ON MARCH 3rd, along with a new game console, Nintendo released “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”, the latest instalment in a storied series of video games. “Breath of the Wild” marks 30 years since the release of the first “Legend of Zelda” game in North America. As with other titles in the series, the player controls a mute, questing elfin lad named Link across a verdant land of swords and sorcery, amassing items and skills, encountering friend and foe and trying to rescue Princess Zelda from the clutches of the monstrous Ganon. What’s especially notable this time around is that “Breath of the Wild” is absolutely huge. Within a thriving genre of games that encourage “free-roaming” exploration, “Breath of the Wild” makes other sprawling titles feel claustrophobic by comparison. A big selling point of the new console, the Nintendo Switch, is that it is a home console and mobile console in one: you can escape into another reality wherever and whenever you want, by taking a game you’ve begun at home out into the world. It’s a feature entirely fitting for “Zelda,” a series packed with enchanted objects that whisk the protagonist away to parallel dimensions. But also, more than any other video game series, “Zelda” pioneered the idea of a video game as a portal into another world.

While Mario, the fleet-footed, moustachioed hotshot, remains Nintendo’s all-round mascot and icon, “The Legend of Zelda” represents the loftier flipside of Mario’s primary-coloured, populist whimsy. Both were the creations of Shigeru Miyamoto, who joined Nintendo as a staff artist but soon established his reputation as a visionary creator. From 1981 to 1986, he came up with “Donkey Kong”, “Super Mario Bros” and “The Legend of Zelda”. “Donkey Kong” was a hit in the arcades, and “Super Mario Bros” ushered in the home-console revolution—but “Legend of Zelda”, released in 1986 in Japan and a year later in North America, was fundamentally new and different.

With an internal ten-year battery, “The Legend of Zelda” was the first cartridge-based game to allow the player to save progress and not have to start from scratch every time. The game’s ambitious scope required this. Graphically crude as it looks now—Link himself fit snugly into a 16x16 pixel square—the game was thrillingly massive for the time. By today’s standards, the game is daunting in its non-linearity, and for how little guidance it offers the player: a whole world stretched out before the would-be hero in every direction, littered with secrets and un-signposted, truly hidden treasures. (Nintendo eventually provided a toll-free helpline which, by 1990, had a staff of 200 fielding calls.) Koji Kondo contributed a tune that, even its bleepity-bloop instrumentation, echoed the galloping, triumphant quality of John Williams’ theme from Mr Miyamoto’s favourite film, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

Mr Miyamoto wanted you to get lost. The propulsive, unidirectional energy of “Super Mario Bros” was a holdover from the era of coin-gobbling video-game arcades. By contrast, “The Legend of Zelda” rewarded stoic perseverance, frequently leaving the player puzzling over what to do next. The aspirations of “The Legend of Zelda” had less in common with the feverish spirit of the arcades than of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The inspiration for this style of gameplay was Mr Miyamoto’s own childhood memories from the countryside of Sonobe, Japan: combing rice fields, scaling hillsides, fishing lakes. One foundational experience he had as a child was stumbling upon a cave, which he eventually mustered the courage to enter by the light of a homemade lantern “The game is not for children,” he would later say, “it is for me.” Link, like Mr Miyamoto, is left-handed.

Narrative was more like an afterthought. It was a public-relations staffer who proposed a rudimentary story and suggested the sumptuous name “Zelda” (after Zelda Fitzgerald) for the damsel in distress. The first priority had been to capture the feeling of exploring diverse environments, of wandering forests and fields and navigating labyrinthine dungeons. Mr Miyamoto said that his dream was to create an in-game atmosphere that was so vivid and realistic the player could practically smell it.

As further instalments in the series continued pushing the technological capabilities of each new Nintendo console, “Zelda” came to be especially celebrated for its engrossing plots and ingenious puzzles. At the same time, the mythology of the games became increasingly complex, with the permutations and reinterpretations typical of comic books. There’s a seemingly endless succession of heroes all named Link, setting out to rescue an endless succession of princesses all named Zelda, scattered across alternate timelines in a convoluted and highly debatable chronology.

What has never changed is the possibility of getting hopelessly, pleasantly lost. Under Mr Miyamoto’s guidance, the Nintendo team continued to refine the balance of the aimful and the aimless, spawning a whole range of games that offer the player the freedom to simply inhabit and explore a world. Most entries in the franchise feature spelunking by lantern-light, harking back to the Zelda creator’s cherished childhood memory.

The lingering irony is that, while Mr Miyamoto’s nostalgic intention with “The Legend of Zelda” was to recapture his childhood out in nature, for generations of gamers reared on the franchise, playing “Breath of the Wild” will be nostalgic mostly for how it evokes their childhoods playing previous “Zelda” games. There’s no great cause for cynicism, however, since, with “Breath of the Wild,” “The Legend of Zelda” continues to provide some of the richest and most thoroughly transporting experiences the medium has to offer.