Twilight Princess HD Developers Have Not Been Approached Regarding Switch Port
Posted on May 16 2022 by Mike Midwood
With the sequel to Breath of the Wild delayed until Spring 2023, many Zelda fans feel stuck in a barren release desert, parched by the lack of new content. It’s been nearly a year since the release of Skyward Sword HD, and the ever-extending timeline for Breath of the Wild‘s follow-up leaves a giant window with no other releases expected. Many fans have been hoping for Switch ports of The Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD, which isn’t totally unfeasible given Nintendo’s efforts to bring other Zelda titles to their current console juggernaut through Nintendo Switch Online. Unfortunately, this prospect is currently just a mirage of an oasis on the horizon. Tantalus, developers of Twilight Princess HD, claim they have not been approached by Nintendo regarding the prospect of a Switch port.
On a recent episode of the Fragments of Silicon podcast, Tom Crago, CEO of the Austraila-based Tantalus, was asked about a potential Switch port of Twilight Princess HD. Crago voiced the company’s desire to work on such a rerelease, but stated there had been no communication with Nintendo about it.
According to Nintendo Everything, when asked if Nintendo has reached out to the developer about bringing Twilight Princess HD to the Switch, Crago is quoted as saying the following:
“No, and look, we’d obviously love to do that [Zelda: Twilight Princess HD], but that hasn’t been a priority for Nintendo – or at least not in conversations that they’ve had with us.
“The way it works with our friends over there is we’ll jump at any opportunity we can to work on one of their titles. There’s a constant dialog between our two companies. Often there’s a little bit of time that passes between titles, and there might be other ideas that are kicked around, but in the case of Skyward Sword, some time passed and then the email comes: ‘Would you be interested in considering bringing Skyward Sword on to Switch?’ To which the answer is of course: ‘Yes we would.’ And then we enter into the conversations with Nintendo around what that might look like and eventually we get underway. So it was similar in a lot of senses in terms of how Twilight Princess (on Wii U) came to fruition.”
The fact that the possibility of a Switch release hasn’t even been discussed by Nintendo and Tantalus is very surprising. Simple ports are relatively cheap and easy to make, and the Switch continues to be a sales goliath, especially when compared with the modest performance of the Wii U. It’s hard to think that Twilight Princess HD wouldn’t recoup potential development costs multiple times over, but apparently Nintendo doesn’t yet have interest. While we may see a Switch release of Twilight Princess HD in the future, it appears that it won’t be filling the void while we await the sequel to Breath of the Wild.
What do you think? Should we see a port of Twilight Princess HD to Switch? What other Zelda ports would you like to see? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Fragments of Silicon (via Nintendo Life)
Hi, I’m Mike Midwood and I’m a Senior Editor at ZeldaDungeon! Video games and literature are my greatest joys in life. An avid Zelda fan, some of my other favorite games include the Resident Evil and Dark Souls series. I hope you enjoy my content here on ZeldaDungeon!
“The sword has no strength unless the hand that holds it has courage.”
