Zelda: Breath of the Wild director on how the game initially came together, Miyamoto climbing trees in the prototype
The concept for Zelda: Breath of the Wild began with Shigeru Miyamoto and series producer Eiji Aonuma asking what would players would be able to do in the new game. Hidemaro Fujibayashi, who became the project’s director, responded by saying you could do everything.
Fujibayashi told Kotaku:
“But I had to sell it to them. How we’re going to make this happen. And I felt like the best way to convey this idea to them was to show them that you could climb walls.”
Work on Breath of the Wild began with a prototype. The team created a starting area with a small field and trees, along with rupees hidden throughout. Fujibayashi describes how Miyamoto played the demo:
“We put rupees at the top of the tree to let them know that this is something we’re taking into account, but I didn’t tell them. All I did was say, ‘Here, play the game.’ So the first thing [Miyamoto] did was start climbing, and he climbed the tree, and once he was able to do that and see that he can go anywhere within this small field, he got how this game will play out and that’s how I presented it to him.”
“When we first presented this to Mr. Miyamoto, he spent about an hour just climbing trees. We left little treats like rupees on the trees, but we also left other things in other places we thought he might go. But he just kept climbing trees. Up and down. And so we got to the point where we go, ‘Do you want to look at other stuff?’ But he just kept on going. Once [he] got out of the Shrine of Resurrection, he spent an hour just within a 25-50 meter radius outside of that cave just climbing trees.”
This led Fujibayashi and others to realize that they could make a game in which climbing could be as enjoyable as other elements like battling enemies. Nintendo then pursued “multiplicative gameplay” so that Breath of the Wild’s objects and mechanics work alongside each other.
According to Fujibayashi:
“As you’re climbing trees you use up stamina, and once you run out of stamina, instead of just falling you can input a key and you start dragging down the wall. Even that provides another level of fun… What we realized was instead of trying to make all these new ideas and building them from scratch and adding them, we decided to look at what we have. We realized there are so many ways of playing the game hidden within the world we built.”
