Early Nintendo was a madhouse: "It was very difficult to finish Mario and then get the Mario programmers involved in the final push to finish The Legend of Zelda"

Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto recalls that early Nintendo was a bit of a madhouse, with Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda – which he also created – being in development at the same time.

Speaking during a Q&A included with the 1994 audio CD The Legend of Zelda: Sound and Drama (and surfaced via Retro Gamer's 40 years of The Legend of Zelda issue) Miyamoto recalls, "We had started development on Super Mario Bros shortly before [starting on LoZ in 1984], so we were extremely busy with planning, with the two projects progressing simultaneously." He explains, "It was very difficult to finish Mario and then get the Mario programmers involved in the final push to finish The Legend of Zelda."

Super Mario Bros – as revolutionary as it is – is pretty simple to grasp, whereas the first Zelda can be real obtuse at times, even if you take a wrong turn on the first screen you'll be left without a sword. This was something Miyamoto and the development team were conscious of, with the developer recalling "We were worried that people wouldn't know what to do, even at the beginning of the game, and the game wouldn't be well received."

Miyamoto explains, "I wanted to create a game where the player understands the history and nature of the land, and it feels like they're exploring." He adds, "In traditional RPGs, the game progresses solely through dialogue, but we wanted the player to interact with the game world using the controller, and conquer dungeons using a simple mapping system."

It is wild to think that two games that revolutionised the industry both came out so close to each other, and even wilder when they were directed by the same person and worked on by a lot of the same developers. Especially considering the average time between Mario and Zelda games nowadays is closer to half-a-decade at the minimum.

Shigeru Miyamoto thinks Zelda 2 was "sort of a failure," and A Link to the Past is the "real sequel"