Mario Golf: Super Rush Developers Were Inspired By Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule Field
Posted on August 30 2021 by Charles Xavier
I remember that, when I was a child, my cousins had Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64, and it was one of the few games my uncle would play with us. A few years later, my dad bought Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour alongside Mario Kart: Double Dash; it was always in the rotation of multiplayer games that we’d gather to play. It didn’t really bother me that each hole was a level in and of itself back then. But it seems that the newest entry in the series, Mario Golf: Super Rush, features entire courses, and they are quite large.
In a recent Nintendo Dream interview with the developers of Mario Golf: Super Rush, translated by Nintendo Everything, producer Hiroyuki Takahashi and director Shugo Takahashi shared that their goal was to create courses the size of the fields in Breath of the Wild, and that the Zelda team even gave them a hand to realize this vision:
S. Takahashi: The courses are huge, too. We got technical support from Nintendo for this game.
H. Takahashi: The fields of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild were incredible, weren’t they? With the Speed Golf concept being a focus for this game, something we considered for a long time was putting all 18 holes on one course. (laughs)
In past games the screen had to be changed every hole, but the transitions between the holes in this game are much smoother.
S. Takahashi: I’ll admit I always wanted to do this, but technology at the time of each previous entry never allowed for it. Especially in the Mario Golf 64 era (laughs).
(All laugh)
S. Takahashi: We only show it in a small part of the game, but we really wanted to make a game where you hit the ball anywhere on the vast courses. A game where if you hit the ball as far as the next hole, you’d have to go and hit it all the way back. A map the size of Hyrule Field was our goal, and the Zelda team at Nintendo shared ideas with us as to how we could get there.
It’s crazy to think that we haven’t had a new home console Mario Golf entry in 18 years. While I haven’t bought Super Rush for myself, maybe at some point I will!
Do you see any similarities between the course design of Super Rush and the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Nintendo Dream (via Nintendo Everything, Nintendo Life)
Charles is a Senior Editor at Zelda Dungeon. He is a Visual Development artist focused on enviroments and pitch paintings. Check out his Instagram and Twitter to see his latest artworks, a lot of which is Zelda fan art! His favorite candy is Skittles – he feels the world should know this.
