On the eve of The Legend of Zelda’s 25th anniversary, Nintendo development head Shigeru Miyamoto takes a look back at Skyward Sword — a game that took he and his team five years to complete — and admits that development wasn’t the smoothest of processes. “It’s occasionally the case during game development that the project doesn’t proceed along as planned or doesn’t turn out as fun as expected when you make it,” he told Famitsu magazine this week. “This Zelda had some of those problems. We ran into this issue of people wondering who really wants to make a Zelda sequel — whether a sequel was necessary from the company standpoint, or whether it’s just me saying ‘Let’s do it.’ A game really gets its start when you have someone who says ‘I want to do something like this,’ but sometimes it’s born simply because it’s a series title or there’s more story to cover.”
It was an issue Miyamoto was struggling with even as his team tried to figure out what a Zelda sequel needed. “For us,” he said, “games provide a structure for play, and if you’re making a sequel, you have to have that desire to improve, strengthen, and expand things right at the core of the project. To put it in an extreme way, the ideal for me is to build the play structure up to a certain point, then decide whether to make it Zelda or Mario. It’s like building up the engine and chassis, then deciding later what sort of car you want to use it on.”
