Legend of Zelda

Article by Joe Stawski

The Legend of Zelda, this is practically a house hold name to gamers and many non-gamers. As of December 2011 the franchise has sold 67.93 million copies since the release of the first game. The series is first ever to be inducted into Spike TV's video game hall of fame during the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards.

The Series got it's start in the US in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The first release of the series was Legend of Zelda. The main character in all of the games has stayed the same throughout all of the titles in the series as well as the main bad guy. These games are a mix of action adventure questing and puzzle all rolled into one. The princess is captured and is held by the evil king wannabe Gannon or Gannondorf. There are eighteen titles in the series over thirteen years of history in the franchise. The games span over several platforms in the US alone, not to mention some platforms in Japan but we won't discuss those because, let's face it....... nobody cares.

The largest change to the series came in 1998 with the release of Ocarina of Time. This was the first of the franchise to be in a three dimensional game-world. The first of the series were linear games, the next in the series were bird-eye view. While many of the games released since Ocarina of time maintained the 3 dimensional game-world the developers were not afraid to do throwback titles using the birds eye view scheme. Although these titles were mainly for the hand held platforms. This remained true until the release of Ocarina of Time 3D which was released in 2011 on the 3DS, Nintendo's newest hand held system. This is a franchise that I grew up with and will always be one of my favorites.