A Link To The Past is arguably the best Zelda game in the series, and today I want to go through some of the development secrets from the team that brought us The Legend of Zelda A Link To The Past. The following info is from interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto, Kazuaki Morita and Takashi Tezuka discussing the development secrets from The Legend of Zelda A Link To The Past.

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Nintendo started making A Link to the Past at the same time as Super Mario World for the Super Famicom console and the plan was to release at the same time as a launch title. However the release was delayed to coincide with the 1 year anniversary of the Super Famicom.

Miyamoto described the team working on A Link To The Past saying they don’t spend a long time r have a lot of employees working on the development of a single game. Nintendo have a few people developing a title, and that lasts about a year. Then they add more staff who spend about 8 months putting the finishing touches to the game. They start with doing a series of experiements with a small number of peole and see what works and what doesn’t, then the project starts to take shape. They start with testing the hardware limits of the system and incoporate the enemies and scenarios later.

There were a number of alternative titles for A Link To The Past including “New Legend of Zelda” and “Ganon’s Revenge” and internally they called it “Super Famicom Legend of Zelda”. This made sense to the team because the game was supposed to be a launch title for the Super Famicom console.

The development team were restricted with hardware for Zelda 1, they wanted to do things in the game but couldn’t due to the hardware contraints. For example, the level 7 dungeon entrance Nintendo changed the colour of the ground when the water drained, however, they originally wanted the water to disappear. You could also burn down small trees, but Nintendo wanted to burn down bigger ones. The goal was for A Link To The Past to be more realistic.

Miyamoto discussed the innovation in A Link To The Past. When the first Legend of Zelda released, having a world based on swords and magic was a fresh idea. Saving your game, buying in-game items and dungeons were all new innovations. In the 5 years since Legend of Zelda released, then many other games appeared doing similar things and the levels of innovation were reduced, this made Miyamoto pause for thought in what Nintendo might do to keep players entertained.

The spin attack came from the desire to create diagonal movement and attacks. Given the graphics and capabilities had gotten much better on the Super Nintendo, the developers wanted to make animations to match. You can move diagonally, therefore attacking diagonally made sense, but the controls of this didn’t feel good, so the development team invented the spin attack.

The dash ability was a new addition to the game, this was inspired by the dash ability in Mother on the NES.

There were some concerns in making the controls too complicated. For example, there are a variety of actions that can be performed with the A button like “pick up” and “read”. Miyamoto was concerned players may not work out the ability to use switches and pulling or pushing with the A button. Nintendo specifically put in controls for how to grab items, by pressing A and a direction. Staff were opposed to this on the team but Miyamoto felt by pressing A and a direction, that felt more like pulling. Controls could have been simplified to just pressing a button, but Miyamoto felt players would get a great sense of satisfaction with the slightly more complex controls.

Originally you couldn’t damage the Helmasaur King, one of the dungeon bosses, with the Hammer. You could only damage it with bombs. However, the team went back and made it possible to damage it with the hammer, because it was in the same dungeon as the hammer.

Miyamoto always wanted to revisit the open-ended Zelda adventure, although the hardware on the SNES was too restrictive for this. He wanted a world that players could get lost in, even taking them a year to finish. Miyamoto explains, if you ignore structure then plotlines can get complex and NPC messages don’t make sense. Programming in enough logic to handle this would have taken 150% more memory than the team had (the team would go back to this concept in Breath of the Wild).

Nintendo had a load of ideas that never made it into the final game including creating a grass fire with the latern, and cutting a circle in the middle of the grass so you could safely standin the fire. Also, digging a hole in the swamp and then bombing the hole would cause water to rush into the hole. The latter concept was in development and Miyamoto said that if they had 6 more months, then they would have added it… but it was cut.

The enemies in A Link To The Past are smart for the day. If you make a noise then some soldiers can hear you over a wall. Even if they can’t see you, they can hear you and they come running. If you stay still then they won’t come after you, but if they hear you fighting with another soldier, then they will come and help them. There are also dumb enemies, soldiers that seek out the player without paying attention to obstacles. They are described by the development team as enemies with low IQs. The low IQ ones are dangerous though, because they tend to be stronger.

There are a few similarities to Super Mario. The fire spinning bars that appear in some dungeons were designed for Zelda on the NES. They are also similar to fire spinning bars in Super Mario Bros. Also, the way you pick up the grass in A Link To The Past is similar to Super Mario Bros 2.

A Link To The Past has a light and dark world. However, during development there were 3 worlds. The 3rd world was removed because the development team felt players would have gotten confused. The light and dark world was born out of a single world, and then split into 2.

Figuring out the difficulty was a challenge for the development team. During development the difficulty of the enemies changed every day as the team watched testers play through the game. The difficulty of the puzzles was another thing. Miyamoto observed there are a difference in people who can find hints themselves and people who can’t. Sometimes you think a puzzle is easy and solveable in 1 min and then it takes them hours. Hints would be placed, but then players would miss them so the team went back and placed the hint 3 times.

At first there were very few hints, and play testers didn’t react well to this. However, when they solved the puzzle they had a good reaction, and looked back at the difficulty and remembered the struggle as fun. When Nintendo increased the number of hints the testers then found it boring, so Nintendo decreased the amount of hints again.

Miyamoto emphasised the need for a constant stream of side quests. He didn’t want to make quests that said “Go give the medicine to the girl,” but rather for the players to think for themselves what they should to bring to her. Nintendo planned more actions like “Eat” and “Dance” but just couldn’t fit these additional actions into the game.

Thanks to Famicom Tsuushin magazine and the official guidebook to the Japanese version of A Link to the Past, published in 1991 by Shogakukan.

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