Tantalus Media CEO, Tom Crago, recently took part in the Fragments of Silicon podcast during which he gave some insight into the development of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD. Mr. Crago said that translating the Wii game’s original motion controls into a traditional control scheme for the Nintendo Switch family of systems took the company around one year and a half. Presumably this also includes perfecting the game’s motion controls from Wii Motion+ to the Joy-Cons. Regardless, Tantalus Media did a great job with the finished product and Switch owners can choose between motion controls and traditional controls. Here’s what he said:
“It had to work for those (Switch Lite) users. Having it work button-only, joystick only was probably the biggest challenge for us. And it’s not that there’s 50 engineers sitting in a room writing lines of code to figure it out. It’s more just, ‘Okay, let’s take a step back. Let’s really think about what we’re trying to achieve here from a gameplay and feel standpoint.’ Keep on making suggestions, working back and forth until we nail it.”
“It took a year and a half. So it was a long process making this game. I don’t know on what day we were actually able to pronounce that we nailed the controls. It wasn’t right at the last minute. We certainly sent lots of different options and suggestions to Kyoto for their review, but yes, it was a big part of the process. Also with games like this, if we hadn’t figured that out, Nintendo just wouldn’t have published it. They’re not gonna put something out there that doesn’t really resonate with The Legend of Zelda, with the fanbase, and with the legacy. We knew that we really needed to get that right.”
