The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma says he wanted to remake Ocarina of Time in the hope it would “trigger new insights” in younger members of the development team.
Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game Aonuma worked on, and he’s been a mainstay with the series ever since, now serving as series producer.
In a new Ask the Developer article on the official Nintendo website, Aonuma explained that his decision to remake the game was partly based on the fact that many of the development team at Nintendo EPD were too young to have worked on the N64 original, or may not even be overly familiar with it.
With that in mind, Aonuma wanted to task the team with remaking Ocarina of Time to mark Zelda’s 40th anniversary, in the hope that those who didn’t work on the N64 version may learn some aspects of the game’s development that they could take into future Zelda titles.
“This year marks the 40th anniversary of the very first The Legend of Zelda game,” Aonuma explained. “With that in mind, I was thinking about what I should create as the producer of the series. Many of the team members who work alongside me on The Legend of Zelda games today have only experienced developing the more recent titles.
“That led me to wonder: ‘Do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?’
“Of course, there are team members who vaguely know the game, and those who played it in their childhood days. But I started to wonder how they’d interpret The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as they go about developing future The Legend of Zelda games.
“By learning the game structure and development style behind the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and by actually rebuilding it as a full remake, it may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development.
“If we could achieve that, I thought it would be incredibly valuable. That’s what led us to the conclusion that now is the right time to revisit The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time once again.”
Aonuma says he was surprised that the team didn’t make more changes
Aonuma also added that, rather than be an overbearing producer telling the team to stick to the principles of the game, he gave them freedom to decide which elements of Ocarina of Time should stay for the remake, and which should be changed.
“If the producers say ‘this is how it should be’, the team would naturally feel obligated to do it that way,” he said. “So I basically let the developers make whatever changes they genuinely felt were necessary.
“I wanted the team to make The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time their own, and to follow through on their own ideas about what the game should be. That said, I did deliver my fair share of lectures along the way!
“I took a step back to observe how the younger members of the development team would reimagine The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time using the insights and answers they had arrived at on their own.”
He added that he was surprised to see how few changes the team actually made, despite having the freedom to make more than they did.
“Looking at what they ultimately created, I’m impressed by how rich an experience they were able to craft from a game that first came out 28 years ago,” he explained.
“At the beginning of development, I remember thinking, ‘they could be making more changes’. But as the project went on, it really came across just how deeply this development team cared about the original game, far more than we had imagined.”
