While The Legend of Zelda is a franchise known for its expansive worlds mixed with dungeons, the games nearly ended up very differently according to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from 1999 that was recently translated by Shumplations While the interview was mostly about Ocarina of Time, Miyamoto revealed that the overall series was originally intended to lack the famous overworld and just be dungeons.
In every Zelda development, the dungeons take a huge amount of time to make. I can’t tell you how many times they end up having to be remade and revised, while the team is on the verge of tears. Did you know, in the original Legend of Zelda, at the beginning of the development it was just dungeons. There was no overhead map. That’s a testament to the “Dungeon Supremacy” philosophy we’ve always followed. However, with Ocarina of Time, for the first time we didn’t spend as much time on the dungeons. It was a very a “un-Zelda” thing to do. (laughs)
It is very fortunate that the decision was made to go with an overworld as well, or the series may not have caught on the same way,