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Miyamoto: Ever since I started making the first game in the series, I’ve been saying that the 3rd Zelda will feature a party, one that consists of the protagonist, who’s a mix between an elf and a fighter, a magic user, and a girl. The fairy that appeared in Adventure of Link was actually a party member designed for Zelda 3. A girl who looked a little like a fairy and whose role consisted of reconnaissance. Like the characters in action games that don’t engage enemies in combat but rather go and scout out the surroundings and return to you safely. It’s also fun when an action adventure game lets you choose who to send out. That’s the sort of thing I’m thinking I’d like to put in Zelda 3.

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Miyamoto: We started out developing it as an action game, primarily. We’ve been careful to maintain a high degree of originality, noting where we’ve copied something from another game (albeit not substantially) and where we’ve done something completely new. We’re proud of ourselves for developing the game structure. The game structure of RPG titles is already more or less settled upon, and an RPG overworld is something anyone can make. But that’s all the more reason to ask yourself whether it’s good enough to use the same template as everyone else and simply expand the story on top of that. That’s where the challenge comes in. These days, there’s a gap between players who prefer a solid story to having new features and players who prefer having new features to a solid story.

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Miyamoto: I hope to make a new game structure for people who can write scenarios like Shigesato Itoi can. Current game structures are being improved through the combination of elements from different game genres. I want to break away from that a bit. I think it would be ideal if I were able to create a game structure that represented a turning point, much like the Famicom RPGs of old, for example.

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Horii: Yeah, we were cutting excess data right up until the final stages of development, but there was still quite a bit left. We were 2 kilobytes over, around 2000 characters. We had exactly 1000 messages, so we started by cutting out all the suffixes. “This sentence doesn’t need an object marker,” we’d say. “This emphatic particle can go too!” *laughing*

Miyamoto: I’ve sometimes had to do the opposite. We had 2 bytes left over in Super Mario Bros., so I decided to put something else in the game in order not to waste them. *laughing*

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Miyamoto: So, what you’re saying is that you wouldn’t hesitate to cut something that resembled what somebody else did, even if you’d thought of it before they had? I have to keep in mind the amount of time I have before my deadlines, meaning that I release things the way they are, regardless of whether they’ve been done before or not. I just think to myself “Oh, so someone else had the same idea.”

Horii: It also depends on the scale of the thing and the ideas that comprise it. If it’s something that doesn’t really matter, I just get rid of it.

Miyamoto: Ghosts’n Goblins debuted in arcades while we were making Super Mario Bros. You don’t get killed in one hit in that game, either. “They’ve gone and done the same thing,” I thought to myself, but I couldn’t get rid of that part of the game structure. It would break the entire game.

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Horii: Each staff member puts themselves in the players’ position and speaks from their perspective. They’ll go so far as to say things such as “If that’s what the game was like, I’d throw it at the wall!” But because they’re speaking from the player’s standpoint, we can only try to persuade them. You’ll hear comments like “The players will hate that!” and “Can’t we just do this?” Everyone gets a say.

Miyamoto: The way we make games is a little different. I can’t comment on the tiny details of the game program or make suggestions for other ways someone could go about what they’re doing. I just tell people what I want to do, and the programmers tell me whether or not they can do it. We try to reach a compromise. 2 or 3 days later they’ll come to me and say “Well, we can do this much,” and then, 2 or 3 days after that, “Well, we can accomplish that if we go about it like this.” It often happens that we end up achieving what we set out to do in the process. *laughing* I have my teams to thank for that. The Mario games have all involved the same group of people. The Zelda team is mostly the same as well, only the director has changed. We start out with 3 or 4 people, and then when we run into trouble we add around 20 more. If we were to start out with dozens of people, there wouldn’t be any work for them to do before we’d decided on the direction we were going to go with the game.

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Miyamoto: Do you think that RPGs and adventure games will become a substitute for novels?

Horii: Nah, I think that novels still have their place. Games are more active. If you were to write a novelesque story for a video game, players would feel that it dragged on and on. The sense that you were the one driving the story would disappear. I think the most important aspect of game design is to immerse the player in the game’s universe and make them feel like they’re actively driving the plot. That’s the reason I won’t risk having the protagonist speak, even though it would make writing the story much easier.

Miyamoto: That’s a common feature of RPGs these days.

Horii: Oh, yes? Generally speaking, I think having the protagonist speak alienates the player. He’s playing as though the character is an extension of himself, so why is his avatar suddenly speaking of its own accord? He’ll be struck with the realization that the character he’s been thinking of as himself up until now is actually someone else entirely. Having the protagonist speak for himself and decide own his own which way the story goes would make players uncomfortable.

Miyamoto: Cutscenes in action games are the same in that regard. There are scenes that make you feel as though you’re the one doing everything, and scenes that make you feel like you’re being pulled along against your will. I actually really dislike taking control away from the player. I want to do everything I can to ensure they feel like they’re in control.

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Horii: Personally, I want to make titles that have a story that draws the player into the game’s universe rather than titles that fit nicely into a genre like “RPG game” or “adventure”. Today’s RPGs are incredible, in a sense. They get a lot of publicity and suck you into the story. I wonder, however, if we can’t take them a little further. I think one example would be an RPG game that made use of a network connection.

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Horii: I think there are a lot of ways to go about making games on the Famicom. It’s interesting to think about what rules you’re going to have when making a board game, for example. If people get tired of RPG battles, maybe new games won’t have any. If everyone makes fantasy games, people might get sick of those as well. Then another type of game world will come onto the scene. Instead of each genre stagnating, people will release games that push their boundaries. RPG games, action games, simulations… I feel that RPGs might be split into 2 types, for example. In one type, the story will take precedence, and people will take it very seriously. In another, only the world will be established, and you’ll get to eke out your own existence. Wouldn’t that be interesting? To have an RPG that allowed you live your own life?

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Miyamoto: I’d like to do a game for the Super Nintendo that even fathers can enjoy. Something that makes people criticize me, wondering why on earth I’d make a game like that in modern times. Something that appeals to us dads.

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Miyamoto: That sort of thing is interesting, isn’t it? Even if the soldiers in this game can’t see the player over a wall, they’ll come running when they hear noise. So, if you hide motionlessly they won’t come after you, but they’ll approach if they hear you fighting with another soldier. There are also stupid enemies programmed to seek out the player without paying any heed to walls or other obstacles. Essentially, they’re soldiers with a low IQ. Actually, though, those enemies are stronger. We got into an argument about intelligent soldiers being weaker than stupid ones. I got the impression that Morita didn’t like the idea.

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• By the way, there were several characters in this game that also appeared in Mario. Was that your idea, Mr. Tezuka?

Tezuka: We’d had concept art for Bow-Wow lying around for awhile. We’d put it aside thinking we might make use of it if we could, but someone discovered it and ended up using it for their own purposes.

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Tezuka: To tell you the truth, fire bars were originally made for Zelda. They were a lot of fun, so we used them in Mario too.

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Tezuka: We basically decided to do a real time adventure game. No one wants to do physical things like pushing and pulling by selecting them from a menu. If they’re going to push something, they want to put some force behind it.

Miyamoto: In addition to that, it has everything that’s good about an RPG. It’s interesting to hear my players bragging about how they’ve got this armor and that tunic, so they don’t take any damage. It means they’re really attached to their character. That’s why I wanted them to choose their own name. But maximum priority was put on the adventure. A puzzle game is an adventure everyone can understand. The game eventually became more and more puzzle-oriented, to the extent that there were times when I wondered if it wasn’t an adventure at all anymore. Sure enough, those were the times when I started worrying about whether a real time adventure be interesting or not. In the end I figured it would be a thrilling enough game on its own merit.

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• This game has a light world and a dark world. When did you decide on that sort of duality?

Miyamoto: At first there were 3 worlds, but players would’ve gotten confused. That’s why we had to fix things up. It’s difficult to plant a new concept like that in an action game, you see.

Tezuka: In that regard, Nakago was very realistic. He was saying from the start that we wouldn’t be able to make 3 worlds.

Nakago: I ended up just making one, but it was split into two and reborn.

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Miyamoto: It’s relatively easy to set as you get used to it, but figuring out the difficulty for the puzzles was tough. There’s a difference in that there are people who can find hints by themselves and people who can’t. If you think there will be people who can solve it in one minute, there will also be people for whom it will take hours.

Tezuka: Even a single dialogue message would change a lot, which caused us some trouble. If you say something right out, players will catch on too fast, but if you say it in a really roundabout way, maybe they won’t understand.

Nakago: If you only put a piece of information in one place, players would overlook it, so we’d put it into three places.

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• There’s a sense of accomplishment when you discover the way to solve a puzzle or uncover a secret, isn’t there.

Miyamoto: At first, when we hardly put in any hints, the testers’ faces looked angry. *laughing* But they had good reactions when they solved the part they were working on. When they looked back on the part they were having difficulty with, they remembered the struggle as fun. When we increased the number of hints and made it easy, it became boring for them, so we decreased the amount again. There were people who’d get stuck on one part and never make it out, and people who, like I mentioned before, would fool around and try something different and get through right away. People’s personalities shone through.

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Miyamoto: It’s no good to have a constant stream of sidequests, but you can’t make a game without doing that. That’s why I didn’t want to have quests that told you to “Go give the medicine to the girl,” but rather for the players to think for themselves what they ought to bring to her.

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Now that graphics have gotten a lot prettier, I wanted to make animations to match. Adding the diagonal movement that Zelda 1 lacked, for example. If you can move diagonally, you’d want to cut diagonally with your sword, too, right? But when we tried to put in a diagonal thrust, the operability of the game declined, and we ended up using a spin attack instead.

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For some people, Zelda is an adventure game in the guise of an RPG. For others, it’s an adventure game in the guise of an action game. The latter might not be able to get away from the preconception that they have to use the strongest weapon to fight the boss. For example, you can damage the Helmasaur King with bombs or the hammer. Originally, we had it so that the hammer didn’t do anything, but because we went to the trouble of putting a hammer in the temple, we went back and reprogrammed it so it could be put to use as well.

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