The Legend of Zelda was inspired by old-school Western RPGs, which weren't popular in Japan at the time. Taking inspiration from these foreign '80s PC games, and wanting to create a non-linear title that could use a save system, Nintendo fellow Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the idea for Link's adventure in Hyrule.
In an interview with Famitsu, that's been translated by GamesRadar+, Miyamoto talks about Nintendo's inspiration for both The Legend of Zelda and the Famicom Disc System. An add-on for Japan's version of the NES, the Famicom, the Disc System could play games that required more data via rewritable floppy discs. However, the hardware sadly never made its way over to the West.
When talking about the early days of the NES, Miyamoto says: "We had arcade-style games and sports games, but in order to capture the interest of a large number of people, we had to create new types of games. We wanted to make a different style of game where you don't continue linearly towards the goal."
At that time, many games focused on high scores and didn't require players to save their progress. In longer games like Super Mario Bros., there were systems in place that let you return to certain checkpoints. Password systems and level selects are common examples, but they could be hidden perks like Mario's warp pipes.
Miyamoto had dreams of creating a game for Nintendo with the ability to save baked into the cart or floppy disc. "We wanted a game where the main character was the focus, and we also wanted to utilize save data," Miyamoto says. "With this challenge in mind we made the [Famicom] Disc System. It was after this that we started to think about game design."
Since the early '80s, vast RPGs like the Wizardry series were popular in the West, but Japanese players were focused on games developed within the domestic market. "At that time, RPGs on PC were catching on abroad, but they weren't widespread at all in Japan," Miyamoto says. "Nintendo leveraged the technology it had developed up until that point, and gathered the most interesting elements [of these games] to recreate them for the Famicom.
"That's how I came up with a similar game design for The Legend of Zelda," he concludes.
