Aonuma on working on something other than Zelda, more
Eiji Aonuma has been working on Zelda for a very, very long time. He has almost exclusively been involved with the franchise since joining Nintendo. With retirement coming sooner rather than later, Aonuma is thinking about trying “all sorts of new things before it’s too late”.
Aonuma told EDGE this month:
“I’m 50 now, so I only have about ten more years to make games at Nintendo. I want to try all sorts of new things before it’s too late — I don’t want to get to the end of my career and only have worked on Zelda. But every time I come up with some good new ideas, they end up being used in a Zelda game! I need a six-month break to get away from the Zelda cycle and focus on something new [laughs]. But I’d probably end up making a game that is similar to Zelda; after all, A Link to the Past was my biggest influence.”
Aonuma is currently hard at work on the new Link to the Past game for 3DS, among other projects. It has been over 20 years since the original, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka weren’t able to remember much about the SNES game’s development.
“I have asked them for advice, but the problem is that they don’t remember anything! For instance, Link was originally left-handed, but later became right-handed, and everyone has a different theory as to the reasons why. When I asked Miyamoto about it, he said, ‘I forget!'”
Aonuma also spoke of how he grew to have a connection with Link:
“When I first started making Zelda games, I was more interested in the enemy characters than in Link himself. But while I was making Twilight Princess, I was listening to the theme on an iPod while walking hand in hand with my child, and I suddenly burst into tears. I was thinking about all the awful trials Link would have to go through in the new game. I realised that Link really is my other child. I don’t inhabit the character so much as watch him from somewhere very close.”
