Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda. But I’m still hungover from Mario’s 25th! I think Toad may have been passing around some bad mushrooms.

So in honor of Link’s first epic adventure taking place 25 years ago, let’s take a look back at some of the essential nuggets that make LoZ as awesome as it is.

There’s a bunch of things that set Zelda apart from some of the games before it, and there’s no better place to start than the beginning. So before you even think about putting that cartridge into your NES, you should know something. You’ve gotta blow, stupid. But BEFORE THAT even, you probably noticed that unlike those boring gray games before it, Zelda’s cartridge is gold. Some say it’s because the game had already sold several million copies in Japan, where it had a 1 year head start on North America, but the gold cartridge has since become a standard unique feature of subsequent new releases in the series from launch day.

The next thing you might notice is that the has a file system. In fact, Zelda was the first game in the west to feature a battery pak for saving your progress. Start the game and you notice it’s wide open. The first screen is a top down view presenting you with 5 options to choose from. Go left, right, up, down, or into the cave. A far cry from Mario’s GO RIGHT mantra. You might even call it the first “sandbox game” ever, since you’re basically free to wander the landscape as you see fit, and can even enter the dungeons out of order. Though you won’t get very far by heading straight to Dungeon 7, you can do it if you wanted to. And since you’re such a little nonconformist, that should make you happy. Frankly, you’ve wasted hours of your life trying to go LEFT in Mario.

Speaking of Mario, what’s really amazing about LoZ, and truly a testament to the genius of both games’ creator Shigeru Miyamoto, is that the games are completely unlike Mario in many ways. I mean aside from the whole “save the princess” thing, none of the design elements that made Mario such a hit were reused in LoZ. Link, for example, does not jump – the crux of Mario’s platforming. He has an inventory of items to carry along his adventure, many of which are earned by interacting with NPCs, something that never happened in Mario. and the game was the first in the west to feature a battery pack for saving your progress. After all, what kind of epic is designed to be played through in speed-runs?

The Zelda games are said to have been inspired by Miyamoto’s propensity for exploration in woods and caves as a young boy.

In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world.

This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs.

-The New Yorker

Funny, I had always thought what LSD was to Steve Jobs, was also LSD to Miyamoto. I mean, YOU’VE PLAYED MARIO right? Anyway, it bears noting that this is shaping up to be a big year for the Link and company, with Skyward Sword coming to the Wii, and a 3D remake of Ocarina of Time (but Ocarina of Time‘s already 3D; NO I MEAN 3-freakin-D) pushing 3DS sales.

A couple more fun facts:

- Link’s shield used to bear a cross, before being replaced by a Hylian crest. Since the late 80s, Nintendo of America has actually banned religious references, among other things from their games.

- In that vein, the third game’s Japanese title “Triforce of the Gods,” was changed for American release. If you think about it, “A Link to the Past” doesn’t actually make any sense.

- Link is left handed, although that unique characteristic is actually going away courtesy of the Wii’s motion controls, as Nintendo has to accomodate the majority of real world players by placing the sword/Wii-mote in the right hand.

- The song of Link’s flute is the same as Mario’s in SMB 3.

TL;DR Happy birthday, Legend of Zelda, here’s a guy playing all your music on piano.

For the truly Zelda-obsessed, Kotaku will be running a special 25th anniversary feature all week on their Total Recall page.

Follow WG on Twitter @wannabe_genius and Mike’s other grumblings @mickeyvee.