"This year marks the 40th anniversary of the very first Legend of Zelda game," Aonuma answers when asked about the inspiration for the modern remake even after the game was remade on Nintendo 3DS.
Many of the team members who work alongside me on Legend of Zelda games today have only experienced developing the more recent titles.
That led me to wonder, 'do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?'
Related:Opinion: Why words matter when we prioritize 'core teams' in game development"But I started to wonder how they'd interpret The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as they go about developing future Legend of Zelda games.
That’s what led us to the conclusion that now is the right time to revisit The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time once again."
Three decades after it was released, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still considered by many to be one of the best video games of all time, and series producer Eiji Aonuma—who worked on the original as the dungeon designer and game planner—wants to make sure the lessons of that game's development are not lost on the modern Zelda developers. In an interview as part of Nintendo's internal "Ask the Developer" series, Aonuma explains that one of the reasons the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake was conceived was so the current Zelda team that didn't work on the original game could understand its lessons and use them as inspiration for upcoming games.
"This year marks the 40th anniversary of the very first Legend of Zelda game," Aonuma answers when asked about the inspiration for the modern remake even after the game was remade on Nintendo 3DS. "With that in mind, I was thinking about what I should create as the producer of the series. Many of the team members who work alongside me on Legend of Zelda games today have only experienced developing the more recent titles. That led me to wonder, 'do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?' Of course, there are team members who vaguely know the game, and those who played it in their childhood days.
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"But I started to wonder how they'd interpret The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as they go about developing future Legend of Zelda games. By learning the game structure and development style behind the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and by actually rebuilding it as a full remake, it may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development. If we could achieve that, I thought it would be incredibly valuable. That’s what led us to the conclusion that now is the right time to revisit The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time once again."
The recent Legend of Zelda titles have veered away from Ocarina of Time's formula of visiting dungeons in a linear path and collecting principal items from each one, which may be more accurately described as the core Legend of Zelda formula up to that point, for what Aonuma has termed as "open-air" exploration seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In the interview, several developers on the Switch 2 Ocarina of Time remake admit to not having played the original until the last few years, indicating that Aonuma's plans to familiarize junior staff with the lessons of the 1998 classic were not misguided.
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"In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, part of the fun comes from progressing through a carefully paced adventure and story, gradually building up the player’s growth and their understanding of the narrative along the way," Aonuma says later. "We wanted players who had grown accustomed to Legend of Zelda games like Breath of the Wild, where they can freely choose their own path from the start, to experience that kind of gameplay as well."
