Zelda: Breath of the Wild devs borrowed assets from Mario Kart 8 while working on the Master Cycle Zero
No one could have expected Nintendo to add a motorcycle in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But in The Chammpions’ Ballad, Nintendo did just that. The reward at the end of the DLC is none other than the Master Cycle Zero.
In an interview with IGN, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma discussed the development of the new motorcycle. You might be interested to know that Nintendo imported assets from Mario Kart 8 as a “test drive” of sorts.
Aonuma said:
“When we were thinking about this motorcycle, we thought it should be something from the past. It’s using ancient technology. Perhaps it’s like the first Master Cycle, is how we kind of approached it. When we were making the game, we did actually borrow assets from Mario Kart, and kind of just had it run through the Hyrule world. It got kind of a test drive, really.”
Zelda: Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi also commented on the same topic:
“In terms of importing that data, it actually became sort of like we actually developed a motorcycle from the ground up. The Master Cycle, it was obviously kind of a racing type bike, where you’re leaning forward like that. But obviously, looking at it, we were like, ‘oh, the suspension won’t really work if it’s at that. We’ll have to change it.’ Then we went to make it off-road, more off-roady, but if we made it too kind of in the off-road direction, it won’t actually look that much like the other style of bikes. It really felt like we borrowed someone else’s bike and then did our own custom conversion.”
