The other father of Zelda

At 47, Eiji Aonuma, producer of the Zelda series, is a pillar of Nintendo. After starting on a Super Famicom game (Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima), he worked on the dungeons in Ocarina of Time, including the Zora dungeon, which remains his favorite. He was then entrusted with directing the saga, and he is currently working on the new Zelda Wii with Shigeru Miyamoto. Often laughing at our somewhat off-topic questions, he nevertheless answered all our queries with humility and sincerity.

Why did this new Zelda take two years to come out?

Zelda is a very difficult game to make because the episodes are always very dense in terms of content. The previous game took us three years to make. Spirit Tracks took us two because the train concept alone required a year to define! The idea of the train was there from the start. Initially, the plan was to draw the tracks with the stylus and have the locomotive follow the line thus created. But that wasn’t a good idea. Drawing a straight line on the DS is quite difficult, and players could go anywhere from the start. They wouldn’t necessarily have known where to go; they wouldn’t have been guided. They would have had too much freedom, and it was then very complicated to create a story. It took us a year to work out the concept of the erased tracks that must be recovered as the adventure progresses.

Why is this DS Zelda in cel-shading?

It’s an artistic choice rather than a practical or game design choice. There are things you can do on a home console that you can’t do on a handheld. When developing a game for a home console, it’s important that the graphics be very polished. The machines are more powerful, the screens bigger, and the staging possibilities more elaborate. That’s why Twilight Princess was more cinematic and the character design more realistic. For the DS versions of Zelda games, you have to take screen readability into account. If we had adopted realistic graphics, that would have hurt the game. Everything would have had to be to scale, and we would therefore have had to make it so the player could explore towns at the right proportion. But Link would have been very small and hard to control. So we favored the cute cel-shading style, because it allows for great variations in scale without shocking players. You can make characters as big as houses or gigantic scenery without hurting graphic coherence.

So it’s not a marketing choice?

Not at all! It’s above all about adapting to the platform’s constraints to make controls easier.

Having worked on the series for so long, aren’t you tired of Zelda?

For me, being tired would mean I’m always doing the same thing. But creating a Zelda isn’t repeating yourself. We have great freedom because of the title’s popularity. We are obliged to reinvent ourselves each time so as not to disappoint fans. It’s a kind of intellectual challenge: we must always do better, always be innovative. Would you have imagined that one day there would be a train in Zelda? As long as I have the freedom to create in this universe, I can’t get tired. People often say to me: “What? Another Zelda?” Yes, another one, because I take great pleasure in doing new things in this universe. For me, it’s a little theater in which I tell new stories, I put in new set elements to surprise the audience. It’s a container in which the content is renewed each time, and that’s what’s fun!

You try to innovate each time, but there are always the same items in the same order, or almost. Could that change in a future opus?

Indeed, the flow of a Zelda is always the same. That’s part of the creation rules: you start with a small character who gains great powers and ends up facing the super boss in order to solve all the problems, and it stops there. The formula works, but it’s true that with Mr. Miyamoto, we said to ourselves that it was time to change a little. I can tell you that the next Zelda on Wii will have a flow a little different from what we’re used to seeing.

Does that mean we’ll have an open world like GTA?

It’s true that open worlds are very fashionable right now, but that’s not the direction we think we’ll take. I believe we need to be able to commit to games where freedom is total. Players are happy to be able to do whatever they want, but the gaming experience wouldn’t be the one we want them to live. We build our games so that players feel very specific emotions. We want them to feel involved, and at Nintendo, we have a tradition of evolving the game’s difficulty by designing tiered levels. It’s a know-how to accompany the player by modulating difficulty. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more about the next opus, because it’s a project that hasn’t been presented. We’re not going to choose either going in a certain order or broadening the player’s freedoms. We’re going to develop something else to renew the next Zelda.

How to build a dungeon in Zelda?

That’s a very broad question (laughs). I can tell you how we design the stages of a dungeon. It’s actually very simple. You’re at the beginning and you have to reach the end, that is, the confrontation with the boss. In terms of planning, we see that Link is here and he must finish there. We then ask ourselves how he can get there. After performing several actions, he gets closer to the boss room, but he can’t enter it. He must then take another path and discover a new item allowing him to access other rooms and face the boss. There, the dungeon is finished! That’s the angle we work from: how are we going to arrange the player’s path to bring them from the beginning to the end? It then has to be well paced, interesting, and well balanced. You know, in Japan, we have a way of telling stories in four acts. There is a beginning, a progression, a twist, and an epilogue. The beginning corresponds to entering the dungeon. The progression is when you reach a place you cannot cross. The twist coincides with obtaining an item that unlocks the levels. Finally, the epilogue is the final confrontation with the boss.

What is the most difficult dungeon you have designed?

I only worked on the dungeons in Ocarina of Time. For the other titles, I had a higher position and there were people dedicated to creating those dungeons. But in my entire career, the most difficult dungeon to make was probably Majora’s Mask, because it’s a game where you are limited in time. There are only three days to save the world, and if you don’t succeed, you have to go back in time and start over. That opus is like a big dungeon in itself, probably the biggest ever designed for the Zelda series, and it was very difficult to design and balance the progression.

Are you going to take up that challenge of limited time and that darker universe again?

The time dimension is always very interesting to use, especially for the player, because in limited time, they feel more alert. But there’s no point in doing the same thing again. We’ll find another way to maneuver time in a future episode.

Previously, the player could stop or speed up time, travel to the past and future. What does the next Zelda have in store for us?

It’s hard to know what we could do in the next ones because we’ve taken so many directions! (Laughs.) Time is a universal and very comfortable element: everyone knows that after morning comes afternoon, then evening. It’s a rule we all know and that makes a game’s flow easier. It’s an inevitable thing that at the same time allows you to gradation a duration and add rules that will seem natural to a game. We can’t do away with this notion, even if it’s difficult to do something new compared to what we’ve already done.

You inherited a universe created by Mr. Miyamoto. What have you added that is more personal?

The particularity I bring to the Zelda universe is the scenario, quite simply! (Laughs.) Mr. Miyamoto is not someone who is interested in stories. For him, if the game is fun, there’s no need for dialogue or scenario. Remember, in the very first episode, you were put there and you had to fend for yourself! There wasn’t a single line of dialogue. You had to explore the world in search of dungeons without any help. I brought more dialogue and more construction in the narrative flow.

Zeldas evolve, and we may not develop dialogue or plots even more. Maybe we’ll return to our roots! I don’t know.

Can you give us the chronology of the Zelda Series?

There is a timeline where all the episodes are placed relative to each other. But only two people know it: the Zelda director and me! If we ever made it public, players would try to fit the episodes chronologically in order to discover what happens in the next opus. There would be no more suspense! We use the timeline as a reference, but it’s not an absolute rule that prevents us from doing things either. We don’t say to ourselves that we’re going to make a Zelda between this one and that one. The approach is the reverse. Once the episode is made, we decide its place in the chronology.

When you started in video games, the profession was probably not as valued as it is now. Do you feel known or recognized? Could you have done something else? Do you regret your choice?

You think that we, the creators at Nintendo, are very prominent? You think it’s a respectable profession? (Laughs.) Actually, it’s hard to answer your question because, if that’s the case, I don’t feel it. As for knowing whether I could claim to have a prestigious position in another company, I admit I’ve never thought about it! I don’t have the impression that our profession is fabulous or hyper respectable. Of course, I’m very proud of what I do. I’m very happy to make games and that people all over the world are waiting for the next Zelda. It fills me with joy, but I’ve never told myself that my profession was shameful or respectable. I’ve never operated with those values! I’ve always been a good employee who does his best to make fun games, and that’s how I see my work. I don’t do it for social esteem. I do this job because it interests me and I give it my all because I love it, quite simply! I also don’t see where I could go, because I am “the person” who makes video games.

My answer may seem strange to you, but it’s the same for Mr. Miyamoto. He’s someone who is fully into his work and thinks of nothing else. He doesn’t reason by saying: “I’m going to take a pile of money and I’m going to do lots of great things.” He has no self-confidence at all and doesn’t even realize that he’s a wonderful person. If you tell him he’s great, he replies that no, he’s just an office employee. It’s a very healthy and very refreshing attitude that pulls us all upward. I just live to create things that are always more fun, more exciting. Mr. Miyamoto is someone who is proud of his work, and he is right to be. And it’s under his influence that I am like this too. I think it’s a very healthy way of doing things.

Don’t you ever have a lack of inspiration?

Of course, blank page syndrome happens to me often, and as I get older, it happens more and more (laughs)! But I do my best to make it happen as little as possible.

And then, you know, I’m surrounded by a staff of very competent and very dynamic people who have a lot of personality. We send each other ideas. They circulate and that’s how they evolve. It’s also thanks to all these people that it works well!

Interview originally published in IG Magazine 6 at the release of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (2009)