Zelda was Nintendo's answer to "traditional RPGs," Shigeru Miyamoto says: "We wanted the player to interact with the game world using the controller, and conquer dungeons"

Best NES games: Link holding a sword in the game The Legend of Zelda.

Speaking during a Q&A included with the 1994 audio CD The Legend of Zelda: Sound and Drama (and surfaced via Retro Gamer's 40 years of The Legend of Zelda issue) Miyamoto explained that Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda were not only being worked on simultaneously, but once Mario was finished, developers from it went to help get Zelda across the finish line.

But these were games with vastly different scales, which is why in Japan, Super Mario Bros. was a traditional game cartridge release, while Zelda was released for the floppy disk-using Famicom Disk System allowing the game to be more expansive than the relatively simple sidescroller. "We were eager to take advantage of the Disk System's features," said Miyamoto. "We were able to register names, add better sound, save the player's progress, and incorporate other new ideas, which made the game a lot of fun to make."