He has steered some of Nintendo’s biggest hits for more than a quarter of a century and sold over 55 million copies with his last two mainline games, but 63-year-old producer Eiji Aonuma says he is still all nervous as the most ambitious remake of his career, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, hits shelves on November 5 for Nintendo Switch 2. Speaking to AFP during a visit to Paris where he was made Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters at the French Culture Ministry, an honour also bestowed two decades earlier on his mentor Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese creator admitted that he cannot stop thinking about how fans will react, telling the agency that he is all nervous about releasing the remake of Ocarina because he does not know how it is going to turn out. The anxiety is deeply personal because the original Ocarina of Time released in 1998 on Nintendo 64 was the very first project Aonuma worked on with Miyamoto after being hired for his graphic design skills, and it went on to become widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made, a reputation that makes any reimagining a high-risk undertaking.
This new version, announced as part of the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda saga created in 1986, marks the second time Nintendo has remade the classic after the 2011 Nintendo 3DS edition, but the company says this Switch 2 remake is by far the most ambitious, developed internally by Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning and Development Production Group No. 3 rather than an external studio, with franchise veteran Hidemaro Fujibayashi returning alongside a younger generation of developers who never played the original and who Aonuma believes can bring a fresh feel while preserving nostalgia. In Nintendo’s Ask the Developer Q&A series, Aonuma explained that the anniversary forced him to think as producer about what kind of project would matter most for the series, especially when many team members have only experienced developing the recent open-world era of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and that revisiting Ocarina was a chance to reconnect them with the roots of 3D Zelda design, including its legendary islands in the sky and time-travel mechanics. Despite his nerves, Aonuma is already teasing the future, telling French press that he is very interested to see what the younger staff will imagine for the next mainline 3D Zelda game currently in development, a title likely still years away, while fans wait just days to return to Hyrule and judge whether this nervous remake honours the memory they have cherished since childhood.
