I’ve been thinking a lot about Nintendo, and their long history of introducing a new controller, peripheral, or other device, only to completely abandon it a few months later. They’ve been doing this since the NES days, when the R.O.B. and the NES Zapper hit the scene in a big way at launch and were barely utilized for anything new after that.
To hear that Nintendo once considered integrating the Zapper into Legend of Zelda‘s gameplay gives me some faith that they don’t always intend to go about things that way. That’s just the start of the behind the scenes info in the interview below. We also find out more about the connections between the early Zelda and Mario games, how A Link to the Past originally had three worlds to travel through instead of two, and how adding “more realistic graphics” to that title “a problem”, as it caused “the ambiguity (to) disappear”.
The men who made Zelda- Staff Interview [Glitterberri.com]