The Legend of Zelda is a video game franchise created by Japanese video game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. It is mainly developed and published by Nintendo. The universe of the Legend of Zelda series consists of a variety of lands, the most predominant being Hyrule. The franchise is set within a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and consists of several recurring locations, races and creatures. The most prominent population in the series are the Hylians, a humanoid race with elfin features, that are identifiable by their long, pointed ears. The game world is accompanied by a detailed fictional lore that contains a creation myth, several constructed languages, the most prominent being Hylian, and a fictional universal currency called the rupee. Most games in The Legend of Zelda series follow a similar storyline, which involves the protagonist Link battling monsters to save Princess Zelda and defeat an evil villain, which is often the series' main antagonist, Ganon. Nintendo developed the fictional lore into a complex timeline that spans across the series and chronicles thousands of years of fictional history.

Hyrule was created as the original setting for the 1986 The Legend of Zelda video game and has remained as the main fictional environment for successive games in the series. Inspired by dungeon crawlers, Miyamoto and Tezuka developed a high fantasy world in the form of a 2D map filled with monsters, puzzles and dungeons. Hyrule transitioned to a 3D environment with the development of the 1998 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. For The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released in 2017, Nintendo developed Hyrule into a seamless open world. Since the launch of the original game, the series has been a commercial and critical success. It has introduced landmark innovations in world design that have since influenced numerous developers across the video game industry.