Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Last summer I was sifting through some boxes of old things, some of which I hadn’t seen since I was in high school or, even before then. Not everything I discovered was a treasure, but I did find a few things that I flagged right away as precious. So that’s what happened to those ‘Giant Size’ X-Men annuals, I said. I knew I wouldn’t have trashed that collection of mineral samples, I said. I can probably find a place on my shelf for those old Boy Scout handbooks, I said. Naturally, this presented several problems of storage space that have yet to be solved.

While I haven’t finished doing whatever I’m going to end up doing with all this personal material history, there was one item that I wasted little time in elevating to prominence, framed in glory. It’s a three page insert from an old issue of Nintendo Power magazine, on which is printed a map of all the overworld screens from the original Legend of Zelda video game. Included with the map are hints and secrets associated with completing the game’s notorious second quest, unlocked when you turn conventional wisdom on its head and name your little green swordsman “Zelda.”

Here’s a redditor’s copy of the same map, in better overall condition than mine. My map has a chunk ripped out from the upper right, large enough to take out most of three screens. That little section is probably missing forever, but the rest of it now peers serenely from behind UV-resistant glass, mounted on the wall above the TV where other fictional landscapes may blink into and out of my experience.

Lately, I’ve begun playing Tears of the Kingdom, the latest game in the Zelda series, which was released last year, thirty six years after the original game’s appearance on the NES. I know that number offhand because Zelda and I happen to have been brought into the world in the same year. I have to ignore the original Japanese release on the Famicom Disc System in order to claim that honor, but that’s a sacrifice of accuracy I can live with, because the original Zelda is there in some of my earliest memories. We age up together, and every significant anniversary of the game coincides with a similar milestone in my long march from birth to wherever it is I’ll end up.

In those thirty six years, I have directly explored about ten distinct versions of Hyrule, the setting of most Zelda games. they are countries that exist both on a screen in the form of maps and digitally rendered environments, and in the hands of the player who projects their identity through the buttons of various controllers onto Link, the hero. They share a name and many common features, but they vary in scale, detail, and all the intangible factors that make an imaginary place feel concrete. Each has assorted underworlds, dark dimensions, and other parallel landscapes that expand the landscape for the player. All of them are Hyrule, but “Hyrule” is much harder to define than it is to endlessly reiterate.

__________

The original map of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda is an eight by seventeen grid, featuring a few distinct, color-coded regions representing different landscapes and biomes. There are mountain ranges, a few lakes and rivers, some forests, grasslands, and a desert, as well as a stretch of coastline in the south east, making it relatively easy to find an analogue for all the various land forms in one of those maps in the back of a middle school social studies textbook. There are some place names printed in the game’s manual, such as “Lost Woods,” “Death Mountain,” and “Lake Hylia,” which have been reused in most subsequent versions of the kingdom. Most geographical features, however, are unnamed, or referred to with general names. Monsters are nearly everywhere, but there are not very many people to encounter, and most of the visible structures are in ruins.

Over the years, the creatives at Nintendo have fleshed out the kingdom with more varied terrain, and more towns and people, of both the human and fantasy varieties. The culmination of this effort, thus far, is the overworld map of Breath of the Wild (largely the same, at least on the surface, as its follow-up Tears of the Kingdom). This most recent Hyrule is large enough, and has enough geological variation, to project the illusion of grandness to an extent that has never been possible before. Every bit of the landscape is meticulously labeled with standbys and deep cuts from the various geographical guises that Hyrule has worn over the years. It seeks to present itself as something like the definitive version of the setting.

There are many ways in which the Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom map recall the first map of Hyrule specifically; with the notable exception of Wind Waker, most Zelda games have actually depicted the kingdom as largely landlocked, without giving the player access to an ocean. And while the two most recent games have given us far more people to interact with, they mostly live in small towns nestled in the shadows of greater ruins. One of the most remarkable things about this map, to me anyway, is the way that it channels the feeling of the original game’s exploration through a wild and ancient landscape, while leveraging modern technology to give the player’s imagination much more to work with than could the old 8-bit sprites.

__________

When Tears of the Kingdom was in development, an obvious question for those of us who had already combed over Breath of the Wild‘s map was how it would be made fresh and interesting for a return trip. The solution had to be complicated, given the scale of the map and the fact that much of its landscape had been designed with specific puzzles and story elements for Breath of the Wild in mind. A large part of the answer was to extend the map in two directions, down into massive subterranean caverns, and upwards to fantastical floating islands in the sky. This continued a maximalist trend that has been present in most of the series.

While Hyrule is almost always the primary setting, its identity is not static even within a single game. In A Link to the Past, the map was effectively doubled in size by the existence of the Dark World, a parallel Hyrule that was mystically linked to its counterpart, such that actions in one realm might affect objects in the other; comparing and moving between the two maps became an integral part of the gameplay. A similar dynamic was central to Ocarina of Time, where the two maps were nearly identical, but offset by a seven year gap in time. In the years since we have seen Hyrule submerged under an ocean or hidden beneath the clouds, and discovered additional parallel dimensions like the Twilight Realm and Lorule. The consistent design theme has been that not only must Hyrule be large, it must be bigger than it seems, the better to hide its many secrets.

The realities of game design, however, are such that Hyrule is also always smaller than it seems. Although it is designed to give the impression of vastness, it is possible to cross most of the length of the overworld map of Ocarina of Time in less than five minutes, even without the benefit of a horse. Although succeeding games have offered larger maps, they are still not so large that exploring them becomes a task larger than is appropriate for a video game. Even Tears of the Kingdom takes place in a more limited space than its dramatic visual suggest, its grandeur as much a function of dramatic lighting and visual contrast as it is of the sheer size of the simulated landscape.

The in-game representation of time also contributes to the illusion of vastness. When I began playing Tears of the Kingdom, I started by making a circuit of Hyrule, to activate its various Skyview Towers and fill in my overworld map. In just a few hours of real time, I would see the sun rise and set and rise all over again, while thunderstorms and other weather events would arise and pass away over just a few minutes. The characters in the game appear to move about at normal speeds; nevertheless, their days are objectively quite short compared to ours. That’s just as well, or we might end up spending even more time with them than we do.

The promise of these games is that we can spend the time we do invest in them exploring a great big world, where endless secrets are hidden in endless fields, caves, castles, and temples. But they can’t really be endless, and we don’t actually have the time for “endless” anyway. What we’re really looking for, and what all adventure games ultimately provide, is an adventure in miniature: a little walled garden full of good and evil.

__________

As mentioned previously, the layout of Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom is meant to be something like “definitive.” It will remain so until the next great leap in processing power, and the need to once again redefine Zelda for a new generation, requires the construction of an all-new digital space that, somehow, will still be Hyrule. If it is to have all the spirit of mystery and discovery of its predecessors, it must hide its treasures in new places; but to maintain continuity with the rest of the series, those places must be in familiar locations. This has been a perennial design question with every new game: to make Hyrule new again, without making it unrecognizable.

Certain requirements have crept into the maps over time. There must be a Lake Hylia, and it must be fed by a river wherein the Zora live. There must be a Death Mountain to the north east, inhabited by the Gorons. The Sheikah must make their home in Kakariko village, and the Gerudo tribe (and their evil king, Ganondorf) must hail from a desert to the west. There will be a Lost Woods, ruled over by a giant tree; there must also be a Temple of Time, though it’s somewhat optional whether to put these two in close proximity. Remove these elements, and you begin to lose some of the Hyrule flavor that has accumulated in the stew.

But for every “must” there is an exception. A Zelda game doesn’t even have to take place in Hyrule proper: the hero Link has made several excursions to dreamlike worlds beyond its borders. When Hyrule is the setting, there are still opportunities to be creative. In Wind Waker, most of the kingdom was covered in water, accessible only by the tops of its highest peaks made into islands, its historic heartland preserved in a magic bubble. In the Wii port of Twilight Princess, the developers opted to reflect the entire game so that east was west and left was right, rather than rationalize a left-handed Link being played by a player swinging the Wii controller in their right hand. In Skyward Sword, the vastness of Hyrule was divided into three neat little self-contained provinces, each taking liberties with some of the traditional geography.

Fans of the series often enjoy speculating about the overall timeline (or timelines) of the various games, sifting through evidence in maps and story and theorizing around gaps and incongruities. Nintendo threw the fans a bone with publications like Hyrule Historia, endorsing the concept of multiple branching timelines. It all gets a little sci-fi, but the intention from both Nintendo and the fans is fairly clear: to insist that, wherever you may find Death Mountain or Hyrule Castle on any particular map, whatever species of fantasy creatures appear or disappear from their expected locations, or whatever myths or legends are quoted in the story to explain the kingdom’s origins, that each Hyrule really is Hyrule, the same Hyrule that we’ve known all along.

Myself, I try not to get bogged down in the idea that events depicted in one game must necessarily be part of the history of all subsequent games. I don’t feel the need to seek Watsonian explanations for why Death Mountain was once in the west, or what the Oocca may have had to do with the Zonai. All of these things, along with a Hylian language and mythology, are the product of reinvention and imagination: the means by which a place that was once as simple as an eight by seventeen grid is given something that can be taken for a history.

__________

That old magazine insert on my wall takes an imaginary world, the truest existence of which is on the screens of old televisions connected to antique consoles, and puts it on display. It is actually only one of the Hyrule maps I have here at home, along with depictions of other fantasy lands dear to my heart. They are different from other kinds of maps, as they do not say so much “this is a place that exists,” as “this is a place I would like to return to, some day.”

How many times shall I return to Hyrule? I’ve lost track of all my visits to its previous iterations. I can only guess how many more will be produced in my lifetime, and how many of those I shall find myself systematically mapping and exploring. But Hyrule is a joint production between the video game company and my imagination, and so in a sense it will only exist if I choose to go back there, no matter how many games are produced with the intention of luring me back.

Why make that choice? Like I said, we’ve grown up together. The synchronicity between my arrival in this world and that of my favorite fantasy video game franchise may not be as perfect as I like to imagine. But I know this world well, and as I am its limited co-creator I have certain freedoms to enjoy. However far the technology of games can go in realizing virtual worlds, the map on the wall reminds me that I can go further. It won’t be too hard to keep me coming back.