The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D wasn’t developed internally at Nintendo. As we reported earlier in the year, the Nintendo 3DS remake was handled by Line Attack Heroes developer, Grezzo, founded by Koichi Ishii, best known for developing the Mana games at Square.
When they were asked to develop the remake, Grezzo started out by discussing the game with members of the original Ocarina of Time Nintendo 64 development team. Their job was to remake the game in a way that would feel fresh, but also stay true the fans’ memories of the original. According to a new Iwata Asks interview with the Grezzo team, this involved preserving some of the bugs present in the original N64 game.
“One conflict arose when, as programmers, we wanted to get rid of bugs,” revealed Grezzo programmer, Shun Moriya. “But the staff members who had played the old game said the bugs were fun! We were like, ‘What?!’”
Moriya elaborated: “It wouldn’t be fun if your friends couldn’t say, ‘Do you know about this?’ So we left them in if they didn’t cause any trouble and were beneficial.”
“If something simply could not be allowed to stand, we begrudgingly fixed it, so some bugs don’t appear, but we left in as many as we could, so people will grin over that.”
Unfortunately, Grezzo didn’t mention which bugs were left in, so I suppose that’s something players will discover for themselves over time. The rest of the Iwata Asks interview focuses on the challenges of re-creating Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 3DS. One of these was the difference in framerate — 20 frames-per-second in the original, and 30 for the 3DS version — which necessitated difficulty tweaks.
Published: Jun 26, 2011 02:00 pm