Max Nichols' Game Design blog
I present to you: a huge flowchart showing all of the confirmed (and some of the speculated) influences on the first Legend of Zelda title. And then, for good measure, 5000 years of those influences’ influences. See below for a list of citations demonstrating all of these connections!
A short awhile ago I was interviewed by Play Sense, a game marketing company that, on the side, has a series of interviews with folks in or around the games space with. It was a really fun chat with Sandra Mad. We touched on my own history with Zelda and game development, why this website exists, and how it’s impacted me.
I was fortunate to be a guest on Post Games podcast’s episode about the history of the Zelda series! I was interviewed on the podcast,…
This post is a long timeline image. The image is a collage of screenshots, photos, and quotes related to the career of Satomi Asakawa, an accomplished character designer who worked on many Zelda games.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda historian.
This time: Tears of the Kingdom! The first new 3D Zelda since I began contributing to the podcast. We dove into every topic we could think of, from the nature of awe in games to the nitty gritty of how physics and audio systems are implemented in games. A ton of fun!
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda historian.
At last! Ocarina of Time! I’d been looking forward to discussing this game in more depth for years by this point, and the brothers’ return to the game with their master Quest run was a good excuse. Since their first Ocarina season I had become a much more, well, seasoned Zelda historian. I knew way more history! So I got to discuss in a lot of depth the specific history of design choices that went into each of these dungeons, and then into the game as a whole in the history episode.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda historian.
I had a chance to talk about the Oracle games several times across their two seasons. A lot of discussion around dungeon design and top-down map design, as well as info on the history of their development and the people involved!
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda historian.
Echoes of Wisdom! A new Zelda game, the first one to apply the Breath of the Wild design philosophy to a top-down game. I was very excited to get a chance to discuss this one, and how all the new design choices fit in the context of the greater series’ evolution.
If you’re reading this you have already heard about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and likely seen the trailer. The series has finally hit a major milestone: we get to play as the titular Princess Zelda herself. So why did this happen now? I think we can trace a direct line from a design philosophy called “multiplicative design”, first seen in Breath of the Wild, to a playable Zelda now.
Let’s dig in.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda historian.
Majora’s Mask is a fascinating, unique game with an interesting development history and a lot of public information about how it was made. I got to do an in-depth exploration of it’s development with the Willoughby brothers, and also offer some particular insight into it’s most unique dungeon.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
I got to talk about the history of Four Sword Adventures’ development and place some of it’s design decisions in the context of the larger series’ history!
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
Whew, finally the podcast got to The Worst Zelda Game. But a flawed game makes for even more interesting discussion, dissecting where it went wrong and why. I spent a lot of time this season discussing the load-bearing train-based overworld, why I thought it was a flawed design, and how that impacted all the rest of the game’s systems.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
A short season for me, for a shorter game. I appeared in a single episode, which we mostly spent talking about the game and it’s systems as a whole. I think it’s a very well-paced game with possibly the best central hub town in the series! I spent a lot of time talking about how that pacing was achieved, and why I think it works.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
Twilight Princess! A game with nuanced highs and nuanced lows, I I think I talked about it for a good 9 hours over the course of these episodes. A lot of great discussion about Twilight Princess’s overworld: how I think the Zelda team arrived at this design, why it is among the weaker of the series, and how I think it impacted the design of the next few games. Also probably the most time I’ve spent discussing dungeon designs, because this game’s dungeons are incredible.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
Despite not being a game I hold in high esteem – or perhaps because of it – Phantom Hourglass was a fascinating game to analyze and discuss. Over the course of this season of the podcast I discussed my thoughts on what they were trying to achieve, the historical context of 2007, the sea changes happening to the Zelda team, my thoughts on the touch control system, and a lot more.
How the goals goals and approaches in the #Zelda series change over time is a favorite topic of mine!
I think that through a certain lens Kat (quoted below) is right, but there are interesting distinctions to be made between different eras of the Zelda franchise.
I was asked to provide a blurb for this GamesRadar piece, which I was more than happy to do! I wrote about how impressed I was at the Zelda team’s success attempt to find ways for players to see consistent and predictable results from physics gameplay.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
This was a truncated season; not a full play of Tears of the Kingdom, but a first impression sort of deal. I appeared shortly after the game came out, so I had a lot of half-formed thoughts about the world design, the depths, the physics and chemistry system, the new build system, and more.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a towering achievement, a game that raised the bar far above all that had come before.
In 1998, 3D games were not new: 3D games with first-person, top-down, and side-scrolling viewpoints had already arrived, as had third-person platformers. But nobody had yet made a third-person game with both strong camera control and melee combat, especially not in a vast, immersive world. There was no blueprint, and design pitfalls awaited any team that tried.
Ocarina of Time solved that puzzle decisively. It was a model for making third-person 3D action games that were approachable and ambitious. It broke new ground in camera control, melee combat, level design, and world design. It achieved a high standard for readability and approachability; nothing like it had ever been made before, and it set a high-water mark that wouldn’t be surpassed for years.
Sacred Realms is a Zelda retrospective podcast, where hosts Matthew and Lyndon Willoughby discuss the Zelda series as they replay all the games. I’m a frequent guest on the podcast, offering my perspective as both a game designer and a Zelda fan.
I appeared in the A Link Between Worlds season to talk a little bit about world design, recount stories about the game’s turbulent development from interviews I’d read, and ramble at length about the art of dungeon design.