In a new interview with The Washington Post, legendary The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma said that the stories behind The Legend of Zelda games are always being created after they established the gameplay and its concepts. Once the gameplay and concepts are fully realized, the team gets to work on creating a captivating story. The Washington Post says this contrasts with other major developers who work on narrative first and overall gameplay second.
Another contrast to the rest of the industry: Nintendo games tend to be written with story as an afterthought, establishing game design concepts before creating a narrative to graft around them. In the production of many of today’s big games, the narrative conception of loading at the beginning of the process. To this day, that approach eludes Aonuma.
“I’ve never made a game where you think about the story first and then go play,” Aonuma said. “First when you think about gameplay, what you try to think about after that is how you can get players to understand that game.” Anuma said this approach helps teams improve game elements more easily, freed from any attachment to the demands set by the narrative. Instead, the game’s design elements are a blueprint for the narrative that follows.
“The story is used as a vessel because it has a beginning and an end, and the player moves through it,” Aonuma said. “I think it would actually be difficult to do the reverse and start with the story,
then try to match the gameplay mechanics to that.”
