The Legend of Zelda

The cartridge of the Western release contained a battery and a memory chip, so progress was saved right inside it. A technical detail changed the structure of the whole project: once a game can be interrupted and resumed, the world stops being a sequence of levels and becomes a territory you return to.

The map is open almost from the very start. The order of the dungeons is partly up to the player, some items are mandatory, and some simply make the road easier. Hints are few, and that is a deliberate decision: certain passages open only with a bomb or a burned bush, and nowhere is this said outright, so knowledge was pieced together from the finds of a whole neighborhood or a whole class. After the ending, a second version of the world opens with a different arrangement of dungeons, which doubles the content without new resources. This is also where the techniques that became permanent for the series took shape: an item from a dungeon opens access to the next areas, and progress rests on the character's new abilities.