Twilight Princess HD Developer Thrilled to Be Able to Work on Zelda Game, Took “Several Months” to Convince Nintendo
Posted on April 26 2017 by Kristen G. Rosario
With Breath of the Wild still deep in our minds it’s nice to hear news regarding Zelda from a different title in the series. To be specific, we can finally get more information about how Twilight Princess HD came to be. Especially by what means Australian-based game port developer Tantalus got the opportunity to work on this beloved game in the franchise.
In a recent edition of Fragments of Silicon, CEO of Tantalus Media Tom Crago got a chance to talk more about his studio’s work on Twilight Princess HD. During the interview, he was asked how his company got a shot at working on this Zelda title. As it turns out, it all started way back when they ported a Game Boy Advance game for a small Japanese developer. Of course the publisher for that game was the Big N itself.
It’s an interesting one. I mean we had a game that was published by Nintendo in the past. That game was called Top Gear Rally on the Game Boy Advance which we developed originally for a very small Japanese publisher called Kemco. And Nintendo liked it, so they decided to publish it as a second-party title, and in the course of building that relationship, I was able to go to Kyoto a couple of times – and obviously when you get the opportunity to go to Nintendo headquarters and meet people there, these are relationships that you want to nurture when you’re making video games, so that’s what I did. I kind of kept those lines of communications open.
But I think the big thing actually for Nintendo was when we did Mass Effect 3 on Wii U… the two big ones that we did on Wii U were Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Nintendo were pretty impressed by those games technically, I think. They liked how we’d taken the original games from PC and console and brought them onto Wii U. So when they were thinking about a Zelda title and looking around for external developers, then it’s kind of a pretty short list of studios who had kicked some goals on the Wii U at this point. So they approached us, which is a pretty nice fun call to receive when you’re asked if you’d have any interest in working with The Legend of Zelda. We jumped up and down in excitement, and then commenced the fairly long process of convincing them that we could do that job.
Speaking of “convincing them,” Tom tells Fragments of Silicon that it took Tantalus “several months” to have Nintendo give the OK for them to work on Twilight Princess HD. They not only had multiple talks with series producer Eiji Aonuma, but also went through tests to prove to Team Zelda that they were the right people for the job.
Several months. I mean they are obviously an incredibly meticulous company, and we’re talking about a beloved property – one of the most beloved properties in the whole house of Nintendo, so we approached it very diligently and carefully, and we went to Kyoto a couple of times to meet with Aonuma-san and his team, and to talk to them about the work that we’d done and what we proposed to do on Twilight Princess, and then there are a series of experiments and tests and trials and so on before you have the opportunity to actually go into full development, and we are fortunate that we got that opportunity.
What do you think of this news? Do you believe Nintendo chose the right developer for the job? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Fragments of Silicon (via Nintendo Everything)
Kristen G. Rosario is an Editor who joined Zelda Dungeon back in September of 2015. His current goal is to become a full-time video game journalist, hoping to eventually gain a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism. While he pursues that dream, he not only takes care of his adorable dachshund Angel, but also helps run a YouTube channel with his brother. The Zelda series is a quest he hasn’t fully completed yet, but hopes to get there one day.
