What inspired The Legend of Zelda?

The Legend of Zelda began as one man's memory of being eight years old. Shigeru Miyamoto grew up in Sonobe, Kyoto, and in accounts he has given for decades, a 2010 New Yorker profile, a 2015 NPR interview, and David Sheff's book Game Over among them, he describes the same scenes: roaming fields, woods, and caves with no map and no plan, finding a lake by surprise on a hike, and working up the courage to enter a dark cave with a lantern.

Zelda was built to hand that feeling to the player: a world that does not explain itself, entered from a nearly empty screen, where discovery is the reward for wandering. The dungeons under the world are the cave in Sonobe, staffed and lit.

His partner Takashi Tezuka supplied the fantasy-literature side of the equation, Tolkien especially, which is how a Kyoto childhood ended up wearing the clothes of European heroic fantasy.