What is interesting about the NES Zelda game is that it only used half the space allotted to it. The development team misunderstood something while working on it and only made the game half as big as expected. This led to the second quest as they had all this extra room available.

Quite cool that something that was HEAVILY promoted on playgrounds of the time was a last minute patch for the dev team making up for a mistake.

The dungeon layouts just happened to feature at least one questionable one - which honestly, is easily written off as happenstance due to the number of screens and layout of those screens limiting variety quite a bit.

I was a much, much, bigger fan of Zelda II. I just kept getting stuck in Zelda 1. I got the game used at a yard sale, cart only, for like $15 (over $40 today) and I felt like I got a deal. Only after I realized I had no clue what to do and my friends at school were not interested in helping a newb, it became clear I needed to offload this one while I could get most of my money back (sold it to a friend for $10 and lunch money for a week).