Nintendo Spent A Year Working On What Essentially Sounds Like Zelda Maker

It’s been almost a decade since we got the first Super Mario Maker on Wii U and 3DS, and fans have always wondered if Nintendo might give the level editor gameplay treatment to one of its other major franchises, like, say, Zelda. Well, it turns out that the Switch maker actually did experiment with the idea for a Zelda Maker of sorts, and that’s eventually what turned into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

In a new developer interview published by Nintendo, Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma sat down with Echoes directors Tomomi Sano and Satoshi Terada (who leads the team at Grezzo that’s primarily making the game) to discuss the ideas behind Princess Zelda’s first modern playable outing and how it came to be. And it turns out that Echoes of Wisdom originally started its life as a different idea entirely.

“We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel,” Terada said. “In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an ‘edit dungeon’ because players could create their own Legend of Zelda gameplay.”

Aonuma explained how the pitch evolved from there:

They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. As I played, I started thinking that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies. That was the beginning of gameplay using “echoes.” The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.

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While long-time Zelda fans would still love a game that’s all about designing devilishly fun and challenging mazes for people to play online, it’s fascinating to see how the idea for Echoes developed from Aonuma pushing back on the concept and seeing how it could be utilized in a more traditional, single-player context to expand on the standard type of Zelda gameplay players are used to. The idea for “edit Zelda” wasn’t short-lived either. Sano confirmed the team spent many months prototyping the original concept before changing it.

“But there’s a reason it took a year to upend the tea table,” Aonuma said. “After all, you can’t really see the potential for ideas to develop into solid gameplay until you can verify features and their feel, so I wanted them to try making it first. I felt that the ‘edit dungeon’ feature they showed me had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing the Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use ‘echoes’ instead.”

There was one big concern, however. The Zelda producer said that with all of the items players can copy and the different types of echoes they can make, he was worried the mechanic might constantly crash the game. “I wasn’t sure how far we could go, but in the end, it was amazing to see how many echoes it was possible to create in the game.” And the results apparently turned out to be surprisingly fun, especially since Echoes changes viewpoints between 3D top-down and 2D side-scrolling. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I never knew this was possible,’” Sano said. “Of course, creating dungeons was fun, but being able to copy various objects and use them in different places was even more fun.”