A Link Between Worlds Almost Didn’t Happen

Nintendo’s Iwata Asks are a series of interviews where Satoru Iwata discusses games and events with the Nintendo employees involved, and they are a goldmine of information about the inner workings of the company. In one such interview, it is revealed just how close A Link Between Worlds came to being completely scrapped.

After Spirit Tracks was finished around the end of 2009, Nintendo started to consider making a Zelda game for the 3DS. However, most of the Spirit Tracks team was called in to help develop Skyward Sword, leaving a team of three to work on Zelda for the 3DS: Hiromasa Shikata, Kentaro Tominaga, and another unnamed programmer.

The tiny team toiled for nearly half a year and then finally decided that they had to show something to Shigeru Miyamoto for development to really get started. I usually think of Miyamoto as a warm and joyful person, but it appears that he can be ice cold when the job demands it.

Mouri: As soon as we started the presentation, I could clearly see Miyamoto-san’s facial expression rapidly darkening. I thought, “This is bad…” And then at the end he said, “This sounds like an idea that’s 20 years old,” that was the killing blow. We were down on the floor.

Iwata: What did you do once you were beaten down?

Shikata: He had ripped it apart so badly that I was distraught.

Iwata: I suppose so. (laughs)

Shikata: We decided to rethink it from the start, and one day when the three of us were having a meeting, I suddenly said, “What about having Link enter into walls?” Mouri-san and the other programmer were like “That’s great!” and got into it. But even though I had brought it up, it didn’t quite make sense to me.

This was the birth of the Link’s ability to merge with walls in A Link Between Worlds, but it was almost cast aside just as it was conceptualized. Shikata couldn’t quite envision how such an ability would work and was about to give up on it when the unnamed programmer saved the day.

Mouri: There’s this other programmer who is usually a really mild-mannered person, but Shikata-san, who had suggested the idea, was so indecisive about it that the programmer got mad and angrily said, “I think the idea of entering walls sounds amazing, so what’s wrong with it?!”

Iwata: Even though he’s mild-mannered?

Mouri: Yeah. (laughs) He got even hotter, saying, “We’re at a fork in the road as to whether this project runs astray or not, so I’m not changing my mind!” and “We’re making this no matter what, so tell us what to do!” Then Shikata-san was like, “Maybe the point is turning corners on the walls…” without any confidence, so I got angry too and fired back, “Then I’m making a prototype!”

Mouri was so fired up by this he pumped out the prototype in about a day. Miyamoto approved the project…and then production halted just as it was beginning. Around October of 2010, the team that had been working on Zelda for the 3DS got pulled apart to work on launch titles for the Wii U. Even so, the team didn’t want their project to be forgotten about.

Eiji Aonuma: They put a sticker with the development code name on a Nintendo 3DS with the prototype in it-like a student giving a favorite teacher a present at a graduation ceremony-and gave it to Miyamoto-san, Tezuka-san and me.

Aonuma had thought the project was something special, so he took it upon himself to jumpstart it back to life…without the original team.

Aonuma: Yeah. We released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for the Nintendo 3DS, but that was a remake of a Nintendo 64 game. So when I heard people asking if we would come out with a whole new game, I really wanted to satisfy those expectations.

Iwata: But Shikata-san and the others were still off elsewhere.

Aonuma: Yeah. Then development of Skyward Sword ended two years ago in 2011 and I started thinking about the next project. Since the idea of entering walls had come up, I sensed the possibility of making a new kind of Zelda game from that and thought I should do something about it. I wanted development to make even a little progress, so while they were gone, I resumed work on it.

Iwata: What? You revived the project even without the core members?

Aonuma: If I hadn’t, and we’d begun after they got back, we’d never have been able to bring it out by the end of 2013.

Kentaro Tominaga was brought in to work on the game until Shikata could return.

Tominaga: Without letting myself be constrained by the world of The Legend of Zelda, I made a few small dungeons with entering-the-wall ideas I came up with, and then about May of 2012, I presented them to Miyamoto-san saying that I would be making 50 more of these dungeons where you used the entering-walls ability.

Iwata: What was Miyamoto-san’s reaction?

Tominaga: He tore it up! (laughs)

Shikata: Again! (laughs)

Everyone: (laughs)

Tominaga: But he didn’t just criticize, he also gave us a hint. He suggested basing it on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

That is when the project began to use elements from A Link to the Past.

Iwata: Did anyone say that it would turn out like a remake even though you had this new idea of entering walls?

Aonuma: They did. Everyone gets skeptical when they simply hear about it in words.

Iwata: Sure.

Aonuma: So I used a tool myself to render the landforms of A Link to the Past into 3D.

Iwata: You did that yourself? (laughs)

Aonuma: Yeah. It took about three days.

Tominaga: I think it took a little longer…

Aonuma: Did it? (laughs) I wasn’t sure it was right for a producer to go that far, but I thought showing the actual thing would be more convincing and made three-dimensional landforms. I had them place Link and move him around. When they saw that they all marveled out loud and were convinced that it works. When we showed it to Miyamoto-san, he finally gave the okay. About when was that?

Tominaga: It was two months after Miyamoto-san ripped it apart in May of 2012. The first presentation was no good, the second one was okay, the third was no good, and the fourth was okay, so it went through a cycle of bad to good.

Iwata: This project was both trashed and praised. (laughs)

Tominaga: Yeah! (laughs)

After all that, A Link Between Worlds was finally off the ground and running full speed ahead. There were a few more issues with making the game run at 60 frames per second and getting the view just right, but in the end the team was able to put together a wonderful addition to the Zelda series.

What do you guys think? Does A Link Between Worlds show its scars from development hell, or is the game perfectly polished?

Source: Iwata Asks