Miyamoto talks Zelda: A Link to the Past in classic interview – name, cut ideas, open-ended Zelda interest
Way back in 1992, Japanese magazine Famicon Tsuushin published an interview all about The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with Shigeru Miyamoto. Shmuplations has now gone to the trouble of translating it in full. There are notable topics here, such as how Nintendo approached the name, Miyamoto’s interest in making an open-ended Zelda (which he’s finally realizing with Breath of the Wild), and scrapped ideas due to hardware limitations.
We’ve posted a few of the excerpts below. For the full interview, head on over to Shmuplations.
On naming Zelda: A Link to the Past (SFC version features the “Super Famicom” branding)…
—By the way, what do you guys call Zelda at Nintendo?
Miyamoto: Z.E.A. (laughs)
—Huh?
Miyamoto: That’s a joke. We just call it Zelda.
—If you just call it Zelda, though, don’t people get it confused with the original FDS game…?
Miyamoto: Well, of course when we need to distinguish it, we say “the SFC Zelda.” But those two games—the FDS Zelda and the SFC Zelda—aren’t usually talked about at the same time, so it’s not really a problem. We did have a hard time deciding on this title though.
—Regarding the title, I understand it was “New Legend of Zelda” for a long time.
Miyamoto: We had been thinking about making a new title eventually… there were a number of alternate suggestions, like “Ganon’s Revenge.” But since this was for the SFC, of course, we decided on “Super Famicom Legend of Zelda” (laughs).
—Nice and simple.
Miyamoto: Yeah, simple. Of course there are two previous games with the same Legend of Zelda title, but I think the only people who might get confused by that are wholesalers and advertisers—I doubt any players would have a hard time understanding it.
On wanting to make an open-ended Zelda…
—40 hours, wow… yeah, if you get stuck on some of these puzzles, it can eat up a lot of time. That might be a bit intimidating for players used to more conventional, linear RPGs.
Miyamoto: We did include alternate paths/solutions for players that are easier, though. Originally, the system in Zelda we envisioned was more open-ended: for example, if there was a rock blocking your way, you could safely ignore it and keep playing: there was always another way around. I wanted something that players could get so lost in, it would take them a whole year to finish.
—Wow, a whole year—but the payoff for that struggle would be enormous, no doubt.
Miyamoto: The problem with making an “open-ended” version of Zelda like that was the messaging and plotline. If you ignore structure like that, then the plotline can quickly get screwy and NPC messages start to not make sense. Programming in enough logic to handle all the different possibilities probably would have required about 150% more memory than we had.
On scrapped ideas due to hardware limitations…
—Were there other ideas you had for Link to the Past which had to be cut due to the 8MBit limitation?
Miyamoto: Yeah, a lot! But you can’t just throw every good idea you have into a game. The idea has to connect up with something else in the game, and there needs to be consistency between the ideas. There was a ton more we wanted to do, though!
—What kind of ideas did you have?
Miyamoto: One idea was with the lantern: if you used it on a grassy area, it would cause a huge brushfire. If you cut a little circle of grass around you, you could safely stand there in the middle of it!
—That sounds like it would be fun. Anything else?
Miyamoto: In swamp areas, you could use a shovel to dig a ditch, and then it you bombed the swamp breakwater it would cause the water to rush into the hole you’d dug. That idea was actually half-complete… if we’d had another 6 months, we might have been able to make it a reality.
