With The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time arriving on Nintendo Switch 2 this week, Nintendo has explained why it remade the game at all. The short version: Eiji Aonuma wanted the people making Zelda now to learn from the game where it all started.
The reasoning comes from the first chapter of Nintendo's Ask the Developer Vol. 24, published on 2 November. In it, Aonuma, the series producer, and Hidemaro Fujibayashi talk through the project. Fujibayashi directed Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and served as a producer alongside Aonuma on the remake. Nintendo lists the game as a Switch 2 exclusive launching on Thursday 5 November. Video Games Chronicle picked up the interview the same day, leading on Aonuma's point about the team's younger developers.
A remake as a lesson
Aonuma ties the timing to the series' birthday. "This year marks the 40th anniversary of the very first The Legend of Zelda game," he told Nintendo. He said many people on today's Zelda team have only worked on the more recent games, which led him to ask: "Do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?"
His answer was to have them rebuild it. Learning the original's structure and development style, and actually remaking it in full, "may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development," Aonuma said, adding that if they managed that, it would be "incredibly valuable."
It wasn't the only reason. Aonuma also said the team wanted players who grew up on Breath of the Wild, where you can choose your own path from the start, to try the original's carefully paced adventure and story.
Hands off, mostly
By their own account, both producers stepped back. "If the producers say, 'This is how it should be', the team would naturally feel obligated to do it that way," Aonuma said. Instead, he "basically let the developers make whatever changes they genuinely felt were necessary," though he admits, "I did deliver my fair share of lectures along the way."
Fujibayashi said his advice to the team was to decide early what to change and what to leave alone, including whether controls should recreate the original's feel when the controller layout is different.
The warp points that didn't make it
The best story in the chapter is about a change that got cut. Aonuma said players of the Nintendo 64 original often got around Hyrule Field by spamming the forward roll, so he asked the team to add warp points like the many in Breath of the Wild, which the original never had. When they played with them, he said, they lost the moments of stopping to wonder, "Wait, what's this?" He had the team take them all back out.
That fits his wider surprise at how much the team chose to keep. "At the beginning of development, I remember thinking, 'They could be making more changes'," Aonuma said, before adding that "it really came across just how deeply this development team cared about the original game, far more than we had imagined." VGC also highlights this point.
The original came out on Nintendo 64 in 1998, and Nintendo's interview describes the game as being brought back "with a whole new look." Chapter 2 of the interview, on the visuals, is already up, and Nintendo says chapters 3 and 4 follow on 3 November.
Riley's take: A Zelda producer pitching fast travel and then cutting it to protect those "Wait, what's this?" moments is my favourite kind of design anecdote. To me it reads like the lesson he wanted the team to learn: the walk across Hyrule Field was the point. Whether a whole new look changes how that walk feels is something players can judge from Thursday.
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