I was 12 years old when the GameCube was announced in 2000, still an inveterate Nintendo fangirl obsessing over screenshots in magazines from Space World, the Japanese trade show that Nintendo used to put on for the press. Space World 2000 gave the eager Nintendo faithful our first glimpse of Luigi’s Mansion, a new Metroid, Pokemon and Mario on a 128-bit console (when was it that we stopped talking about bits?). All of it was impossibly good-looking to a kid who grew up squinting at the N64’s fuzzy polygons.

What had us all in a froth of anticipation, though, was a ten-second glimpse of what Zelda could look like on this new hardware. The demo reel included a brief face-off between Link and Ganondorf, styled after Ocarina of Time. Ganondorf, armour-clad and cackling, loomed over an adult Link, who threw his shield aside to meet his two-handed strike. Nintendo fans could barely contain themselves.

Not so for series director Eiji Aonuma. He straight-up hated it. “I saw that movie and I thought, ‘No, this isn’t Zelda. This isn’t Zelda at all,’” he says. “I felt like this wasn’t what I imagined Zelda to be. It wasn’t the Zelda I wanted to make. That video clip didn’t actually contain any big surprises. There wasn’t any kind of revelation going on. It was more like a continuation of the previous version.” To me at the time, I say, it looked like a scene from Ocarina of Time, but better looking. “Yeah,” he smiles. “That’s right. I wasn’t interested in it at all.”

“ I felt like this wasn’t what I imagined Zelda to be. It wasn’t the Zelda I wanted to make.

At the next year’s Space World, in 2001, we got a very different trailer. A cartoon link –with huge, expressive eyes, a childlike form, a dinky little sword, and a shield almost as big as he is – ran from a crown of Moblins, whose feet pedalling comically in the air as he leaped from their grasp. Looking at it now, you can see many of Wind Waker’s hallmarks, the things that have helped it endure as a masterwork of the series: the exquisite animation, the fluid combat and childlike playfulness. But at the time, it caused an almighty fanboy ruckus. Where’s our “mature” Zelda (yelled a bunch of young teenagers, ironically)? What happened to that adult Link, that menacing Ganondorf? Who is this kid?

“I believe that we got that kind of feedback from the users because we’d changed a lot of things style-wise, compared to Ocarina of Time,” Aonuma observes. “Usually, when there’s a big change to be made, the fans will be a bit nervous or hesitate to get into it. But I think that change was actually a good turning point. One of the reasons why we got such good feedback about the HD remake is because, probably, the users are more used to that art style now, after it was used in some of the original DS titles.”

It’s no secret that most people don’t normally like change, and that passionate fans can be the most conservative and resistant when it comes a-knocking. But Wind Waker’s transformation was a bold move that paid off in the long run. At a time when games were obsessed with emulating realism but still didn’t have the technology to pull it off, Wind Waker carved out a look that was all its own, and ensured that it would never look dated. Cartoon Link’s initial reception may not have been rapturous, but Wind Waker’s re-release has been near-universally hailed as a masterpiece, and it’s now popularly considered among the very best Zeldas.

“ We don’t go out to just make a remake. There should be some kind of meaning to it.

That’s despite the fact that it was, originally, partially unfinished. Rushed towards release, Aonuma’s team was forced to cut two dungeons from Wind Waker, replacing them with a trawl for bits of Triforce that was not well-loved at the time. I had hoped that those two dungeons might be reinstated for the HD release, but it turns out that was never a possibility.

“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,” says Aonuma, laughing. “So right now, technically, they don’t really exist anymore…”

Where those dungeons ended up is one of the great Zelda mysteries, though they were never transplanted in their entirety. “We didn’t exactly use them as-is and implement them into another game,” clarifies Aonuma. “We’d add some [of their] features to other dungeons. So they’re in different dungeons now.” Elements of them must have found a way into Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass, but who knows – their remnants may be somewhere in Skyward Sword, too.

Eiji Aonuma, excited about A Link Between Worlds.

Wind Waker is still my favourite Zelda. It came along at an important time for me, and having spent many hours arguing in its defence over the past ten years, it’s greatly rewarding to see that second time around, almost everyone seems convinced of its charms. Usually it’s the opposite that happens when we return to a much-loved video game. Memories are left in tatters by awkward design, horrible graphics, the realisation that the script and story weren’t perhaps as mature and interesting as you thought it was when you were 11. Often, the memories we cherish in our heads are much better than the actual game that forged them.

“ We’d like to create something that can be better than the image inside the players’ minds.

That’s a challenge that any remake must face, and I imagine it must cause their creators a great deal of consternation. “The memories that users have in their heads aren’t just about the gameplay of the game, not just about the experience in the game, but it’s more like… Their memories are about their lives mixed in with those memories,” Aonuma elucidates. “So it’s really difficult for us to re-create that whole situation, that whole memory, because it depends on the players.

“What we have to be careful about, when it comes to the remake, is that we’d like to create something that can be better than the image inside the players’ minds, but still retains the atmosphere of the original. When it comes to the Wind Waker HD version, we think that we’ve managed to create a game that doesn’t ruin that [nostalgic] image, but sticks with the original atmosphere as well. What’s most important is to stick with the original – we don’t want to make any huge changes, even though we’re creating something new.”

Wind Waker isn’t the first Zelda to be remade. Ocarina of Time had to contend with a generation of older players’ rose-tinted memories last year, too. It came out of it well, but did going back to these old games and intruding on their quasi-sanctified memories not make Aonuma nervous? “The staff were really nervous about it, but I was completely fine,” he claims. “I said, ‘Come on, let’s just make changes.’ I asked the staff to be more free. because we had to create something that’s not exactly like the original game. We had to bring some additional fun to it. So I told the staff to be more creative, to not be afraid of making something new.

“We don’t go out to just make a remake. There should be some kind of meaning to it. For example, the reason why we released the 3DS version of Ocarina of Time, is that we wanted users to enjoy the stereoscopic 3D version. Now that HD is possible with the Wii U, for the same reason, we wanted users to enjoy an HD version [of Wind Waker] and to be able to use the GamePad, so they could see a difference there. So it’s not just making a remake that’s the important thing. We wanted to have a particular reason to do it. If there’s a meaning behind doing a remake, then of course we’ll consider it.”

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It seems inevitable that other Zelda games will, in time, enjoy the same treatment. Aonuma acknowledges the groundswell of demand for Majora’s Mask, but won’t confirm that it’s up for consideration. In all honesty, it’s the only other Zelda that I think would really justify a remake. Majora’s Mask, like Wind Waker, was forward-thinking, unique, unafraid of change. It's often the most adventurous games - the ones that dare to defy expectation - that endure the longest. It's why this is my favourite Zelda, and it's Aonuma's too. “My favourite would be the world of Wind Waker, because it’s so unique. It’s a world that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” he says.

Nintendo has never shied away from change, despite its reputation for relying on the same old brands. Mario and Zelda have been around for 25 years, sure, but both of those series have revolutionised video games and the way that we think about them over that time, more than once - and that’s to say nothing of Nintendo’s neophilic attitude to hardware. The last few years have been a relatively conservative period for the company, but Wind Waker is a timely reminder of its power to innovate.

Now she's played Wind Waker again, Keza MacDonald expects that she will be spending the next few months waiting for Link Between Worlds, playing Link Between Worlds, and raving about Link Between Worlds. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter