Hyrule Interviews

PEOPLE: - Shigesato Itoi, age 40. Creator of MOTHER (Earthbound Zero). Later: Editor of the Ishinomori A Link to the Past manga. - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 36. Creator of Zelda & Mario. Producer of Nintendo’s R&D4 Team. QUOTE: Itoi: I'm sitting like this because my body has an actual necessity to be in this posture. It's the result of a struggle between two things: the fact that I'm being watched by others, and my own internal necessity. I believe the future of "creative work" lies in how much we can tap into and breathe life into that kind of raw instinct. So, if you tell someone, "No, do it this way," about something they love, it's like forcing them to roll over against their will. They'll get sick. And it's not enjoyable for the viewer either. Miyamoto: … Whether it's music or art, a game with a distinct worldview is just more fun. When you go that route, the individual creator's touch becomes everything.

Itoi on tapping into raw artistic instinct, 1989.

Source: Shmuplations

#ItoiQuote, #MiyamotoQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/31d41fe961fd...

Satellaview - An Explainer (Blog Post) - Yakumono's Personal Site

Feel free to widely share this curated easy to understand #Satellaview knowledge that I just posted on my blog.

I didn't want to overscope it but I spent a lot of time explaining a curated list of games for those who have no idea what the Satellaview is.

luigiblood.neocities.org/blog/2026-01...

Finding clips of the playing (which is nice), do you know if there was also any talking or interview content?

Nope! This is brand new news for me! I’ll have to see if I can dig that up, thanks for the tip!

PEOPLE: - Michiru Oshima, age 37. Composer for Legend of Legaia. Later: Music arranger for Twilight Princess. QUOTE: Q: What was it like composing video game music for the first time [for Legend of Legaia]? Oshima: I think the reason battle music in games can be so rousing and exciting is because these are unrealistic worlds. If you put music like that in a realistic setting it would seem comical—the synergistic effect of the music and action would simply be too much. But in games you can go full-force, straight ahead. I suspect that is what composers find appealing about writing for anime and video games. You can do things in them that can't be done anywhere else.

Oshima on why she thinks it’s appealing to write music for anime and video games, 1998.

Source: Shmuplations

#LegendofLegaiaQuote
#OshimaQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/31d41fe961fd...

PEOPLE: Masayuki Uemura, age 77. Engineer at Nintendo from 1971 to 2004. Creator of the Famicom. Hiroshi Yamauchi. President of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. QUOTE: Uemura: The colors [of the Famicom] were based on a scarf Yamauchi liked. True story. There was also a product from a company called DX Antenna, a set-top TV antenna, that used the color scheme. I recall riding with Yamauchi on the Hanshin expressway outside of Osaka and seeing a billboard for it, and Yamauchi saying, “That’s it! Those are our colors!” Just like the scarf. We’d struggled with the color scheme. We knew what the shape would be, but couldn’t figure out what colors to make it. Then the DX Antenna’s colors decided it. So while it ended up looking very toy-like, that wasn’t the intent. The idea was making it stand out.

Uemura on how he and Yamauchi chose the design for the Famicom, 2020.

Source: Kotaku

#NESQuote
#UemuraQuote, #YamauchiQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/30041fe961fd...

Hōjō clan - Wikipedia

Indeed! It was the Hōjō clan:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8D...

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 46. Producer and Co-Director of The Legend of Zelda. - Gunpei Yokoi, age 57. Creator of the D-Pad and the Game Boy. Miyamoto’s lead from 1980-1983. QUOTE: Q: Before interviewing you Mr. Miyamoto, I visited Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. Then, when I stopped by a souvenir shop, I saw plates and jars with the familiar triangular mark everywhere! Is the Triforce related to the shrine? Miyamoto: No, it has nothing to do with it. Gunpei Yokoi's family crest was the same, but I only found out about that later. It was a complete coincidence. When we were first making Zelda, we were wondering what kind of items to use, and we decided that some kind of “triangle power” would be good, so that's how it came about. The design was the most beautiful and fit well.

Miyamoto denies a connection between the Triforce symbol and the Fushimi Inari-Taisha Shrine, 1999.

Source: The Hyrule Journals

#Zelda
#TheLegendofZeldaQuote
#MiyamotoQuote, #YokoiQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/24441fe961fd...

PEOPLE: - Eiji Aonuma, age 35. Ocarina of Time Dungeon Director. QUOTE: Aonuma: I, personally, really like the Forest Temple. It was the very first dungeon we designed in Ocarina of Time. … At the center of the Forest Temple lies the twisting pathway. When you go through it, you can reach items you couldn’t before. We wouldn’t have been able to make something like that if the game hadn’t been 3D. It’s easy to think ‘wow, the path twists!’ but the designers actually had a lot of trouble with it. I think they spent about a week tormenting themselves over how to make it work.

Aonuma on the first dungeon designed for Ocarina of Time, 1998.

Source: GlitterBerri's Game Translations

#Zelda
#OcarinaofTimeQuote
#AonumaQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/0e093b226205...

Shigeru Miyamoto x Shigesato Itoi – 1989 Interview - shmuplations.com This lengthy interview captures a high-level meeting of the minds between Shigesato Itoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and author Seiko Itou.

Today we have an amazing interview from 1989 with Shigeru Miyamoto and Shigesato Itoi. Conducted shortly after the release of Mother, it's full of deep musings about realism, creative exhaustion, the moral panic over kids & gaming, and prescient visions of the future. shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 60. Director of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. QUOTE: Miyamoto: We wanted to create a game with a bigger character that you could move around. The problem was that if you had a bigger character, there was less space. … In Excitebike, the screen scrolled so that there was more room to play. We used this screen scrolling technology to create a bigger Mario and allow him more room to move. So we made Mario bigger and had him running across the screen, which turned out to be fun.  However, we [also tried making] Mario smaller so that the space in the game seemed bigger.  We enjoyed the big and small Mario so we thought it would be more fun if Mario could change sizes [in Super Mario Bros.]

Miyamoto on how both big and small Mario came to be, 2013.

Source: Time For Kids (Time Magazine)

#SuperMarioBrosQuote
#MiyamotoQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/2fe41fe961fd...

PEOPLE: - Satoru Takizawa, age 44. Breath of the Wild Art Director. QUOTE: Takizawa: In Japan, when we remember something that “stirs the soul”, we use 'gutto kuru' to capture that feeling. … To create an appealing, never-before-seen world, you need to break conventions. You need to be creatively reckless. So perhaps it's safe to say, in some ways, we game creators really enjoy violent work. In what way did our artists add that gutto kuru feeling to their art [in Breath of the Wild]? They wracked their brains each and every day throughout development to fully manifest their individuality.

Takizawa on “gutto kuru” art and “violent work”, 2017.

Source: Game Developers Conference (GDC)

#Zelda
#BreathoftheWildQuote
#TakizawaQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/febaddf2a123...

Very funny to refer to "Castle Town" as if it was a singular town here, rather than the name of _many_ different towns since 1998

PEOPLE: - Eiji Aonuma, age 53. Director of the The Wind Waker. Co-Director of Majora’s Mask. Zelda series producer. QUOTE: Q: What is your favorite song from Zelda series? Aonuma: There’s this song from The Wind Waker, the music in the battle in the desert against the sand worm, Molgera. I love that song. It has a kind of Japanese feel to it, with the Taiko drums. Q: Clock Town or Hyrule Castle Town – which is your favorite? Aonuma: Clock Town. Clock Town [in Majora’s Mask] is a whole society and microcosm, and I find that interesting.

Aonuma on his favorite music and town, 2017.

Source: Nintendo.com

#Zelda
#TheWindWakerQuote, #MajorasMaskQuote
#AonumaQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/30441fe961fd...

PEOPLE: - Masayuki Uemura, age 77. Engineer at Nintendo from 1971 to 2004. Creator of the Famicom. - Hiroshi Yamauchi, age 92. President of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. QUOTE: Uemura: [Former President Hiroshi Yamauchi] loved hanafuda and card games. I remember once, early on, a birthday party for an employee and he showed up and got right into hanafuda with everyone. He was a Kyotoite. It’s a city with a lot of long-running businesses, some maybe five or even six hundred years old. In the hierarchy of the city, traditional craftspeople rank at the top. Nintendo, as a purveyor of playthings like hanafuda or Western playing cards, originally ranked down at the very bottom. Doing business in that environment made him very open to new ventures. He wasn’t interested in specializing. He was keenly interested in new trends.

Uemura on what kind of person Yamauchi was, 2020.

Source: Kotaku

#UemuraQuote, #YamauchiQuote

www.hyruleinterviews.com/30041fe961fd...

My understanding was that it generally reviewed well and was considered a very good game at the time! The black sheep label and bad reputation mostly came later.

ZELDA II: THE ADVENTURE OF LINK by Nintendo has finally arrived-surely one of the most eagerly awaited titles of the year for the NES. (Due to continuing shortages, however, many of you may have to wait a while longer to play this one.) Nintendo has programmed a worthy successor to the very popular LEGEND OF ZELDA, following it with an adventure starring a slightly more mature Link who now must recover the Triforce of Courage to awaken the sleeping Princess Zelda. He must defeat the guardians of six palaces and restore six precious crystals to their rightful positions in six statues. And though Link eventually defeated Ganon in the first game, the evil one's underworld minions seek to revive their master. Although the character of Link is recognizable in this second adventure, little else in the sequel is strongly reminiscent of the original game. While the LEGEND OF ZELDA had a certain fairy-tale quality, THE ADVENTURE OF LINK is more the quest of a boy on the brink of young manhood. There is much more combat in this game than in the first, and success at combat is one of the keys to advancement in the game. We can sense the seriousness of his quest, which is more difficult for Link and for the player directing his progress than in the original ZELDA. In the new game, Link has many opportunities to interact with other characters in the game, another key to success. Everywhere he goes there are people with hints, others wishing to help him regain strength, and even special characters who will teach him magic or swordsmanship skills. Even more than ZELDA, THE ADVENTURE OF LINK is a role-playing adventure in the classic mold. There are vast areas to explore, all kinds of terrain, experience to be gained, and many a creature to be fought. This is a game to be played over many weeks, a game that is not easily solved but that provides a tremendous amount of play value. (Solo play; Battery-backed memory in cartridge.) For Nintendo system only. Recommended. (MSR $49.95)

Later they published one of the earliest ever reviews of Zelda 2:
archive.gamehistory.org/item/c75c6f2...

Only American console-focused game magazine*, I should say.

Computer Entertainer was the only American game magazine to survive the console crash in the early 80s. It was created and sedited by the sisters Marylou Badeaux and Celeste Dolan.

We have the VGHF to thank for getting the rights to this magazine, preserving it, and making it available for folks!:

ADVENTURE OF LINK Delayed Again One of the most eagerly awaited games of 1988 is ZELDA II: The ADVENTURE OF LINK. The level of anticipation for this game is so great that we've heard some pretty wild stories: a number of "sightings" of the game in various stores (not true) and various store clerks telling customers that they've "just sold out and expect more in a week or two" (also not true). The real story is that all you adventurers will have to wait a little longer, since the game has been re-scheduled for the May to June time period. According to sources at Nintendo and their licensees, there is an "accelerating PC chip shortage" in Japan which is affecting release dates on new games as well as the re-stocking of existing titles.

All this talk of RAM shortage had me thinking back to another shortage! Here's a clip from the Computer Entertainer newsletter in February 1988.

I nabbed this from the Atari Compendium:
www.ataricompendium.com/archives/new...

#Zelda
#AdventureOfLinkQuote

The Legend of Zelda | Notion Hosted by Notion Sites — The easiest way to get a website up and running.

This is only scratching the surface! There is a whole realm of interviews about this game out there. This is our page for Zelda 1 if you want to do more reading!:
www.notion.so/hyruleinterv...

I may follow-up later with more quotes about the legacy of the game. I hope you enjoyed the thread!

PEOPLE: - Koji Kondo, age 55. The Legend of Zelda (1986) Composer. - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 63. The Legend of Zelda (1986) Producer & Co-Director. QUOTE: Kondo: The Legend of Zelda has an opening crawl, so I wondered about what should play during that too. Tezuka-san's written request simply says, ‘title music.’ [laughs] For quite a while, it just played Ravel's Bolero. It really matched the opening crawl! Miyamoto: You rearranged it for the NES, right? Kondo: Right. But immediately before finishing The Legend of Zelda, we learned it was still under copyright. Miyamoto: Oh, I remember that! (laughs) The Copyright Incident! … Kondo: So I pulled an all-nighter to compose the opening song.

And of course we can't forget the Copyright Incident:

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 63. The Legend of Zelda (1986) Producer & Co-Director. - Takashi Tezuka, age 55. The Legend of Zelda (1986) Co-Director. QUOTE: Q: The Japanese packaging [of Zelda 1] had ‘The Hyrule Fantasy’ as a subtitle in the logo. Why did you include that? Miyamoto: The game features a world of swords and sorcery, and you adventure across this spectacular land called Hyrule, so it seemed appropriate. When throwing out all sorts of ideas for names and assigning them to enemies and so forth, we thought Hyrule sounded perfect for the name of a region. I think that's why we did that. Is that right? Tezuka: Yes. We also hoped that The Legend of Zelda would continue as a series, so we intended to call that series The Hyrule Fantasy.

During development they simply called it "Adventure Title", but they eventually settled on the name "The Legend of Zelda: The Hyrule Fantasy". The initial plan was to use "The Hyrule Fantasy" as the name of the series.

A rough version of Zelda 1's map, hand-drawn on a huge piece of graph paper.

Here's the first draft of the map, though sadly very low res:

PEOPLE: - Toshihiko Nakago, age 52. The Legend of Zelda (1986) Programmer. - Takashi Tezuka, age 49. Co-Director of The Legend of Zelda (1986). - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 57. Producer & Co-Director of The Legend of Zelda (1986). QUOTE: Nakago: And this is the first land map for Zelda. Back then we had some long paper, and Tezuka-san and Miyamoto-san would sit side by side and draw together. You drew the stuff on the left, Tezuka-san, and the right side is Miyamoto-san’s. If you look closely, you can tell how marker was used to make small dots. These are rocks, and these are trees. And you can see Miyamoto-san’s personality. At first he’s making individual dots, but as he gets tired of it, toward the top, he just fills in a bunch of space! Aonuma: Yeah, the left and right sides do look different. Tezuka: They really are different somehow.

There are some other fun anecdotes from the production.

For instance, Miyamoto and Tezuka each drew one half of the Zelda 1 world each

Miyamoto on being afraid that gamers would become “bored and stressed”by Zelda 1, 2003. Source: Miyamoto Shrine #Zelda #TheLegendofZeldaQuote #MiyamotoQuote https://www.hyruleinterviews.com/3fc73bb43878470d8f84b8a8c6c1611d

They were afraid that gamers would be "bored and stressed" by Zelda 1's non-linearity!:

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 50. Producer & co-director of both The Legend of Zelda (1986) & Super Mario Bros.. QUOTE: Miyamoto: We started to work on The Legend of Zelda at the same time as Super Mario Bros., and since the same teams did both games, we tried to separate the different ideas. Super Mario Bros. should be linear, The Legend of Zelda should be the total opposite.

So some goals for Zelda 1 included sensations of growth, hiking, and treasure hunting. Remember that this was developed at the SAME TIME as Super Mario Bros., so some goals in Zelda were specifically designed to be Mario's opposite. Mario was linear, Zelda was not.

It seems LIKELY to me that Zelda was also influenced by games like Hydlide, Dragon Slayer 1 and Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu, and Tower of Druaga. Those were all noteworthy pre-Zelda action-RPGs. But I have never seen explicit acknowledgement of this.

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 63. Producer & Co-Director of The Legend of Zelda (1986). QUOTE: Q: Why did you decide to make The Legend of Zelda, which came out 30 years ago? Miyamoto: The Indiana Jones movies were out around that time. … I wanted to bring that sense of adventure to a video game. And people playing computer RPGs back then were bragging about how strong their swordsmen had become and were calling each other at night to exchange information. When I noticed that, I thought it was an interesting milieu. Q: Since it was so absorbing, you wanted to make something similar yourself. Miyamoto: Yes. So with a world of swords and sorcery as my theme, I decided to make an adventure game based on treasure-hunting, and that was the beginning of The Legend of Zelda.

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 50. Producer and Co-Director of The Legend of Zelda (1986). QUOTE: Miyamoto: Back when [Zelda] was born, I was… [thinks] Influenced by games like Black Onyx and Ultima. The ideal would be not to have any influences at all. But I wanted to take the interesting parts of those games. It makes me feel proud that those people think that my characters are strong. That was something interesting. That was the foundation. But thinking of what was fun, I thought the character’s process of gaining strength was fun, but I didn’t think the way of playing them was fun. [laughs]

Miyamoto was inspired in part by the way that characters could grow in RPGs, in games like Ultima and Black Onyx, but he didn't like the turn-based combat. He was also influenced by the treasure hunting adventure of Indiana Jones

PEOPLE: - Shigeru Miyamoto, age 45. Creator of Zelda, Mario, & more. QUOTE: Miyamoto: For me, it’s simply whether it feels right, whether it makes you happy, when you pick up the controller and play it. Through that controller and monitor, you can freely explore the different experiences of life. Q: Do you mean experiences that players have actually had already, in their own lives? Miyamoto: Yes, maybe sports or something frightening you experienced. Zelda has an epic story and all, but the truth is, to me it’s all about hiking. [laughs]

Miyamoto would later describe the Zelda series as being "all about hiking":