"We were brimming with new ideas on how to fully utilize the Disk System’s new capabilities: a name entry system, using better music, recording the player’s progress, and so forth. In that sense it was a very fun game to create. The flip side of doing something new, however, is that Zelda was a game where we were very concerned whether players would understand what they were supposed to do (much like the fear Nakamura had when Dragon Quest was first released). Once we decided there’d be riddles and puzzles in Zelda, that carried a lot of anxiety with it as well. Some of the puzzles are quite difficult to solve, after all."

"Since we were working on Super Mario at the same time, once Mario was finished, we grabbed the Mario programmers and used them for Zelda in a final programming sprint. That was really tough."