Aonuma: Wind Waker’s Cut Dungeons “Don’t Really Exist Anymore”

With the announcement of The Wind Waker HD came the inevitable discussion among fans and journalists alike of what they thought should be updated within the game and why for its high-definition debut. One prevailing sentiment heard repeatedly by so many people was that Nintendo should complete and include the dungeons which were, at one time, planned for The Wind Waker‘s GameCube release. But, as we all know, that never happened.

Barring other factors which I’m almost certain contributed to Nintendo’s decision, Aonuma has said before that the reason the cut dungeons couldn’t be included in The Wind Waker HD is that the dungeons which were left unused in The Wind Waker ended being implemented in other Zelda games.

But, as it is a very common one to ask The Legend of Zelda‘s current producer, IGN brought the question of the cut dungeons’ fates up to Aonuma in a recent interview. Aonuma restated the point that the dungeons had already seen the light of day in other titles, but then went on to explain that these unused dungeons hadn’t simply been cut-and-pasted to the next Zelda. Instead, certain “features” of The Wind Waker‘s cut dungeons had been taken and added to those of future titles.

“I’m aware that lots of users wanted those two missing dungeons to be implemented in Wind Waker HD. But to be honest, we’ve already used those two dungeons for other titles after Wind Waker already. So right now, technically, they don’t really exist anymore…

“We didn’t exactly use them as-is and implement them into another game. We’d add some [of their] features to other dungeons. So they’re in different dungeons now.” — Eiji Aonuma

Personally, I think it’s important that we all remember just how complicated development cycles are and how many cuts and additions are probably made throughout the development of almost any project. Just based on the little bits of information we have about the massive changes certain games went through during their development cycles, I conjecture there’s got to be so much we don’t know about the original visions for all of our favorite games. The early idea for Shadow of the Colossus was Nico, a co-op adventure about taking down behemoths with your friends—online—and the game turned out to be nothing like that. But what it did turn out to be is my all-time favorite game.

What are some of the most interesting things you’ve learned over the years about the early iterations of your favorite games?

Source: IGN