A Link to the Past set up Tears of the Kingdom’s master stroke

polygon.com:

I tend to remember video games for their “master stroke” — the sequence, set piece, or revelatory discovery in which everything the developers were trying to do coalesced in one defining moment. In some cases, as with Resident Evil 4’s village battle, these moments set the pace and tone for the rest of the game. In others, such as Red Dead Redemption’s farm epilogue, they work as a reframing of the dozens of hours that came before. In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo’s open-world epic, the master stroke does a little bit of both. And this particular moment’s seeds were planted 32 years ago, in A Link to the Past.

We tend to talk about Tears of the Kingdom in the same way we talk about many immersive sims: focusing on the ways we pushed the limitations of Nintendo’s intricate systems. We say things like, “Did you know you can use Recall to make an elevator out of basically anything?” Tears of the Kingdom is an emergent story generator on a scale we’ve rarely seen before. It’s tailor-made to be shared on social media, and as a result, we tend to see it as a playground where the best stories arise when somebody breaks the rules.

But if there’s one sequence that defined my experience with Tears of the Kingdom, it was that first dive into the Depths. Spurred on by my quest to find the scientist Robbie, I stepped up to a yawning chasm near the center of Hyrule Field, leapt into the inky blackness, and fell… and fell… and fell. Only minutes after skydiving from the islands floating above Hyrule, I had just skydived again, down into some mysterious pit beneath the surface.

Except, it wasn’t just a pit! As I plummeted toward Robbie’s campsite, the barely perceptible edges of the room opened up, woodwinds