There is a good reason that zelda is the one series that outshines all others in the sheer volume of amateur game developers attempts at re-making the game along with the systems that lie within, but I have personally never heard that reason put forth so eloquently.

They go about assuming that it would be a simple task, an ideal 'starting point' for their budding journey of game-development self-discovery, where the concept is simple enough for one man to accomplish given enough time/effort, but still robust enough for that one person to earnestly care about the amount of time/effort spent regardless of how many times it may have been done before.

But they always learn the task is far from simple, and that anyone going about it from the standpoint that "anyone can do it" are going to almost surely fail to meet the standard that kind of game set forth.

 
The intro text is like the skeleton of an extremely basic, generic storyline that's been compressed so hard it's barely parseable as language. They highlight words presumably to aid in scanning but really the whole thing reads like they stripped out any part of it that wasn't an immediately recognisable clue to what you would be doing or the genre-mandated setting in which you'd be doing it, to the extent of breaking any kind of coherence in the paragraph as a whole. It's actually easier to skim this then it is to read it.
 
The "simplicity" of old pixel art and videogame stories get celebrated for the idea that they represent a kind of universalising abstraction, that might be the case but I don't think it's why something like Zelda 1 feels strange and evocative. It's more the sense of recognising the outlines while retaining a knowledge of all the stuff that's been stripped out: words, faces, backgrounds. I used the word skeleton to describe the intro text but it's more like a hollow exoskeleton, a rugged external structure that gives shape to an absence or lacuna. Prefab wall tiles around a black void.
 

 
 
 

Yes. I think the things being said are true and correct and put something difficult into reasonably descriptive words.

A pixel art 8 bit pastiche in 2012 can tap into ways the visuals in these games functioned but it can never operate in exactly the same way that works made for that hardware in that era did/do

Drawing with pixels in low-rez, low-color, adding tile restrictions, these things make you reduce any image to a absolute statement, but an image more complex than a tiny grid of colored dots is also reduced to an absolute statement through endless digital replication of the sort you're seeing in the screenshot at top. In a past time, in a past context, pixel art was the art that could be economically digitally replicated. That's not where we are.

little has changed aside from the symbols and the volume of reproduction. the tape/tilegrid has more stuff on it, a few floating point values here and there, but game software effectively operates on two levels:
- data: tiles, textures, models, maps, text, sounds
- process: the mechanics by which the data is rearranged and restructured to provide the appearance of another world (zelda) or an alien mechanism (tetris).
these things can be blurred together, but for the most part, they are as distinct in current video games as they are in Zelda. only the volume of data has increased. when we understand video games, we can use both the processes and the data as referents to latch onto and understand the game world in terms of our own experiences. because Zelda has such a low volume of data, it makes the processes more stark. the walking, encountering  B E I N G S, even if it is rudimentary is more detailed than the endless, impenetrable mass of tree-markers. permeability, exploration, survival, travel, discovery, in simple procedural pictographs are the STUFF of the game more than having a sword or trees or people are. maybe it's easier to get to the beingness if you're not distracted by the pictures/animations/dialogue trees? we have more capacity to expand both of these parts of game software, but aside from strict representation of earth-physics, data easily gets the most attention. even procedural generation often has more to do with creating limitless data than referring to / invoking memory or idea of a process or experience. pictures? w/e. the world lives in the game loop.

maybe i am a self-centered shithead but i felt like this tweet might have referred to me.
https://twitter.com/J_Chastain/status/264860754262503424
pwned, me. maybe... i am pwning myself??

i can see how it would read like i'm doing this but actually i'm just unable to make a genuine contribution in the preferred style of the topic because of my limited ability to write well / feel things. i don't think i disagree with the description in the OP, but i do claim to offer an analysis of it. this includes some criticism of (what i see as) treating the visual as the primary currency of representation. i was genuinely trying to look at where we might 'be at' comparatively to a time when "pixel art was the art that could economically be digitally reproduced." what is there in Zelda that IS real, necessary and immediate to game developers today given that 8bit pixel art clearly is not?


anyways, truly sorry if my post was unwanted / ruined the cool vibes of the thread by segueing into the wrong territory.

maybe i am a self-centered shithead but i felt like this tweet might have referred to me.
https://twitter.com/J_Chastain/status/264860754262503424
pwned, me. maybe... i am pwning myself??

That is probably the best tweet I have ever read.

It's like it put every single thing ever said on the internet that people assumed could NEVER fit inside a tweet, and summed it all up in a way that actually DOES fit inside a tweet. If elegance was edible, this tweet would be a 10 course meal served from inside a bento box.

Sorry about being off-base from this cool topic just to make that observation. Although the way I see it, the game being discussed is so simple and elegant in it's presentation, it is fairly safe to assume everything that could be said about it has been said in this topic already. It just seems to me like delving into more circular discussion is sort of counter-intuitive to the simplicity inherit in the game's objective to deliver as clear an experience to the player as possible while using only the simplest units of information perceivable to human observation. (but I am totally open to being proven wrong on that front if there exists more relevant discussion for this matter yet to be mentioned)