Termina was Designed to Appeal to Adults

In a recent GameSpot interview with Zelda head Eiji Aonuma, so many details are being revealed. Aonuma specified that Majora’s Mask was developed to appeal to a larger audience, and the goal was to entice an older audience than what Zelda‘s current reach was. This could be the reason why Majora’s Mask has so many elements of horror and scariness.

Aonuma also explains that Ocarina of Time‘s development team had many opportunities to turn the game into a somewhat scary experience as well, but didn’t take them. Nintendo was taking a real gamble developing the kind of game Majora’s Mask is. They were basically experimenting with the Zelda franchise as it was known at the time. It’s amazing how many details are surfacing about the development of Majora’s Mask with the release of its highly popular 3D remake.

Excerpt from the actual interview regarding this topic:

“There were some opportunities to do rather dark and scary things in Ocarina as well. You know you had the “seven years later” version of the world that Ganon had wrecked. But in the case of Termina, we’re really doing something a little bit different. We’re changing the entire game world around this concept. And what we were going for here was trying to age-up the demographic of Zelda a little bit. We were thinking about a world that might be particularly appealing to adults who would play this game.” — Eiji Aonuma

Source: GameSpot