8. The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

There’s something timeless about sprite-based art. Maybe it’s the level of creativity that comes with the restraints of older tech. Developers had to figure out the best way to design a character and build a world with the few, simple pixels they had at their disposal. These two NES games served as the template for all Zelda titles that followed, inspiring decades of boss fights, Hylian countrysides, and princesses. So many games, not just ones in the Zelda series, owe a creative debt to these 8-bit darlings.

Remember instruction manuals? Within both games’ respective booklets, we are presented with the art that these pixels inspired in the minds of their creators, like a drawing of Link holding the triforce against Ganon’s towering specter amidst an inferno. If this was a ranking of promotional and concept art, it would look very different.

It’s hard being the first games of a franchise in the context of a ranking and I’m struggling with where they landed. In some ways it’s the most inspired art style in the series. Games are a unique form of art that are conceptually iterated on, sometimes for decades. I’m not usually one who subscribes to the concept of “respecting your elders” but the level of engineered originality in these games is something we must respect. As for why they’re not even higher in my ranking? I think what’s sometimes more impressive is the art their legacy inspired.