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Retro The Legend of Zelda's original planned box art seen for the first time in decades

mazi

mazi

picross pundit



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Wouldve been interesting to see how some box art would have turned out had they continues with the black series style.
 
The smile either sells it or kills it depending on how you are feeling lol.
 
Very interesting to see, but holy shit am I glad we got the other one instead
 
I love rhese boxes but man, does this give a weird impression of the game. Like it is a Pac-man clone or something.
 
This is fascinating; so it originally would have looked much closer to other games.

I wonder what role the actual box art played in the game's success? Feels like that decision was an early example of Nintendo treating Zelda as something special.
 
Yeah that straight up looks worse imo. Obviously they're limited with what they can show but it focusing on the dungeon crawling, locked doors and swordfighting gives a narrow impression of the game. The coat of arms on the final box art gives off pure fantasy vibes that leaves more open to the imagination, which works in favor of a graphically limited NES title.
 
Don't think this was "originally planned" per se, the boxes for Zelda and Punch-Out seem to be mockups/placeholder
 
That's really cool! I also like Glass Joe in the cover of Punch-Out!!;

The Black Box strategy on early NES days was Nintendo trying to give a clear message to the consumer, since the Atari era was full of misleading cover arts and lead to the industry crash; But by the time Zelda came out in the west, I don't think the black box was needed anymore; people were already pretty much hooked on video games again.
 
Apopheniac said:
Don't think this was "originally planned" per se, the boxes for Zelda and Punch-Out seem to be mockups/placeholder
Click to expand...
The tweet says it was a retail targetted flyer they were giving out at CES 1987 which is usually held in January. Slalom would launch a few months later in March. Zelda was August, Punch-Out was in October. I don't see any reason to suggest these were mockups or placeholders instead of the first drafts for those two games.

The Punch-Out replacement would be easy to explain since it lacks the Tyson rebranding so either the deal hadn't been finalized yet or they didn't have the new packaging designed.

Zelda could easily have been replaced due to Nintendo phasing out the "Black Box" design in 1987, probably to as a result of 3rd party developers who started to publish in the region in the back half of 1986 using box art that was less representational of the actual game images. This trend actually starts with Zelda which was sandwiched between it's FDS contemporaries Kid Icarus and Metroid which received the "Black Box" trade dress but with a silver background. I agree with @MisterSpo that it's also likely that Nintendo wanted to highlight Zelda as the game was a big hit in Japan on the FDS so NoA probably wanted to replicate that success as well. I could also see the box art not testing well with retailers leading to it being scrapped in favor of the design we all know.
 
Oh sure Link gets to be happy, but Kirby had to suffer for years on his boxes? How is that fair?
 
think this and punch-out look very good. maybe ultimately the gold was the rigut call for Zelda, but the punch out change is a shame
 
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Krvavi Abadas said:
op is really burying the lede by not noting the same flyer also promoted an unreleased sewing machine add-on for the NES.
01-08-87-Knitting-With-Power.jpg

japan eventually got such an add-on, but it was actually released on the Game Boy rather than the famicom.
Click to expand...

Makes me wonder - did they ever intend to produce that? All they needed was to make one for this advert.
 
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The black box covers look amazing. Sort of wish these all came out since it would give such a consistency, but can see how the gold worked out for the best probably. Good made Zelda look much cooler and probably served as more of an incentive to purchase.

Nintendo should add these as an option in NSO for the display.
 
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