Miyamoto reflects on the NES era and discusses western RPG’s influence on Zelda’s creation”
Posted on July 29, 2026 by Carlos in General Nintendo, News
Last week’s Famitsu interview with Shigeru Miyamoto continues to provide fascinating insights from the legendary Nintendo developer. In an interview highlighted by GamesRadar, Miyamoto reflected on the creation of The Legend of Zelda for the NES, revealing that the game was inspired by western RPGs, which were largely unknown in Japan at the time.
Looking back on the NES era, Miyamoto explained:
“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 the time, many games revolved around achieving high scores and didn’t require players to save their progress. Longer games, such as Super Mario Bros., instead relied on systems that allowed players to return to certain checkpoints. Password systems, stage selection, and even hidden shortcuts like Mario’s Warp Pipes were common ways to make longer adventures more accessible.
Miyamoto said he wanted Nintendo to create a game that allowed players to save their progress directly to a cartridge or disk.
“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.”
The Famicom Disk System, an add-on released for the Japanese version of the NES, allowed games to store more data by using rewritable floppy disks.
Miyamoto also discussed how western RPGs influenced Nintendo’s approach. Since the early 1980s, large-scale RPGs such as the Wizardry series had become popular in the west, while Japanese players were still focused primarily on domestically developed games.
“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”
He concluded: “That’s how I came up with a similar game design for The Legend of Zelda,”
If you missed it, Miyamoto also spoke in defense of Nintendo’s recent remake announcements during another Famitsu interview last week. You can read our full coverage by clicking here.
More: Shigeru Miyamoto, The Legend of Zelda
