Interview:G4 August 10th 2004

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Nintendo and Zelda

I took the basic introductory exam that they required of all new employees and was selected to enter the company. I studied art in college and applied to work at Nintendo. Originally I didn’t think I’d be designing games.

I was an artist at first, and back then we were working on NES games. I was actually an artist creating pixel characters. Seven years ago, we began work on the N64 game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And at that point was the first time I began working on Zelda in planning. And since then I’ve been working seven years on essentially Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and the most recent title, The Wind Waker.

Working with the mastermind

When I first started designing games, I didn’t really take the approach of “I want to do this.” I really kind of looked of what Mr. Miyamoto (creator of Nintendo's most popular video games series: The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.) had done and thought that maybe if I can find ways to mimic what he had done than maybe I’d be able to make good games too. But the nice thing is that now that I’ve been designing games for a while, I’ve gotten to a point where I can actually sit down and talk with Mr. Miyamoto and bring my ideas to him and we’ll interact and he’ll say, “Hey what do you think about this?” And I’ll say, “Oh that’s a good idea!” And I can move forward in that direction. So it’s gotten to be a very mutually rewarding relationship.

Ocarina of Time

Our original thought for the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was essentially to take Super NES game, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and turn that into a 3D game on the N64. And in doing so, we took one of the items from the Super NES game, and it wasn’t featured very much in A Link to the Past, but we decided to essentially take that and make that kind of the main item in Ocarina of Time and use it as kind of this musical instrument that plays an important role in the game. So we brought this idea and worked on it with Mr. Miyamoto.

Ocarina's success

When you’re actually developing a game, it’s really hard to see how it’s going to turn out and whether or not it’s going to be successful. But with Ocarina of Time, when we actually finished working on the game and saw what we had created, we were really surprised and we said, “Wow, we really may have done something great here.” It was just really this great response that we got from the game. And I think at that point, Mr. Miyamoto really thought that we may have had a big hit on our hands.

Majora’s Mask

Actually, right after we had completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and things had started to slow down for us, Mr. Miyamoto came to me and he said, “I want you to come up with a Zelda game that we could create within one year.” Ocarina of Time was essentially a three-year development cycle. And because of that, we unfortunately had to make a lot of fans of the Zelda series wait for the latest installment. So the idea was to try to bring them a new title sooner. And of course by using the Ocarina of Time engine, we were certainly able to decrease the development cycle. But also, if we were to try to create a game that was as vast and was very large in the scope of Ocarina of Time, we wouldn’t have been able to do that within one year. So it was kind of based on that idea, that we came up with our concept of having unlimited time-frame that you replay over and over again, and that essentially became the focus of Majora’s Mask.

Majora’s success

I was pretty pleased with the response. We received a lot of commendations for having created this game system that was unique and new and that made us really happy. And also, with me personally, I was really interested in looking at once we released Majora’s Mask to see how dedicated people were going to be and just how much of all the events that were occurring in the game they wanted to play through and experience. And there were some comments where people said there was too much to do in that limited amount of time. But overall, I thought it was very interesting to see just how people were so involved in what was going on in the world.

Ocarina vs. Majora’s Mask

With Ocarina of Time, the events in that game weren’t really fixed to a specific time-frame. But with Majora’s Mask, we actually had this limited time-frame that the player would play over and over again. And throughout that, the events that occurred were occurring at fixed points in time. So the player would essentially have to look at specific days and specific times and decide which of the multiple events that were occurring they wanted to become a part of. And they could kind of watch the events unfold in the same way, but depending on how they interacted with them the events might change. So really this idea of the player being more involved in the events and having to schedule their time on a daily basis became an important part of the game play.

Wind Waker

I’ve been working on the Zelda games for a long time now. And in doing so, I’ve been able to study the play control systems of the different Zelda games. And based on that study, we were had the idea that with the Wind Waker, we wanted to find the control style that’s best suited for the Zelda games and make it as easy to use as possible. So that was one of the ideas we had when we first began development of the Wind Waker. With Wind Waker and this goal of trying to create a very easy and simple to control game, we decided to go forward with the toon-shading that we’re using with in game. And the reason we did that is because as graphics get more and more realistic and more and more animations are required to maintain the realism of those graphics, it actually can become more difficult to control if things are not as realistic as the player feels they should be. And so instead, we decided to go with the toon-shading and this idea of deformation and more fluid movement to help make the play control easier as well.

From 64 DD game to cartridge game

The Ocarina of Time was actually never planned as a DD specific game. Midway through the development cycle of the N64 game, we had decided to come up with ideas for how to make Ocarina of Time compatible with the 64 DD. In doing so, we came up with a variety of ideas that we could add to the gameplay. And because the 64 DD was a re-writeable media, we essentially were looking at ways that we could save changes that the player made to the environment in the world of the Ocarina of Time onto the DD so that when a player went back, he could experience those changes again. We looked at other ways because it is a re-writeable media, once a player had cleared a dungeon, if they wanted to go back in there, we would be able to, say, leave markings so that the player wouldn’t lose his path going through the dungeon. And those sorts of add-ons to the game were considered, but ultimately we weren’t able to do it within the time-frame that we had for development, so those kind of features were removed from the game.

We had originally planned for the final version of Ocarina of Time to essentially have the Ocarina of Time Master Quest available, which would also interact with the DD. But ultimately we had to remove that from Ocarina of Time. And actually now with Wind Waker, you’ll get a free disc that has both the original Ocarina of Time, as well as, this never released Ocarina of Time Master Quest, that has the dungeons slightly rearranged and some changes like that to it.

Beyond international barriers

I don’t really think of Zelda as being a game, but really as being a kind of separate world where players are able to enter this world themselves. And they’re able to move around this main character named Link and they’re able to experience the things that he experiences in the game and meet the people that he meets, and gradually go on this adventure where through exploration and experience, the character and the player themselves actually kind of mature throughout the course of the events that unfold. And I think in that sense, there aren’t really a whole lot of other games that take that approach and I think to me, that’s the reason that Zelda appeals to so many people.