"When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there," Miyamoto said. "In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper."

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"So that's a rule of thumb," I asked, "that if you find yourself at that point, you know the idea wasn't successful? Or is that you didn't give yourself enough time?"

"I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing," he said.

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"I'm just curious," I pressed, "what would you have liked that game to have been like?"

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"So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to."

That part of Miyamoto's reply puzzled me, because I hadn't remembered the transitions taking that long. A YouTube video of the original Famicom Disk System version of the game shows, however, that there was a few-second delay going back and forth.

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"The other thing," he said, "is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort."

"I'm sure people would love for you to return to Zelda II with [Zelda lead producer] Mr. Aonuma at some point," I said.

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For now, Miyamoto's all about the soon-to-be-released Wii U game Pikmin 3. And the Zelda franchise is booked with a fall remake of The Wind Waker, a sequel to the Super Nintendo's A Link to the Past and an eventual brand-new Zelda game for the Wii U.

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Coming tomorrow: Miyamoto On The Clamor To Make Something New

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Zelda II overworld screenshot via Sharenator.