Do you ever wish that Nintendo’s first party designers — specifically the folks behind mainstays like Mario and Zelda — would do something new? So do they! Or, at least, one of them does.

Eiji Aonuma, producer on The Legend of Zelda titles for over a decade, tells Industry Gamers that he’s tried time and time again to come up with fresh concepts and ideas… and they keep getting absorbed back into Zelda.

“Yeah, the truth of it is I always want to work on something new. It just turns out that as I’m coming up with these ideas along the way, I realize, ‘Y’know, this could really work on a Zelda game.’ And it sort filters back into it and in the end, we come back into another Zelda project,” Aonuma said.

“So in some ways, it’s a bit of a challenge for me personally that Zelda ends up becoming this pool of my ideas, and it keeps absorbing the ideas I have and they get integrated back into Zelda games. But that’s just sort of the way it’s flown for me.”

So what will be next for Aonuma after this holiday’s Wii send-off, The Legend of Zelda: Skywad Sword? He’s not saying just yet, but chances are he, along with Miyamoto, are already toiling away on the first high-def Zelda for Wii U.

Speaking on that stunning Zelda HD demonstration from E3, Aonuma says,”we really built it specifically to be an experience. The idea is using Zelda as the backdrop for one of these HD experiences, what kind of representation Zelda can make there. But this is really just to show people what kind of things the console can do.”

“And so, it’s not necessarily the case that we would use that graphic style or depiction the same way we would in a new Zelda, when there is a new Zelda for the Wii U. Just like the map functionality that was also implemented in that experience – it’s simply us giving an objective look at the kinds of things that can be done with the HD hardware. And Zelda happened to be the filter through which we view it in that experience. So nothing is defined right now as far as how we’ll proceed.”


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