The Legend of Zelda (NES)

The game needed to be different from Mario, where the player was guided from the start of each stage to the end. Instead, this new game would make players think about where to go next.

The new game would need to adopt realtime, action-based controls that would allow players to interact with the world more directly, as command-based menus were considered un-fun.

A Link to the Past (SNES)

Expanding upon the idea of Zelda as an “action-adventure” game that makes you think, players should be able to interact with objects in a flexible manner. For example; if there was an object in the game and the player didn’t know whether to push or pull it, the game would need to allow for both possibilities, without a context-sensitive menu giving the solution away.

To create an even greater sense of exploration, the new game should adopt a multi-world approach, with a single hub world and other adjoining worlds that would be connected to it. Events taking place in the hub world would lead to things changing in the other worlds. Three worlds were initially conceptualized to bring this idea to life.

Link’s Awakening (GB)

To create a game that invoked the same feel as Twin Peaks, which was a popular television show at the time. Twin Peaks was small in scope, but featured a large number of interesting and odd characters, which the development team for Link’s Awakening wanted to emulate.

Oracle of Ages / Oracle of Seasons (GBC)

To create a game involving the “four seasons” using the technology of the NES-era Legend of Zelda. The idea was to convey the appeal of that generation of games to a new generation of players using the Game Boy system.

To make use of the Game Boy Link Cable, and create three interconnected titles that would link up with one another, allowing for a different experience depending on what order you played them in, and your activities within each game.

Four Swords Adventures (GBA)

To create a new style of multiplayer game, by connecting the Game Boy Advance and a Gamecube.

To use this multiplayer structure as a means of getting more people to buy the game, so that they could play it with their friends.

The Minish Cap (GBA)

To use a dual theme once more, just like A Link to the Past (with its light and dark theme), eventually settling on the idea of “big and small” as the two themes for this game.

Phantom Hourglass (DS)

To make it easier for the player to control Link, with the use of simple, precise touch controls.

To use experience gleaned from The Wind Waker to create a game in the same world, using a similar art style and animation to appeal to the Japanese audience.

A Link Between Worlds (3DS)

To rethink the conventions of The Legend of Zelda.

To create a game that demonstrated the appeal of stereoscopic 3D on the Nintendo 3DS.

*****

In 1998,games branched off into two types: 2D games and 3D games. Starting with The, which pioneered the latter, the 3D games have come to be viewed as the “main event”—the big-budget, 50-hour affairs that come around every 5 or 6 years. Meanwhile, the 2D games have taken on a bit more of a “filler” role. They typically enjoy a shorter turnaround time and help keep the brand on people’s minds while the next 3D game is in development.That having been said, the 2Dare no less important to the brand than the 3D ones, and in many cases have been required to step up to the plate when the 3D games just haven’t been able to deliver on their promises. It’s a situation that’s unique tobecause no other AAA action-adventure franchise has two such distinct styles of games running in parallel and contributing to the growth of the brand.This article is meant to examine a number of the most important 2Dgames over the years, and to help contextualize why they were created, what market conditions were like at the time of their creation, where the developers’ heads were at, and how these factors affected the design of each of these games.Original release: 1986The originalbegan with an idea designer Shigeru Miyamoto had based on his childhood pastimes. When he was a child, Miyamoto would explore places around his home, often wandering around caverns and mountains, and fashioning slingshots using sticks and twigs to keep himself amused. Having had a hand in developing bothandat Nintendo, Miyamoto wanted his next game to be something different to both those experiences.It took the development team—headed by Miyamoto and another designer named Takashi Tezuka—a while to figure out just what sort of game world would best convey these two core design principles. The initial concept forsimply involved the player exploring a series of dungeons, influenced by Miyamoto’s own experiences exploring caverns as a child.The first dungeon would be accessed from the game’s title screen, and subsequent dungeons accessed through menus. Then, as the project evolved, an overworld was introduced, linking these dungeons together and allowing for a more open-ended style of exploration that allowed players to poke around a much larger field, as they discovered their way around the map.The concept for the game’s world and setting also underwent a number of changes during the development process. Initially, the idea was thatwould involve time-travel, taking place in both the past and the future, and that the main character, Link, would serve as the connection between the two. In this early concept, the three pieces of the Tri Force were imagined to be electronic chips instead of magical artifacts.Ultimately, these concepts were set aside in favour of a more straightforward medieval fantasy setting.There were no real “market conditions” as such, that influenced the game’s design—simply Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto’s desire to create an exploratory action game that was different from, and would allow players to decide where they wanted to go next, instead of being guided around. It was still early days for Nintendo, and their developers were making the rules up as they went along.Original release: 1991After(which was very different fromand considered something of a spin-off title by its director), Miyamoto felt the team needed to build upon the strengths of the firstfor its next game, as well introduce a number of new elements to help keep things interesting. Games had begun getting increasingly complex since the early years of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and if Nintendo wanted to keep up and set an example for other developers on the Super Nintendo, their titles would need to do the same.builds uponin a number of ways. The greater focus on players being allowed to think for themselves is why the designers introduced the concept of pushing and pulling objects in the game. The idea was that players would feel a greater sense of gratification if they were allowed to experiment with different solutions and make mistakes while trying to find the answer to a puzzle.Realtime controls would reinforce this sensation. Miyamoto was keen that the game allow the player to push and pull things by putting their weight behind them. This was considered more interactive and fun than simply standing in front of an object, pressing the A button, and having Link perform a context-sensitive action with no thinking required.Beyond a greater sense of experimentation and discovery, there was one more element Miyamoto wanted to include. He had personally always wantedto include an RPG-like party consisting of a the main character (a fighter), a mage-like character, and a female character (possibly a fairy) that would serve as a means of reconnaissance.Unfortunately, by the timewas deep in development, memory constraints, scheduling concerns, and other limitations required that a lot of the ideas initially pitched for the game be cut. The idea of three worlds (one of which was probably going to be a sci-fi world) was cut down to two, the idea of Link having two other characters in his party was done away with entirely, and a much grander idea that would allow for a more open, non-linear approach to exploration also abandoned.(The idea of a fairy guiding Link around would later be re-used in, with companion characters becoming a much more commonly used element inthereafter)Ultimately,design was governed by wanting to build upon the strengths of the first, and by the memory limitations imposed by the Super Nintendo. It was also a project that was cognizant of the realities of budgeting and scheduling the development of a major game, owing to the fact that developing video games was now a serious, profitable business for Nintendo. Miyamoto has stated thatwould have incorporated several more ideas, had the team had another six months to work on the title.Original release: 1993Initially, there were no plans at Nintendo to create a newgame for the Game Boy. The Game Boy was primarily a product of Gunpei Yokoi, who had a separate software division working under him, named Nintendo R&D—the team behind theseries. This team was the primary first-party software provider for the Game Boy system, while Shigeru Miyamoto’s unit worked largely on Nintendo’s home consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super NES.Furthermore, Miyamoto himself was busy with other projects and unavailable to attend to any discussions regarding a potentialgame for the Game Boy. And so the idea was that Nintendo would simply use whatever resources it had available to portto the Game Boy instead. This allowed a group of developers that weren’t part of Yokoi’s R&D 1 team access to a single Game Boy development kit to begin experimenting with.One of these developers was a programmer named Kazuaki Morita, who wanted to see just what he could get away with on a Game Boy development kit. From there, plans for a port ofeventually grew into something more ambitious.Designers Yoshiaki Koizumi and Kensuke Tanabe, both of whom had played a role in developing the story of, were part of the team that helped create. Both designers were fond of telling stories, which made them an excellent fit for a game that was meant to emulate the weirdness of a character-focused show likeDevelopment began, it is said, almost as an extracurricular activity after working hours. The team experimented with different ideas, and with no Miyamoto or other higher-ups to supervise them, the developers more or less got away with whatever they wanted, even putting characters from the Mario franchise into the game. Since a structure forgames already existed by this point, development went relatively smoothly.Aside from being one of the more outlandish games in the series,is also the firstto feature a fishing minigame. This was designed by Morita, the programmer that initially spearheaded theproject for the Game Boy. Morita enjoyed fishing in his spare time, which was what first sparked the idea. He would also go on to design the fishing minigame in, which would lead to nearly every subsequentincluding a fishing game in some capacity.Original release: 2001Like Link’s Awakening, the Oracle games originally began with the idea of porting a previousgame to the Game Boy Color—in this case,. Studio Flagship, a subsidiary of Capcom run byYoshiki Okamoto, had expressed interest on working with Nintendo on atitle, and was hired to develop the port. Alongside a port of, it was agreed that Flagship would also develop four other originalgames for Nintendo.Okamoto, having faith in his team to deliver the goods, left them to their own devices, assuming they would be up to the challenge of portingto the Game Boy Color. The team, unfortunately, had other ideas, and wanted to skip ahead to creating an entirely newgame instead. And so, in Okamoto’s words, “for the first year we did nothing but lose lots of money.”Ultimately, Nintendo was asked to involve themselves more deeply with the project, meant to form the "Tri Force series" of Zelda games, to help course-correct it.Hidemaro Fujibayashi, a young member of the staff at Flagship, was assigned to work on the Tri Force game. Initially, Fujibayashi was simply serving as a “design secretary” of sorts, compiling all the different ideas that were being tossed about at the time. Owing to his deep involvement with the project, he was eventually assigned to be its director.Fujibayashi and Okamoto had decided that each of three interconnected games would represent one part of theTri Force—Power, Courage, and Wisdom—and collectively form the “Tri Force series,” with a heavy focus on the games’ interconnected story. Fujibayashi in particular felt it was important for the game to have a strong action-RPG-esque story, since the Game Boy Color hardware allowed for it.A world map and topography for the game were created. After thinking up how the world would look, the team at Flagship began thinking up characters, and then proceeded to alter elements of the world to better suit the story they wanted to tell. As development proceeded, it became obvious that this approach was leading to difficulties and delays, owing in part to unexpected hardware differences between the Game Boy Color and NES. In particular, the GBC’s screen was narrower than that of an NES, and so the player couldn’t see as much of their surroundings from any given spot.This required a number of the game’s maps to be redone several times, which also led to changes in the games’ story. Ultimately, it was decided that Flagship would need to scale back from three interconnected games to just two.The resulting games,and, were unlike anyprior, both in terms of how they were connected, and the kinds of characters the player encountered, with some of them displaying a more rebellious streak than Nintendo’s own characters are known for. Fujibayashi believes this is the result of cultural differences between Nintendo, which is based out of Kyoto, and Capcom, which is based out of Osaka. He describes the characters in the Oracle games as “borderline outlaws”.Just one example of this is the Dark Tower area in the game, which contains quotes from the development staff. The included lines like “There’s no end to this work…” or “I can’t go home…”Original release: 2004The early 2000s were the start of what Nintendo called “gamer drift”. While the originalandwere in development, Nintendo had begun to experiment with new styles of gameplay in theirgames. This, they felt, would help combat “gamer drift,” which was a term they used for audiences losing in interest video games due to their increasingly complex nature.Gamer drift is something that would influence the direction of a number ofgames, starting with the original, and then its successor. One of the ideas Nintendo had was the notion of connecting the Game Boy Advance to the Gamecube, similar to how the Game Boy had been able to connect to the Nintendo 64, in order to import player data intoThis was something theteam felt they could use, in order to experiment with a new style of game—one that would hopefully help them attract more players.By the time developed wrapped on, Nintendo and Flagship had a comfortable enough relationship that a number ofprojects were underway at the Capcom-owned studio.was one of these projects, and the idea was that, unlike, all four players would be able to share a single screen this time around.While in the overworld, all four players would play the game collectively on a television screen (which was connected to a Gamecube), and when you entered a dungeon, each player would enjoy their own view on their individual Game Boy Advance systems, and be unable to see what the others were doing.Ultimately, whilewas interesting conceptually, the barrier to entry it presented was simply too high for most players. In a world that isn’t nearly as connected as today, getting four GBAs, a Gamecube, and a bunch of Link Cables together in the same room proved too difficult (and complicated) for most, and the game didn’t do the numbers Nintendo had hoped for.Original release: 2004Development ofhad begun as early as 2001, but was put on hold so that Flagship could portto the Game Boy Advance, and create its new multiplayer component: the original Four Swords game.By the pointwas back in development,series producer Eiji Aonuma had gotten increasingly worried about the fact that Nintendo couldn't seem to figure out how to get mainstream audiences to playgames again. Part of the reason, Miyamoto had convinced him, was that the 3D games were simply too complicated in terms of controls and navigating 3D spaces.This meant that there was still room for a 2Dgame to reach players a 3D game couldn’t. Thus, once development onresumed, it was with two goals:To play to Capcom’s strengths, which lay in beautiful artwork and 2D graphics, and use this to create a 2Dgame that could compete with 3DDuring the development of thegames, Flagship had tried to experiment with ways to guide the player without the use of a character dedicated solely to this task. Around that time, they had also been brainstorming items for Link to use in those games, including masks and hats. Ultimately, the idea of a hat as an item came up once again, and led to a prototype of Ezlo, the talking hat that would serve as Link’s partner in the miniature world ofwas important to Nintendo for two reasons. The first was that they needed a game to help sustain the Game Boy Advance in its later years, while the Gamecube was failing to find an audience. The second was that Eiji Aonuma was working on a separategame in parallel—titled “Twilight Princess”—which was under considerable pressure to help revive thebrand after sales ofhad dropped off much more quickly than Nintendo would have liked.was the Zelda team’s first time working with the scale and budget that game required, and was going through considerable difficulties in development. Aonuma would later reveal thatprovided him with a brief reprieve from the long, drawn out development cycle of that game, and the opportunity to refresh his mind amidst the incredible amount of stress he was under.Original release: 2007Between 2001 and 2006, thefranchise had seen its fair share of challenges. Sales had dropped off, and multiplegames () had failed to sell to expectations. With 2006’s—a 3D Zelda game that Nintendo credits with saving the franchise from untimely demise—the team had successfully managed to course-correct by appealing to the series’ primary audience: young adults in the North American market.With a less cartoon-like art style, a large world to explore on horseback, some of the best dungeons in the series, and the use of motion controls,had gone on to be the most successfulgame in years, with most of its sales coming from North America.Unfortunately, the game hadn’t done quite as well in Japan, and so it was time for the development team to turn their sights to their home market, and attempt to salvage thebrand there.Prototyping onbegan as early as 2004, right after development onhad wrapped, andandwere both in development. For the past few years,series producer EIji Aonuma had been thinking about how to makegames more accessible and popular without sacrificing the depth the games were known for. When Nintendo’s hardware division came up with the Nintendo DS, Aonuma felt the touchscreen and stylus would allow players an easier way to control Link, and asked his team to begin prototyping ideas.Since the DS could support cel-shading,was set in the same world as. This meant the game could follow a similar structure, with the player using a boat to explore the ocean, and coming across different islands along the way, which gave the development team a starting point for what the player experience would be. An effort was made to include more things to do out on the ocean than in, all while keeping the game’s controls almost exclusively touch-based.This, the team hoped, would encourage more people in Japan to pick up and try, including children. In the Japanese version of the game, an effort was made to facilitate this all the way down to the game’s text. Tapping a kanji character with the stylus would reveal how that character was meant to be read, making it easier for younger kids to keep up and understand what was going on."At first, we had the idea of creating a good game in a short time. We thoughtwas our rival,” Aonuma once said in an interview. “is like that smart transfer student. TheTeam’s not in the top places, but it studies hard. And then comes this transfer student and easily gets the first place without studying. That’s very frustrating. After three long years, we finally finishedand the transfer student’s the one that’s smart and cool and gets the first place?”The team’s efforts paid off:went on to sell nearly 1 million units in Japan—a feat no othergame had managed since. Betweenand, Nintendo had found a way to appeal to two very different audiences with very different tastes.Original release: 2013Whilehad seen an upswing from 2006 - 2009, the following years weren’t nearly as kind to the brand. This largely came down to the fact the fact that the most recent 3Dgame,, wasn’t as well-received as Nintendo would have liked, and by 2012 audiences were beginning to question if the game-maker even knew whogames were for any more.Recognizing that the brand was in need of a major overhaul, Nintendo went back to the drawing board to re-evaluate whatneeded to be. There was just one problem: the next major 3Dgame—whatever it was—was going to take several years to develop, and Nintendo couldn’t afford to wait that long to convince the market that they had what it took to reimagine. Cue the next 2Dgame.When development first began on this new 2D, the idea wasn’t to rethink the conventions ofat all. The initial concept was to create a game around the idea of Link being able to blend into walls, and to use that as the new central gimmick of the game. Eventually, series producer Eiji Aonuma decided that a smarter approach would be to merge this idea with the top-down view from a more traditional 2DThis, he felt, would allow for an interesting shift in the player’s viewpoint when switching between the regular top-down view and a side-scrolling view when Link entered a wall. At the behest of Shigeru Miyamoto, the team decided the game would take place in the world ofWhile this new 2Dwas in development, Aonuma had also been working in parallel with a much larger team on the next 3Dgame. This game would need to radically reimagine the structure of modern, and prove to the world that the brand was still relevant. Unfortunately, it was going to be a few years before the game was ready for release, and Nintendo needed to start winning the faith of the market back much sooner than that. And so, for the time being, this responsibility would need to be shouldered byWhile designing, the team playedfor research. Upon doing so, they discovered that the game wasn't nearly as open-ended as players remembered. This, they felt, should be the starting point for changes in the newer game—to allow players to tackle the game’s dungeons in any order they saw fit. In order to do this, the team would need to rethink how items worked, asdungeons were typically gated behind the items required to complete them. This led to the creation of a new item rental system, which would allow players to rent any of the game’s items at any point that they liked—provided they had the money to afford them. This, in turn, led to Rupees now being a far more useful resource than they had been in priorgames, and ensured that you always had some use for them.This new open-ended structure solved multiple problems at once, a number of which had been things players had complained about in previousgames, which madeexactly what the brand needed at the time. Aonuma and Nintendo promoted the game as a glimpse of what the future held for the series, and it went a long way towards re-instilling faith in theteam’s ability to make new, exciting, and unpredictable games.It's 2019, and thebrand has never been in a better place. 2017'sexpanded on Nintendo's promise to shake the series up in new, exciting ways and is currently the best-selling game in the franchise by a wide margin, with a full-fledged sequel on the way.2019 saw the release of not one, but two newprojects—an indie game titledand a remake of, developed by Grezzo, the studio behind(a multiplayerspin-off) and the Nintendo 3DS remasters ofandThis past year also revealed that Monolith Soft, the developers behind, are going to be taking on a more active role in the development ofgames. In a recruitment notice on their official website, Monolith Soft indicate that they've set up a new division, Production 2, to work on a newproject. This could be the sequel toor something else entirely, and Monolith are currently hiring planners, technical artists, designers, and producers for the team.