediately. The Sheikah Slate handles the map, the scanning and the abilities that replace half of a traditional inventory. Nintendo has published every game in the series and developed most of them in house, handing a few, among them the Oracle pair and several remakes, to outside studios. The official chronology tying the games together was not printed until 2011, twenty-five years after that first cave. Answers are collected below the quiz itself.