Ex Nintendo Marketer Recalls The First Zelda Commercial In North America

Gail Tilden, the former marketing mastermind of Nintendo America, who joined the Japanese gaming giant in 1983 as their first marketing employee, shared an interesting story about the first Zelda commercial in North America.

In the latest episode of the Video Game History Hour podcast, she recalled how such a crazy TV commercial was born. The pitch from the agent was to have a stand-up comedian talking about the interesting things about the game. Her team, which was only three or four people at that time, pictured "a guy standing at a mic in a spotlight," which sounded like a cool concept, so they all agreed with it. 

However, what happened on the shooting day was unexpected and quite the opposite. When she arrived at the scene, seeing John Kassir, an American actor and comedian, in a dark, padded cell and screaming out the names of Princess Zelda and various enemies from the game, she was like, "This, I can’t go through this, because this is not what we agreed to."

More communication needed to be done here, so she called the agency, who surprisingly said, "Go ahead." It was probably because Tilden was already there. What happened next was that the ad was published, and it may be one of the biggest marketing disasters.

If you look at the comments under the commercial's video posted 15 years ago, many were questioning what Nintendo was thinking for such an ad. The creepy screams and gloomy looks made no sense to some when they watched as a kid and still don't do many years later.