Interview:Kotaku June 18th 2013

Kotaku June 18th 2013

Date	June 18, 2013
Interviewee	Shigeru Miyamoto
Interviewer	Stephen Totilo of Kotaku
Description	Miyamoto describes his 'worst' game.
Source	[1]

Stephen Totilo: Do you feel like you've ever made a bad game?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Yeah.

[...]

Totilo: I have to ask, Mr. Miyamoto, you said you have made a bad game. What was the bad game you made?

Miyamoto: I wouldn't say that I've ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there. In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper.

Totilo: So that's a rule of thumb, that if you find yourself at that point, you know the idea wasn't successful? Or is that you didn't give yourself enough time?

Miyamoto: I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing.

Totilo: I'm just curious, what would you have liked that game to have been like?

Miyamoto: So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to. The other thing is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort.

Totilo: I'm sure people would love for you to return to Zelda II with [Zelda lead producer] Mr. Aonuma at some point.