'Tears of the Kingdom' highlights the lasting power of Zelda

In the first screen of the first "Legend of Zelda" game, released in 1986, players were faced not with an enemy or a challenge, but a choice: Should protagonist Link chose one of three roads? Or go into a cave?

“The game doesn't tell you what to do. It's the player's choice,” said Gene Park, a journalist who covers video games for the Washington Post, on GBH's Morning Edition. “When they go into the cave, they get a sword. And now they're finally armed and well equipped to face the rest of the world. But the game never tells you that. The game gives that choice to the player to figure it out for themselves.”

The latest in Nintendo's video game series "The Legend of Zelda" is setting new records for the gaming giant: the May 12 release of "Tears of the Kingdom" saw an unprecedented 10 million copies sold worldwide in just three days.

So what is it about Zelda that's been able to capture and recapture the imaginations of video gamers new and old for decades?

“The first 'Legend of Zelda' game came out in 1986, and it was groundbreaking in terms of the amount of player freedom the game gave you,” Park said. “It's always that sense of discovery that's always been at the forefront of 'The Legend of Zelda': Player discovery, letting the player feel like they made a choice and discovery on their own and make them feel rewarded for it.”

That feeling of discovery, Park said, has been consistent throughout the franchise since its inception almost four decades ago.

“And that's what this latest release, 'Tears of the Kingdom,' really accentuates,” he said.

For the uninitiated: The game’s hero, Link, is usually trying for save Princess Zelda from an evil villain, Ganondorf. "Tears of the Kingdom" returns to that premise, but with some new features.

“The gameplay features, which are the priority for the development team, have players kind of build contraptions and gadgets to be able to solve their own way out of puzzles,” Park said. “And the way it presents problems, it really encourages players to make their own solutions. There's no, really, one solution to any problem.”

For instance, to help Link cross a large gap, players can build an airplane or a robot. They can also, as Park did, “paste a bunch of pieces of wood together and just walk across it.”

Video games are ever-present in pop culture, even among people who don’t play them. "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" brought in more than $1.2 billion worldwide. "The Last of Us," the HBO show which follows characters after a fungus turned humans into zombie-like creatures, drew 8.2 million viewers to its season one finale in March, according to Nielsen data and numbers from Warner Bros. Discovery.

“I think a lot of people weren't sure about what the show would be about because this is another zombie show,” Park said. “But me having played the game and knowing the story beats, I was like, oh, I think people are going to love this.”

Sometimes, Park said, people cannot make the leap and picture what a video game would look like on TV or film because they’re less fluent in how to play video games. Shows like "The Last of Us," he said, serve as a sort of translator.

“I think the biggest block for video games is that people don't know how to play them,” Park said. “I call it a readability problem. … I think a lot of people did see 'The Last of US' on HBO and say, wow, I did not know that video game stories were this emotional, this raw. And it's been a teaching moment for a lot of people.”

'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' does not require players to necessarily have the hand-eye coordination or intense practice a shooter game may require. Instead, it requires players to explore and go at their own pace.

Park said the buzz around it has brought him back to his younger days, when all the kids at school were playing the same video game and excited to talk about it.

“For me, it's a strong reminder about the sense of community in video games,” he said. “It's really touching to be able to see this wide and diverse audience come together, and really all of us are really playing the same game at the same time.”