How is zelda made

But through the magic of conference calls, Skype and a translator, we had a talk about Zelda dungeons in general and, specifically, about The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask , the game he co-directed for the Nintendo 64 that was released in and just re-made and re-released for the Nintendo 3DS last week.

We would talk about how Majora's Mask was a bit more of a Zelda for adults. Kotaku : How do you create a Zelda dungeon? How does that process work? How long does it take? Eiji Aonuma: Well, the first thing that we ask ourselves when we're designing a new dungeon is what sort of gameplay do we want the player to engage with. And that will help us decide on a kind of theme for that dungeon.

For example, are we trying to build a dungeon around puzzle type gameplay, or is action more of a focus? And once we've decided on a theme along those lines, we'll start to think about how a player might use a particular item in that dungeon to interact with the environment. Up until this point all of that is kind of laying out the theory of what kind of dungeon this is going to be and from that point we move on to implementation.

Now, this is sort of like the orthodox version of how to create Zelda dungeons, but I should bring up something that's really important to us now is that we feel it's important to challenge the orthodoxy of the Zelda series as we're creating new games.

So while we still need to look for some themes early on, we do want to look at interesting ways to make departures from the rest. Not your father's Xbox controller Brush up on your driving skills in Forza Horizon 5 with the controller the pros use.

Kotaku: Do you recall vividly at all the creation of the dungeons of Majora's Mask? Are you able to share a story of how long one would have taken? How many people it might have taken to make one of them? Aonuma: The one that really stands out to me of the dungeons is Woodfall. This was right after the development of Ocarina of Time had finished and we knew we wanted to make a different sort of dungeon.

In , prior to the release of Ocarina of Time , Yoshiki Okamoto, a designer at Capcom, had just established a new studio dedicated to creating games for multiple platforms. During his time at Capcom, Okamoto had directed a number of well-respected games such as Final Fight and the incredibly popular Street Fighter II , and was also the supervisor overseeing the company's new Resident Evil series of games, the first of which had just been released to immense success on the PlayStation.

Okamoto's new studio, named Flagship, was set up as a subsidiary under Capcom and was jointly funded by Capcom, Sega, and Nintendo. The idea was that Flagship would specialize in developing story scenarios for Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64 games in collaboration with the three companies.

Among these projects was a game meant to serve as a prequel to Resident Evil , titled Biohazard Zero eventually better known as Resident Evil Zero. The idea for the project initially came about due to the Nintendo 64 hardware itself, when Capcom's designers discovered that Nintendo 64 cartridges would allow for quick switching between two separate playable characters without the need for a loading screen like with the CD-ROM format used by the PlayStation.

In , while Flagship was involved in the scenario creation for Resident Evil Zero , Okamoto approached Nintendo about the possibility of the studio contributing to first-party games, including a new The Legend of Zelda. Okamoto would supervise the project, with the intent being to introduce a new generation of players to the appeal of that first Zelda game.

While Flagship was starting with a remake of the first The Legend of Zelda , the team planned to use that project as a launching-off point for entirely new Zelda games afterward. Okamoto estimated that porting the first Zelda over to the Game Boy Color would take three or four months. Following this, the team would use the same infrastructure used for the remake to create two entirely new games, with the stories of all three being connected in some fashion.

Unfortunately, his vision wouldn't come to pass the way he had imagined. Nintendo announced that they would demo the new Game Boy Color trilogy at their upcoming Spaceworld event, along with Zelda Gaiden which hadn't yet been named.

The Game Boy Color titles, Nintendo said, comprised a trilogy that could be completed in any order, with each game having the ability to affect the stories of the other two. Capcom designer Hidemaro Fujibayashi was in charge of development. Yoshiki Okamoto, founder of Flagship and supervisor of these new Zeldas , had originally assigned Fujibayashi to serve as his assistant of sorts on the trilogy.

Fujibayashi would compile the ideas Okamoto and his team had, and eventually used them to write the original proposal Flagship had presented to Nintendo. Fujibayashi then began approaching Capcom artists and programmers to put a full-fledged development team together—one capable of developing the entire game instead of just its story.

It was also decided that it would be a series, so I thought the link system up as a way to make use of that idea.

I wanted, for example, that if you missed an enemy in the first game, you would encounter it in the next one. It's a 'lighter' style, kind of like a weekly TV drama as opposed to an epic film.

We knew that we could use the same basic style as the existing Zelda games and make two really fun games. We also liked the possibility of having multiple endings and the replay value that you get from two linking games. By mid, the project had begun to run into complications. One of the three games in the trilogy had been shelved. The idea was that Capcom and Flagship would use a remake as a test bed of sorts and eventually develop two entirely new games using the same underlying technology.

All three games would serve as a connected trilogy and allow the player to complete them in any order, using a password system to keep track of progress. Unfortunately, the Flagship team, eager to jump right into their new games, had failed to account for unforeseen complications on the remake. Prior to development kicking off, Flagship hadn't accounted for the fact that the Game Boy Color used a narrower screen than a television. The player needed to move around to be able to view the full extent of the room they were in, which meant it was easy to miss details such as stairways, cracks in the wall, and other similar clues meant to steer progress.

Additionally, because Flagship primarily specialized in writing story scenarios for videogames, the team had trouble reconciling its story ambitions with how the game would actually play. As a result, the developers would constantly need to rework the story and environments to fit one another.

Eventually, it was decided that Capcom and Nintendo would only release the two new games, both taking place in a new setting: the land of Holodrum. Since the two games—finally dubbed Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons —were being developed alongside Majora's Mask , references to that game, as well as its predecessor, were included. Oracle of Ages contained characters that appeared in Majora's Mask , while in Oracle of Seasons the player would meet characters from Ocarina of Time.

Nakano would listen to how the development team envisioned the in-game sprites and create illustrations based on these notes. Despite going from three games to two, the development team still had its work cut out for it, with team members crunching to have the project completed on time.

But our team feels really cozy, so the general atmosphere was great. Miyamoto said, 'Wouldn't it be simpler to create two titles, instead of three? Then, we moved in the direction of the two-title concept. To be honest, I think that it would've been impossible to develop three titles like that. Even now with two titles releasing simultaneously we are working very hard to prevent program bugs. As intended, the games were designed to be played in any order, with the second serving as a sequel to the first.

Due to the fact that they'd been delayed, both were published just a month prior to the release of Nintendo's next portable platform, the Game Boy Advance. They went on to sell a combined total of 3. Wei Yen, who had been responsible for the Nintendo 64 graphics chip. ArtX was later acquired by ATI, which would remain the graphics provider for Nintendo consoles for the next several years. As development on Majora's Mask was wrapping up, the development team began working on plans for the next Zelda title, which would be released for Project Dolphin.

Coming off the failure of the Nintendo 64, there was pressure for the system and its games to perform well, and the team experimented with different art styles and rendering techniques to determine what the next The Legend of Zelda game should look like. Alongside these, Nintendo also presented a tech demo for what a The Legend of Zelda game could look like on the Nintendo GameCube hardware, similar to their Nintendo 64 tech demo years ago.

The demonstration featured an adult-looking Link, modeled after his Ocarina of Time design, engaging Ganon in a one-on-one duel.

The short reel was extremely positively received, with most assuming it represented how the next The Legend of Zelda game would look. By late , work on Majora's Mask had been completed and the game released. While it had been well-received, there wasn't much Majora's Mask —or any other game—could do to bolster sales of the Nintendo 64, which had ceded both the Japanese and Western videogame markets to Sony's PlayStation.

Knowing the Nintendo 64 was on its way out, Nintendo had revealed its next videogame console, the Nintendo GameCube, to the public. Members of the Zelda team had already begun experimenting with this new system, and Nintendo intended for them to get a game out as quickly as possible. The game had been a happy accident of sorts, with the development team co-opting ideas that were originally meant for other projects and fleshing them out to give Majora's Mask its unique three-day system.

This time, they wouldn't have the same luxury. For starters, the team had lost Koizumi, who had been tasked with directing the next Mario game.

Earlier in the year, a few members of staff had even produced a tech demo for the Nintendo GameCube's public reveal that depicted a semi-realistic Link and Ganondorf locked in a duel, but while the short reel had fans excited the team felt it was uninspired and looked too similar to Ocarina of Time.

Character designers Satoru Takizawa and Yoshiki Haruhana—both of whom had worked on the Spaceworld tech demo—felt the need to create something entirely new instead. Eventually, it was Haruhana that found a way forward, when he presented the team with a cartoon-ish illustration of Link. According to Haruhana, he had been browsing through a videogame magazine and felt that all the games within looked too similar to one another. He grew concerned that the next Zelda would end up feeling the same way, and began thinking about what needed to be done with its art to make it stand out.

In turn, Takizawa illustrated a Moblin character fashioned after the new Link's stylized look, believing that this new style would allow for more striking animation. The resulting demo reel convinced the designers and director Eiji Aonuma that this was the way to go, and that cel-shading or toon-shading techniques would help achieve the visuals they envisioned.

The staff that I work with was curious, so we challenged it. We tried it. Inspired by their striking new visual style, the development team began brainstorming ideas around Zelda 's core foundations: interactivity and an in-game logic that would make sense to the player. The belief among the team was that photorealistic visuals made it more difficult to convey things to the player. For example; if you needed the player to bomb a breakable wall, it was harder to make the wall stand out from non-bombable walls if the artwork was overly realistic.

And so, the team leaned into the idea of a highly-stylized, animated world filled with moving parts and visual flourishes. Moblins would have strands of rope hanging from their spears, while suspension bridges would feature them heavily as well. In order to make these strands animate convincingly, a programmer that had been in charge of Majora's Wrath, an enemy in Majora's Mask that used whips, would be assigned to them. The development team decided to set this new Zelda among the seas early in the development process.

The Nintendo GameCube couldn't load environments in quickly enough if islands were too large, placed too close together, or if Link approached them too quickly. In order to make transitions seamless between sailing and docking at an island, the team experimented with the size of the sea as well as the placement and sizes of the islands themselves.

Similar to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask , gameplay elements helped define this new Zelda 's story. Once the team had decided to set the game on the sea, they came up with the idea that Hyrule was now at the bottom of the ocean.

This led to the question of how exactly Hyrule had been flooded to begin with, which Aonuma used as an opportunity to position the game's story as a sequel to Ocarina of Time , set hundreds of years later.

By August , the development team had made enough headway on the game for Nintendo to show a clip off at Space World , followed by a playable demo at E3 the next year.

Reactions to the game were mixed, due to the fact that it looked so different from the Space World tech demo, which had employed a more realistic, mature visual style. To many, the dramatic change in the graphics indicated that Nintendo was trying to appeal to children, instead of expanding upon the edgier style of Ocarina of Time , which had cemented itself as the standard for Zelda games on home consoles. This perception was something the company would spend the next several months combating, up until release.

Several years later, late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata would recall: "If I think back, people were cleanly split into two groups. But developing the game timidly would have been the worst thing, so we plunged ahead, determined to go all out hoping to gain acceptance. Development on the game—dubbed The Wind Waker —was completed in late In order to complete it on time, the development team had to cut two entire dungeons from the game and replace them with a quest to recover Triforce pieces scattered around the sea instead.

The shortened development cycle would later lead to criticism of the game's overworld, which players felt was empty and lacking in things to do. The port contained a bonus mode titled "Master Quest," which was based on Ocarina of Time 's previously unreleased expansion, Ura Zelda , which had been in development for the Nintendo As a result, The Wind Waker quickly saw Nintendo's most successful pre-order campaign in history, with Nintendo of America announcing that the game had seen , pre-orders in North America alone.

While pre-orders and initial sales for The Wind Waker were satisfactory, they began to lose steam quickly afterwards, growing to just 4. Meanwhile, in the west, sales were low primarily due to The Wind Waker 's cartoon-ish visual style, which had proven unpopular with The Legend of Zelda 's audience in North America. By this point, Aonuma had a sense of what Zelda 's audience expected from each subsequent game. Aonuma felt that for a game to succeed, two things were necessary: [].

The problem with The Wind Waker was that it hadn't struck the balance of new-versus-existing appeal well enough. Nintendo's unintentional misdirect with their Space World tech demo had led players to believe that they would expand upon the moody visual style introduced in Ocarina of Time.

When the actual game ended up going in an entirely different direction, it alienated a large portion of the audience that expected future games to improve upon Ocarina of Time. However, Shigeru Miyamoto felt that there was another reason that The Wind Waker hadn't been able to find a large audience.

From his perspective, the Zelda team hadn't been able to add any truly new ideas to the core gameplay since the series had gone 3D. This, he felt, had resulted in seasoned gamers growing tired of the formula, while those that weren't fond of videogames found Zelda too complicated—especially in Japan, where the market had begun to decline.

Whether his theory about The Wind Waker was applicable outside Japan or not, Miyamoto's outlook trickled down to the development team and for the next several years the Zelda team would struggle to balance the needs of its western and Japanese audiences. Miyamoto would encourage the staff to think up new gimmicks and ideas to combat Japan's declining videogame market and this would often lead to games that felt misguided or at odds with the western audience.

Following the release of Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages in , work began on a new portable Zelda game, this time for the Game Boy Advance, which had been released the same year. The new game would be developed by Capcom in collaboration with Nintendo once more, and Hidemaro Fujibayashi would direct. Shortly after it began development, however, the project was put on hold in favour of getting another game out first: a remake of A Link to the Past.

A remake of an older Zelda for one of Nintendo's portable platforms had been a long time coming. Nintendo had already experimented with the idea of remaking A Link to the Past for the Game Boy, but that project had eventually transformed into Link's Awakening. This time, there was a simpler, clearer vision in place: A Link to the Past would be re-released with minimal changes for the Game Boy Advance, and an entirely separate multiplayer game dubbed Four Swords would be included as bonus material.

Nintendo had grown increasingly wary of a phenomenon dubbed "Gamer Drift" in Japan. It referred to the ongoing decline of the videogame market, and the company had been experimenting with different ways to combat it across their various franchises.

Nintendo wanted to explore the concept of connectivity differently with a separate Zelda game, which led to the creation of the Four Swords mode. Meanwhile, Hidemaro Fujibayashi served as the director for Four Swords , which required at least two players to play. Four Swords allowed up to four players with Game Boy Advance devices and four copies of the game to play together. Each player would be represented by a Link of a different colour, and Link's overall design was modeled after the Toon Link concept created for The Wind Waker.

By , the Japanese videogame market had declined visibly, both in terms of hardware and software sales. This phenomenon was being referred to as "Gamer Drift"—where existing customers were losing interest in videogames and not enough new customers were being created to take their place.

Gamer drift was something Nintendo in particular took very seriously. They had attributed low sales of The Wind Waker in part to the phenomenon, and the general sense was that the next Zelda game was going to face an uphill battle in Japan. While the North American videogame market was much healthier, The Wind Waker hadn't sold to expectations in the Americas either, owing to the game's divisive visual style.

Meanwhile, director Eiji Aonuma faced a personal conundrum. Aonuma had served as one of many directors on Ocarina of Time and as the sole director of the two console Zelda games succeeding it. By the time development on The Wind Waker wrapped, Aonuma found himself exhausted by the experience. While on tour in Europe to promote the game, he also realized he was uncomfortable conducting interviews alongside his mentor, Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto had invented the Zelda franchise and had strong opinions about just what constituted the virtues that made the games appealing. While Aonuma had directed the past few Zelda games, Miyamoto still had the final say in what was allowed and what wasn't, and his outlook on what qualified as " Zelda -ness" was often unclear to the director.

Miyamoto points out every mistake that I made in front of the reporters! Even Mr. Miyamoto is inconsistent with his answers. In one interview he answered, 'Zelda games are unique,' and then in another he suggested, 'Zelda games demonstrate growth'.

So I would talk about that 'Zelda-ness' just as Mr. Miyamoto would describe, only to be interrupted by Mr. Fatigued by The Wind Waker 's development and the subsequent promotional tour, Aonuma eventually informed Miyamoto that he wanted to step down as director of Zelda and work on something else instead.

In turn, the latter requested that Aonuma stay and promoted him to producer, suggesting he take on a supervisory role and focus on making the series better from a distance. To use it, one would connect the Game Boy Advance to a Nintendo GameCube via a Link Cable and activate the item, which would allow the player to take control of Tingle. The Tuner would then enable a number of smaller features and abilities within the game, which would assist Link in his quest.

Aonuma had grown weary of directing Zelda games due to the heavy workload involved, and doing press interviews alongside his mentor, Shigeru Miyamoto, was adding to his stress. Up until that point, the more recent portable Zelda games had been developed by Capcom, with development support from Nintendo's own Zelda team. Aonuma hadn't been involved with these titles, owing to his responsibilities on the home console Zelda games, but as producer he would now be in charge of every Zelda that was in development.

The game would be played from a top-down view and four players would be able to explore together on the TV screen. When players entered a dungeon, the view would shift to their individual Game Boy Advance screens. The team felt that maintaining a top-down view all throughout would make it easier for all four players to tell where they were. With Aonuma promoted to producer, a new director needed to be appointed for Four Swords Adventures. He was a fan of the Zelda series and would go through a number of prior Zelda titles, handpicking elements from nearly every game to pay homage to in Four Swords Adventures , whether it was in the form of puzzles or other in-game elements.

Four Swords Adventures was originally scheduled for release in Japan in February , but was delayed by a month to accommodate a polished single-player mode. The game's main campaign, Hyrulean Adventure, was initially meant to require at least two players the way Four Swords did, but the team changed plans partway through development to allow solo play as well.

Two months prior to release, Shigeru Miyamoto advised Suzuki that the single-player campaign needed more polish, and so the team spent an extra month redoing the way the game played with a stronger focus on the single-player aspect. Four Swords Adventures was eventually released in March in Japan and a few months later in the west. While the game was well-received at E3 the year prior, it ultimately sold poorly owing to the fact that every player needed their own Game Boy Advance and a Link Cable with which to connect it to the Nintendo GameCube.

This, Nintendo would later admit, made it too difficult to convince customers that they needed to play the game. Concept art by Capcom. The text reads: "We want this to be a little more ominous than A Link to the Past". Capcom had initially begun planning a game for Nintendo's next portable platform, the Game Boy Advance, as far back as but this project had to be put on hold to allow the development of Four Swords , which would be included with the Game Boy Advance remake of A Link to the Past.

Once development on Four Swords wrapped in , Capcom's Zelda team returned to its other project, now under the series' newly-appointed producer, Eiji Aonuma. Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi had two broad goals for the project: to do something that nobody had done before, and to make a game that was representative of Capcom's talent for 2D artwork. While Nintendo's own Zelda team was accustomed to creating in-game assets early on and experimenting with them to determine the look and feel of a game, Capcom chose to create a large number of concept drawings first to convey this new Zelda 's unique theme.

Another picture showed a corridor made out of the gaps between normal sized furniture, and an unknown world opening up beyond Once we saw those images, we could feel 'this is going to be an interesting game'. One of the development team's goals was to include elements that were more geared toward 3D, but create them using 2D artwork instead. This visual trickery was accomplished by distorting the environments and Link's sprite to depict scale and perspective.

In some cases, the world around the player would become larger as Link would shrink down in size. Other times, the world would appear the same as he shrank and Link himself would appear as a tiny dot on the screen. While Fujibayashi served as the game's director on the Capcom side, Eiji Aonuma took on the role of supervisor-cum-director at Nintendo. By early , Aonuma was already involved with another Zelda project—a "realistic" Zelda for the GamCube that would eventually become Twilight Princess.

However, since the Nintendo GameCube wasn't selling well, Nintendo's business was largely being sustained by the Game Boy Advance and their first priority was to keep sales of the device stable.

Aonuma would divert his attention from the console Zelda to see development of The Minish Cap through, ensuring that the Game Boy Advance had a marquee title for the holiday season that year. Working on The Minish Cap would also allow Aonuma a brief respite from the development of Twilight Princess , which was having a difficult time getting off the ground. Following its release, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi became a fulltime employee of Nintendo and eventually went on to help create one of the most lauded games in the series.

The Minish Cap itself would only sell 1. The Wind Waker had not performed to expectations. The game had sold relatively poorly in Japan, owing to the fact that the country's videogame market had begun to decline.

Meanwhile, despite a successful pre-order campaign, sales in the west were slowing faster than usual. Series producer Eiji Aonuma would discover that this was because The Wind Waker 's cartoon-ish visuals had alienated the upper-teen audience that represented the typical Zelda player in North America—the series' largest market.

By the time The Wind Waker was released, game development costs on home consoles had risen significantly. This was something that Nintendo had been wary of for some time, as the company believed that creating games with constantly escalating budgets was an unsustainable business. A declining Japanese market, rising development costs, and apathy from the western audience were putting pressure on Eiji Aonuma and the core Zelda development team to achieve some sort of breakthrough, failing which the franchise was under threat of being shelved permanently.

You could even play the main levels, called dungeons, in whatever order you wanted — which was nearly unprecedented during the early era of gaming, when games were organized much more linearly. This expansive concept was so new that Zelda was the first game to include an internal battery in the cartridge to retain save files for future play sessions, while previous games were designed to be played in a single sitting. Consider some of the other big hits of the time, like Super Mario Bros.

With those tools, they just follow the screen from left to right to overcome obstacles, literally a straight line from point A to B. This level of freedom, along with the successful action-adventure gameplay, hinted at what games could become.

The Legend of Zelda essentially gave birth to these concepts by letting gamers not just tackle the puzzles in different ways but also decide which levels they would tackle first. With the exception of Zelda II a weird 2D side-scrolling adventure game , the next few iterations in the Zelda franchise generally built on this formula, although they also moved in a more linear direction in favor of adopting more complicated action and puzzle elements.

But when the Nintendo 64 came along, Nintendo faced a new demand: to bring Zelda to a 3D space. This is something many gamers take for granted now, but it posed a lot of huge questions for developers at the time.

How could developers translate concepts that worked well in two dimensions to three dimensions? Does the Nintendo 64 even have the tech to make an open-world action-adventure game in 3D work? How would the camera work?

But it was difficult enough that several beloved franchises from the 2D era, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Bugsby , never could successfully make the jump. The game by and large continued the formula seen in past Zelda games, particularly A Link to the Past. But by being the first game to really meld action-adventure and RPG elements in 3D, it shook up gaming. It also offered various technical lessons — particularly with its snappy camera controls — for other 3D games at the time.

This was Nintendo skyrocketing its beloved series into a new generation of gaming. Ocarina of Time was so successful that it is regarded as not just one of the best Zelda games but one of the best games ever. To this day, it remains the best-reviewed game of all time, according to Metacritic. But Breath of the Wild may change that. In some ways, Breath of the Wild is simply trying to bring the original Legend of Zelda to a 3D space. Where the 3D Zelda games have floundered ever since Ocarina of Time is in their linearity.

Whereas the original Zelda let you play dungeons in any order, the 3D Zelda games, with some minor exceptions, generally guided you through the dungeons in a set path. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. The exploration proved to be the most fun part, so Miyamoto and his team scrapped the creation tools and went ahead building a world of mountains and forests and lakes that players could traverse.