Playsense Interview with Hyrule Interviews

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.

Intro

Max Nichols:
So, you said you didn’t play the Zelda games as a kid. Was Breath of the Wild the first one you played?

Sandra Mad:
Yep, yep, yep, and I bought a Switch specifically for it. When it came out I saw people on Twitch playing it because obviously it was hype, hype, hype. Everyone wanted to see it. Everyone wanted to play it and I was like, I want this. So I went out and bought a Switch specifically to play Breath of the Wild.

Nichols:
That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s quite the first experience.

Mad:
Exactly. It’s like, “I think I get why people love it so much.”

Nichols:
Yeah, if you go back to the older ones they’re a very different style of game. Breath of the Wild was a very new paradigm for the series. Or very old, depending on how you look at it. Everything before that was more in an Ocarina of Time style.

Mad:
Yeah, I saw Ocarina of Time. I’ve never played it. I saw people play it. And Majora’s Mask.

All right, so let’s formally start this. I think we have a few people already and others can join while we do this. I’ll do the classic intro.

So, we’re talking with the lovely Max Nichols today, the creator of Hyrule Interviews, which is basically a database dedicated to interviews and quotes from the Zelda team. And today, we’re just gonna ask you what boils down to a question: Why did you do this? Why did you build an interview database at all for Zelda?

So, welcome, Max. Thank you so much for being with us.

Nichols:
Thank you, thank you. I’m glad to be here. I’m very excited to chat about all this.

How Hyrule Interviews Began

Mad:
So, just to start it off: What was the moment when you realized that you didn’t just want to read through all the interviews, or see pieces of news pop up here and there, but you wanted to specifically organize them and preserve them? So, what made you sort of switch from that to full-on…

Nichols:
…To actually building a database. Yeah, so I’ve been involved with the Zelda community for many decades. I got my start on the internet joining the chat room at Zelda.com and stuff like that in the late 90s. At a certain point, I got involved in writing articles for Zelda fan sites. And then eventually I grew up and I got a career in video games. But I kept doing it a little bit on the side. I’d write maybe one article a year.

Eventually I found that in my articles I began relying heavily on quotes from the creators to illustrate my points and help to demonstrate why they made decisions they made. I started building a document of quotes that I thought were cool or useful. And eventually, it got to, I don’t know, about 20 pages long.

And then I started running into this problem where some of the websites I was getting these quotes from were being shut down. I could still get to them, but I had to go to Archive.org.

Mad:
Yeah, WebArchive and all of that, yeah.

Nichols:
I realized that there was a real… First of all, I realized I was actually very interested in this. I was really enjoying finding these quotes and using them. And they were giving me real insight. And second of all, they were disappearing from the internet. And yes, technically, they were still there, but no one was ever gonna be able to find them again. So I kind of put two and two together. And I was like, “These need to be preserved. And I’m the only one who will ever do it. Nobody else is gonna do it. So I’m gonna do it.”

That’s how I got my start.

Mad:
You mentioned that you were always active in the Zelda community from the very beginning. Was it your first ever experience of being a part of a gaming community, being so interested in having a common interest with other players? Or did you do that with other games as well?

Nichols:
I definitely did it first and foremost with Zelda. I mean, going back even further than the internet [communities]… So when I first got online, the first stuff I did was look up Zelda fan sites and websites. I got into forums and chat rooms. I did the same for Warcraft because I was also pretty into Warcraft when I was younger, but I eventually fell off of that side of things.

Personal History With Zelda & Zelda Fandom

Mad:
For a bit of your personal background with Zelda, when and where and how did you first play the games? [What’s] your nostalgic journey into how it all began?

Nichols:
I first played Zelda when I was six. I was staying in the hospital for several days because I was very sick and getting diagnosed with diabetes. And they had a Game Boy in the kid’s room at this hospital that had a completed save file on a Link’s Awakening cartridge. I played the hell out of that. I thought that I was a pirate named Zelda. And then eventually I went home and forgot about it. It was just a hospital thing.

And then I received a Game Boy for Christmas that year with Link’s Awakening. That really cemented it. I fell in love with that game. It blasted my brain wide open; it was the first game I played that was immersive and had a story. I was really interested in these environments and this place and these people. I’d never experienced that with a game before.

Mad:
Yeah, I think it’s like every gamer’s origin story. You know, some kind of a specific moment where it just touches you and you connect with it so deeply. I remember some of mine as well. And I think mine was Mortal Kombat or something. I think I played something before that. And I think it was maybe like Super Mario Bros. 2. That didn’t touch me as much. But for some reason, playing Mortal Kombat with a bunch of friends and seeing who can beat who just sort of cemented the idea that gaming is for me in my head. And I was maybe, I don’t know, six or seven as well. Something very young as well.

So, going back to the previous question of when you [described] how you started to go about it and preserving and building the database. Was there something specifically missing in the Zelda community that made you feel a database was necessary? Is there anything else? Or like you said previously, you just felt the need to preserve it and really enjoyed the process?

Nichols:
It [wasn’t very] need driven. Like, I wasn’t really seeing a gap that I wanted to fill so much as I was enjoying the process of immersing myself in interviews and doing close reads of them in order to…

If you look at the website now or look at [Hyrule Interview’s] social media now, I’m posting quotes and stuff all the time. But I didn’t start off with a focus on quotes like that. It was just a database. It was just preservation. But even then, I had to do close reads in order to pull out all the metadata for the interviews.

So, I was kind of just enjoying an excuse to do it. I did eventually become aware of the fact that I was fulfilling a role in the community that nobody else was, that people were interested in. The online Zelda community is a lot like a lot of game communities where they’re very focused on the final product. Like, people are super interested in documenting everything that’s in the final game and diving into the lore and the timeline that’s in the final game. And they like cut content, right? They’re always excited about the allure of cut content, what could have been.

But there wasn’t a huge focus within the fan space on the development process. Or the people, really, other than the major figureheads like Shigeru Miyamoto.

Mad:
That makes sense, yeah.

Nichols:
So as a developer myself I was bringing in a unique perspective for the fandom, which was an interest in the people and the process of making the games.

Mad:
That is so interesting that your background… How do I put it? It feels to me like highlighting the work behind it and how people think when they’re making the game is an important part for you there. And that feels very much from your perspective of being a game designer yourself. That makes so much sense to me that you would go and lean that way.

De-Mythologizing

Nichols:
Yeah, I was really… I’ve always been very interested in this question of… I’m a game developer, and I want to make games that are as cool as the Zelda games are. How do I do that? What are they doing that lets them make games this good? What are their processes? And how do they approach problems of design?

So, it’s always been a passionate interest of mine to learn that sort of thing. And part of it, of course, is that before I was a game developer it was all very mythologized. Like, “Shigeru Miyamoto is amazing. He’s a genius. And he makes the games.” And there’s these other figureheads that we know about. And as a naive fan I’d think “Oh, they do this amazing work that no one else can do. Nobody else does it like Zelda games.”

And the reality is a lot of people do it like the Zelda games. [laughs]

Mad:
And it takes a village to make a Zelda game, right?

Nichols:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of people, hundreds, thousands of people involved. And a lot of why Zelda works is because of the longevity and stability of Nintendo as a business. So I want to demythologize it for people. I want people to look past the figureheads and the amazement and actually see that there are real people here doing real work. They go to work every day. This is what they do when they’re at work every day. And the things that they’re doing are in reach for other people too.

…Sort of. I mean, the stability and longevity are hard, but the work isn’t out of reach. [laughs]

Mad:
No, that’s a fantastic perspective. It’s sort of like highlighting a concept of an everyday hero, right? People who you don’t maybe see on the news, who, I don’t know, save people from burning buildings or something like that. But just every day they put in the work to do something helpful for the community. I really love this concept of highlighting people like that. It really speaks to me. It’s awesome.

Nichols:
Yeah, some of my favorite interviews are… For instance, sometimes I’ll come across an interview with somebody in the IT department. Nintendo’s career site had an interview with a guy from the IT department talking about his job. And those ones are gold because they’re new perspectives, right? I don’t have any interviews from this person or from that role before. So that’s a whole new angle on things.

Mad:
Do you have any favorite unexpected quotes, like the guy from the IT department giving an interview about his job or anything like that? Like you didn’t expect to find gold where it was and it is complete gold.

Nichols:
Yeah, let’s see. Trying to think of good examples. Oftentimes, unfortunately, those kind of interviews are very shallow because they’re usually from Nintendo. It’s a PR thing, right? So they often don’t have amazing quotes in them. But there’s been some great ones. For instance, there’s a woman who was an artist, a 3D artist. She did props for game environments. She had this great story of how her dad ran a Sega arcade when she was growing up, but she didn’t really play games herself other than at the arcade. And then in college she found Link’s Awakening and fell in love with it, and then went back home and borrowed her older brother’s Famicom. And that got her into games.

There’re lots of little stories like that. There’s no singular quote that’s amazing, but the story is really humanizing.

Mad:
Yeah, that’s again, coming back to the same concept, right? And also maybe thinking of it from an overall perspective, how one tiny thing can change a person’s life, right? She gives her background and it looks like this. And who knows how it would change Zelda? How it would change her life? You know, everything feels… I don’t often feel like that. I’m not a very, I don’t know, spiritual person. But it’s so interesting for me to see connections like that and think about the infinite possibilities of things going completely different than they did.

Nichols:
Yeah, a thousand people worked on this game and all of them had these key pivotal moments in their life where something turned them onto this path. And what an incredible set of moments to dig into.

Influence On My Game Design

Mad:
Yeah. And coming back a little bit to your experience with game design, you said that Zelda sort of helped you shape your own relationship with game design. And do you have any specifics on what they taught you or maybe what affected you as a player and as a game designer? Anything that you can pull from that?

Nichols:
Yeah. It’s a little hard to disambiguate because I’ve been playing these games and inspired by these games since I was six. So to a certain extent, it’s all at the DNA level, right? Everything I know about games I learned from Zelda.

But there are some things I can pull out. For instance, I think Nintendo has a very interesting gameplay-and-character-first paradigm for how they design games, which I certainly have learned a lot from. They tend to start from a gameplay idea, and then they tend to refine it by asking, “How does this work for the character that we’re using?” So I’ve learned a ton about how they approach that and the way they think about those different phases of development over the course of reading all these interviews.

And I don’t know if it’s something I want to emulate myself, because I tend to value driving design from a narrative perspective a little bit more than Nintendo does. But it’s still very cool for me to learn how they do it.

I also, of course, think that they are a great model for how teams stay together and work together over a long period of time. I think Nintendo very clearly demonstrates the value of having a team that [has] worked together so long that they can finish each other’s sentences. Zelda 1 was 38 years ago. More than that now. It took 38 years before they had a Zelda game that had none of the original Zelda 1 team in the credits. In 38 years Echoes of Wisdom was the first without anyone from the original team involved. So they really were together forever.

Mad:
Yeah, you know, we always joke about people who work together saying, “we’re all family” and corporations saying “we’re all family”. In this case, genuinely, at this point, that is your family.

Nichols:
Yeah, like, Shigeru Miyamoto has had lunch with the same two guys every day for 45 years.

Mad:
Damn, I can’t even imagine that.

Nichols:
Something that Nintendo seems to value a lot that I think I intuitively kind of figured out over the years, but they made it very explicit in a lot of interviews I’ve read, is that they really value surprise. A large part of the Nintendo aesthetic is they want to surprise the player. And they like to do it at kind of a high level, with new ideas and new directions for the games. Like, “We want to give the players something they didn’t even know they wanted.”

But they also like to do it at a micro level. They think it’s very important to have moments that are novel and surprising during gameplay. And it’s not like that’s unique to Nintendo. A lot of people understand that. But studying the Zelda series, and Nintendo more broadly— because you can’t study Zelda without studying Mario, they’re the same people— has really driven that home for me.

Mad:
That, I think, sort of answers the question that I had for you next, which was what has building the archive taught you about Nintendo’s design language or the evolution of the series. But if you want to add anything on top of that, feel free to, of course.

The Themes of the Zelda Series

Nichols:
Yeah. I wrote down some notes for this question. So, I spent a lot of time when I was younger trying to articulate… ”Why do I like Zelda games so much? And what is it about Zelda games that are special to me?” And finally, decades later, I can articulate it to an extent.

There are 40 years of this series. It has had many, many different directors on many systems with many different creative visions. What actually ties it all together and gives it a coherent identity? Some of the themes that are present in all the Zelda games are stuff like hiking. Shigeru Miyamoto has talked about how Zelda is about hiking. It’s inspired by his childhood experiences hiking and discovering things in the mountains.

Mad:
I’m genuinely thinking about it in the background. Do I think Zelda is about hiking? Maybe it is.

Nichols:
When you play Breath of the Wild, it’s definitely hiking. And also… so is Zelda 1.

Mad:
One thing they nailed for me, who was a newb in the series, was that, unlike maybe Ubisoft  games with exploration, it didn’t feel like there’s a pattern to it that you always had to follow, right? See the tower, open the tower. And it wasn’t as annoying and repetitive as maybe in other games. I noticed myself enjoying parts of it that I didn’t think I would. I didn’t think I would enjoy finding, like, a specific beetle that I needed for a specific potion. But I did, somehow. Things you think will be tedious end up being actually fun, and it surprised the heck out of me.

Nichols:
For Breath of the Wild in particular, I think the key to that game is negative space.

Mad:
Yes.

Nichols:
I have never played a game that so successfully captivated me with long moments of silence, either in actual sound or in pacing, or in just not flooding you with goals and information all the time. It leaves room for a variety of emotions that a lot of games don’t succeed at leaving room for. Softer emotions like wonder or awe or just curiosity, which tend to be overridden by urgency in a lot of other games.

Mad:
Yeah. So, let’s continue on the topic. I’m so sorry for pulling away from it, but it was very interesting.

Nichols:
Totally fine! Other themes, you know, Miyamoto has talked about how the Zelda series is about a boy becoming a hero. And in some games, that’s very explicit, right? Like Ocarina of Time, which I realize you haven’t played, it’s a game where you play first as a child, and then in the second half there’s been a time jump and now you’re an adult. That’s what that game is all about. But it’s a theme that a lot of them have. Less so for Breath of the Wild, because you’re already a hero at the start of that one.

And he’s talked about how there are games about treasure hunting. He’s cited Indiana Jones as an inspiration for Zelda 1. And that’s an inspiration you can pretty clearly see throughout.

Mad:
Oh, definitely.

Nichols:
Like the whole, you know, there’s traps in a temple and you’re grabbing loot. That’s a fun fantasy.

Mad:
And also, yeah, I can see the Indiana Jones inspiration now that you’ve mentioned it.

Nichols:
He contrasted it to Mario. Like the Super Mario Bros. and the Zelda 1 teams, they were the same team, and they made the games at the same time. They were both in development concurrently, which is crazy. But he’s talked about how Zelda was, unlike Mario, a game that makes you think about what to do next. And some people, you know, pull that out and they’re like, “It’s about non-linearity.” And to a certain extent, yes, but it’s in contrast to Mario. The immediate moment-to-moment gameplay is also about thinking about what to do next.

And that’s a theme that we see throughout the series all the way up to Breath of the Wild, which is designed so that every situation or challenge can be overcome in different ways because of their highly sandbox-y, simulated gameplay systems. So it’s kind of the apotheosis of that idea.

Mad:
And even more in Tears of the Kingdom, right? Because they took it even further there.

Nichols:
Even more so, for sure.

And the last major theme that I’ve kind of written down that’s present in all the Zelda games is the fun of solving a puzzle. Throughout the years, many different Zelda directors have talked about this, a core part of the games in their mind is making the player feel smart. By presenting challenges or problems that in the course of solving them the player feels like they were clever. Or they saw something [in the game environment], and the fact that they spotted it means that they were smart, right? They want the players to feel that way. Of course the games are designed to breadcrumb players to solutions. But that’s the feeling they want to create: “Yeah, I’m so smart. I figured that out.”

Mad:
I noticed the tiniest detail on the wall and I knew I had to press a button somewhere. All of that good stuff.

Nichols:
So those are the five themes I talk about that are there for the whole 40 year history of the series. Those themes are always present.

Mad:
It is so interesting. You know I’m not so deep into the universe and all of the details about Zelda as you are, but when you talk about this, I’m like, “oh yeah, yeah, I can definitely see that.” When you start thinking about it, you immediately agree.

And even with the puzzles, when you said that, what I kept thinking about was that I’m normally not a type of player who loves puzzles and games. I often enjoy exploration and beating the bosses, that kind of that vibe. When I started playing Breath of the Wild it was one of the few games where it didn’t annoy me. I enjoyed solving them. And I didn’t immediately go Google how to like beat it faster and all of that. It is interesting to see how they succeeded in that, even with players like me who don’t often enjoy that. It’s so cool.

Nichols:
Yeah, I’ve always… I’m also not necessarily a huge puzzle guy. I’m not looking for RPGs with the hardest puzzles in them. Or I’m not playing adventure games that have, you know, hard logic puzzles. I mean sometimes I do but it’s a different kind of enjoyment. Zelda’s not scratching the same itch as The Golden Idol or Ace Attorney or something like that. Something about the way they utilize puzzles is very grounded in the environment and it’s very well integrated with the hiking and the exploration. It’s always about observing the environment.

Mad:
We have a comment in chat. Zahar said he would put Breath of the Wild in the category of holotropic experiences.

Nichols:
So actually over here I have my screen looking up “holotropic”. [laughs]

Mad:
That was my question too! Zahar, please elaborate what you actually mean by that because I also don’t know the term. So we’ll wait for him to elaborate or maybe if you google faster than Zahar types, let me know as well.

Nichols:
Yeah, I’m finding a lot of stuff about breath work and meditation so that’s probably not…

Curation and Organization

Mad:
Ah, that’s probably what he means. Let’s see what he means by that.

But for now I want to talk to you a little bit more about curating the archive.  When you look at interviews, what counts as a valuable piece of interview for the database? How do you decide what deserves to be there? And we talked about preservation, what’s important in that sense? How do you go about picking that and curating it?

Nichols:

Very good question. It’s probably something I need to be a little bit more intentional about. My bar is basically that I believe any primary source counts. I’ve put down social media posts, I’ve put down court documents, shareholder Q&As. Basically if it is a primary source from someone who worked on a Zelda product.

So as part of all this I have a database of people as well. Thousands and thousands of names of people who made Zelda games. And theoretically, according to my bar, any interview with any of them counts.

The reality is that I’m just one person and I can only put so much effort in. And I don’t have any metrics of success, right? Nobody’s holding me to a milestone. So I basically just go where my interest takes me. Some days I’ll go through magazines. Like I’ll read through old Nintendo Powers and find all the interviews. Or other days I’ll be like, “huh there was this interesting court case.” Like Nintendo versus, man I forget the name of it, but you know the big Donkey Kong court case.

Mad:

Boy they have a lot of those. They tend to be quite litigious, huh.

Nichols:
They really do.

So a lot of it is really just following what piques my interest. There’s been a few times where I have started to go down a path and then was like, “No this is kind of more work than it’s worth.” Voice actors, for instance, tend to have a lot of stuff. “Oh this person voiced someone in Tears of the Kingdom and they have a podcast and a YouTube channel.” Am I gonna go through their podcast and list all their podcast episodes? They technically count for my database and I wouldn’t mind having them in there but I’m not gonna put in that work. That’s kind of my approach.

Mad:
I have a question that just popped up in my head related to that. We started with you being a part of the Zelda community and how important it is to you and how you obviously felt connected to the game and to the people that play it. Have you considered, or maybe you do this already, having other people from the community help you with this? Volunteers or otherwise to expand the universe of preserving an important piece of gaming history?

Nichols:
Yeah, I have always wanted and intended to pull in other people, but so far I haven’t. I’ve just never gotten around to making that happen and figuring out how to find people to help. I think I’d probably have a fairly high standard. I wouldn’t want to just crowdsource. I would want to find an individual or two who I trust to come in and actually work on the database directly with me. I mean, maybe it’d be as easy as me just posting “Hey who wants to help?” And interviewing a couple folks. But I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Mad:
Or going into Reddit and Discord spaces, seeing and going about people who share your passion for it and see if anyone sparks your interest when talking to them directly could also be an option.

Nichols:
Yeah, I think the thing that makes it a little hard, and this is probably the real reason I haven’t done it, is because a lot of what has made it a success I think is my particular blend of systemic thinking. Like enjoying working on databases, and also having game dev experience.

Mad:
I see.

Nichols:
So like that’s kind of a very specific Venn diagram. And maybe I’m just being a little too precious about it. Like I probably don’t need to have everyone who’s helping me also be a game designer. [laughs]

Mad:
I can see pros and cons for both of these points. On one hand, having a high standard can very much be a good thing, it is your passion project, right? So I can definitely see it from that perspective. But on the other hand, I think maybe someone doesn’t fit all of your boxes, but they share the love and the interest and that could cover a lot of different things that maybe you see as necessary right now. So I could see both sides here.

Next question I have for you, coming back to how you curate the archive: How do you handle context when a quote is interesting, but the surrounding interview is maybe fragmented, poorly translated, or hard to verify or anything like that? How do you deal with those?

The Quality Bar

Nichols:
Yeah, so there’s a couple different bars I apply. For having an entry in the database at all, like the actual interview database, I don’t [have a high bar]. I’ll take even just someone talking, like I have some database interviews that are linking to forum posts. Or maybe there was this amazing talk at this event in Japan. I might be missing the source, but I’ll put it in here because it’s a thing that exists and I’d love to find the source someday. So I really don’t need very much. Fragmentary or missing context, I’ll still put it in there.

I also highlight quotes every day and I have a much, much higher bar for that. They need to be relatively complete quotes, right? Like sometimes articles will [have] fragmentary quotes in the middle of a sentence or something and I can’t really do anything with that. I can’t turn that into a standalone thing. So I end up having to skip those.

And sometimes I’ll come across a statement that seems weird enough that I’m like, “Did this get translated right?” And in those cases, I tend to either not highlight the quote or I will go ask translator friends that I know and be like, “Hey, can you take a look at this? Was this translated right?”

There’s been a few fun ones like that. There was one interview with Time magazine for kids.

Mad:
Wait, there’s Time magazine kids? I didn’t even know that that’s a thing.

Nichols:
Yep. At least it was in the 90s. a kid was interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto and he suddenly mentions a brother. I’ve read thousands of interviews with him. He’s never before mentioned a brother. None of his Wikipedia pages mention a brother.

Mad:
In this random kids Time magazine interview. That is crazy.

Nichols:
So I reached out to other historians I know, right? There’s a guy named Chris Kohler who used to be a games journalist and now he’s a game dev himself. He’s big in the game interview space and game history spaces. And I’m like, “Chris, is this real?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I think so.” So I got a second opinion before I highlighted this because I don’t want to go out and announce, hey everyone, Shigeru Miyamoto has a brother and then then be wrong about it.

Or, I mean, there’s one time Shigeru Miyamoto, you know, the maker of Mario and Zelda…

Mad:
Yeah.

Nichols:
He made a comparison between something and pornography in an interview once. It was like a candid conversation with another game dev in a Japanese magazine. And I was like, “There’s no way he said that.”

So I went and I asked two different translator friends to double check it before I published it. And they were like, no, he really does say this.

Mad:
Wow.

Nichols:
I didn’t expect that to be real, but it was real.

Oh I almost forgot, the one thing I am careful about is I try not to allow any AI translated interviews into the database.

Mad:
That makes sense to me because it could very well ruin a certain quote, which changes everything and all of that. I can, yeah, I can see that.

Nichols:
Yeah. It’s also true for machine translation, even pre-AI we had machine translation. So I try to avoid both of those. And I don’t always succeed. I’m pretty sure there’s some in there that I didn’t realize. Especially nowadays with modern interviews, that’s going to be how a lot of publications do it.

Mad:
Yeah, of course.

Nichols:
But if I know that its AI or machine translated, it does not go into the database.

Mad:
That makes sense.

So what is the hardest part of building a living archive like this? Sourcing, organizing, you know, attribution or keeping it updated and current or maybe something else I don’t even think about.

The Hardest Part

Nichols:
Yeah. Completeness is definitely hard, right? Like I am definitely never going to hit any particular bar of completeness. There’s… so I have 1600 or so interviews in the database right now and probably that many quotes as well. And that’s a tiny fraction. That’s the tip of the iceberg. There’re so many interviews out there.

Especially once you get into Japanese magazines. It’s very laborious for me to go through and find interviews from a Japanese magazine. But you know it’s not just Japan, there’re German magazines, there’re Mexican magazines, there’re magazines from all sorts of languages and locales. So I have accepted the fact that I’m never going to be complete. I’ll just do what I can and have fun doing it.

Mad:
When you mentioned podcasts and stuff like that by members of the team, I thought about that immediately because you can always find a connection to something and there’s always going to be more content that you’ll have to go through to find something. So yeah, completeness doesn’t feel realistic there.

Nichols:
And earlier I talked about how I love finding details from someone who isn’t one of the figureheads, right? Like someone who helped in a less visible role. And in theory I would love to go through those people’s podcasts and find like the one podcast, like episode 90, where they mentioned something about, you know, their experience working in game dev. And I’d love to highlight that quote. And I’m never going to, I’m not going to listen through their 90 episodes of podcasts.

But the other thing that’s hard that I spent a lot of effort on was just the organization. I actually have… When I talk about it, I call it a database, but it’s actually a bunch of relational databases, right? I have a database of people, database of interviews, database of products and one of publications and one of quotes. And one of journalists, because I try to attribute things to the journalists who did the interview.

So I have a bunch of these databases and I need to figure out how to structure these so that they connect to each other, but there isn’t a lot of redundancy and there isn’t too much data entry. I want to minimize the data entry when I can.

So I put a lot of effort into building logic to do stuff like pull data from one database into entries in another database. So it’s there when we need it. And that’s getting pretty technical, but that’s where a lot of my problem solving challenges were, especially early on.

Mad:
That feels like your game designer is coming up there a little bit, you know, making sure everything is in order and it’s like building the logic, I think is what made me think of it, because I think that’s at least how I see it. Game design is sort of like that, right? Building the logic behind it and how it works and all of that good stuff.

Nichols:
Exactly. I have some background as a systems designer, and that definitely comes up.

Mad:
If you finished with that part of the question, I have further ones where we can move on to, you know, public perception and reception. How was the response from the Zelda community? How’s it been in general? And has it changed how you think about preservation and fandoms in general?

Nichols:
Yeah. So when I first started this, I wasn’t sure people would be interested. I hadn’t really seen a lot of appetite for really diving into this kind of stuff from the community before. And I needn’t have worried! People are very interested.

I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I appreciate the attention. I’m not necessarily in it for the raw numbers. I’m not trying to get a million followers or anything. But it’s very gratifying. I often post quotes that I’m excited about in the moment. I’ll be reading an interview, and some interesting quote will stick out to me. And I’ll be like, “Wow, this is really cool.” Or “This is really interesting,” or “I didn’t know this”. I’ll often immediately go and post that quote.

And people are also interested. Honestly, it’s part of what keeps me going. If it was just me, like it was at the beginning, and I wasn’t posting quotes every day, and I was just building a database for preservation with myself as the audience, I probably would have stopped years ago. But it motivates me a lot to see that people are interested in it. And people are using it! Not just Zelda fans, but people who are writing Zelda books are using it, and journalists when they’re writing about Zelda. And so I’m seeing all this evidence of it being useful to people.

Mad:
That must feel fantastic.

Nichols:
Yeah! I haven’t been credited a in a book yet. But I think it’s gonna happen soon. [laughs]

Mad:
I mean, when we started talking about it, and [through] the whole interview, I completely see and understand that there’s a lot of love and passion in it. Obviously, you are not doing it for the numbers. It’s obvious, I think for anyone who looks at it, but I can also completely understand how people connecting with it and people enjoying it keeps you going and motivates you a lot. I can absolutely see that.

Nichols:
Yeah, I mean, it’s helped me in a bunch of ways. For instance there’s a podcast I appear on a lot, Sacred Realms. I have a couple friends who run it. And they’re doing a book club-style playthrough of the whole Zelda series, where they do like 12 episodes per game. So they pull me in to give development history in quotes for every game they play. So that’s been really fun.

Mad:
That’s so sick.

Nichols:
And I’ve made great friends doing that. I’ve been doing this for like, five years, something like that. Five or six. I have made some very real friends along the way through the connections there.

Mad:
So I think all of the stages that we do here, right, talking with so many different folks across industry, one thing always speaks to me, and that is passion and real connections. Like, so many people you can see found life changing friends, jobs and partners, everything you can only imagine that is deeply important to people. It changes so much. And we don’t even discuss it purposely. It just appears in every interview, everyone talks about this. And I think that’s the beauty of gaming communities, the passion that we have for what we do and the support [that we] find in friends and communities.

Embracing Your Freak Flag

Nichols:
Absolutely. There was a period of time during my career where I kind of pulled back from gaming communities. I was a game developer now! I felt like I owed it to myself to take a broader view and not just put all my energy into one series anymore. So I was trying to play broadly, I was trying to experience a lot of different games, I sort of… I had almost trained myself to be ashamed of being a fan of a specific series. Because, you know, that’s very different from being a developer, I felt like I was supposed to move past that and stop being a fanboy and start being a serious creator.

Eventually I reached a point where I was like, “that’s dumb”. I can be a fan still, I can still go on the forums and talk about these things that I love. I can still do a project about this thing that I love. And yeah, like. Sure. Some people might think it’s cringey or whatever, which I guess is what I was afraid of. But it’s great. And especially because it has always been my experience that the spaces in which I make the best connections and the most connections to other people are the spaces where we are allowed to let our freak flag fly, right? Show our passion.

Mad:
100%.

Nichols:
Be passionate at each other. It’s so important.

Mad:
I think at this point in my life, I think you have to embrace the cringe and that will set you free. Like, genuinely, because I think we all obviously put on some facades, right? Of looking professional, of being a certain type of person or anything like that. I think gaming communities are maybe even a little bit more sort of acceptable to be cringe or to be nerdy, you know, to be, or let your freak flag fly, like you said.

And I think that is a really, really good part of it. And I think we have to embrace that. And I know, someone thinks that’s cringe. That’s fine.

Nichols:
I’m enjoying what I’m doing.

Mad:
Exactly.

Nichols:
The community is enjoying it.

Everyone I’ve talked to about it has been on the same page. Like, there isn’t actually anyone out there who’s said “Max, you’re being cringe”. Nobody’s ever said that to me. Nobody thinks that. I was in my own head.

Mad:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So probably it helped you with personal growth, as well as, you know, professional and other aspects of it. Because getting over a hurdle or perception you have of yourself is also an important part of personal development.

Nichols:
Yeah, absolutely.

Game Preservation

Mad:
We just talked about the preservation of game history. Do you think in general, video game history is being preserved well enough right now? Or are projects like yours, and like we [interviewed] Johnny Severin who preserves video game art as well. Do you think projects like yours are filling a real gap? Like there’s a miss in the industry where we’re losing very important pieces of gaming history?

Nichols:
I do think it fills a gap. To a certain extent it’s helping with pure visibility. These things that I’m preserving, I’m actually not doing a lot of preservation directly. I’m not hosting content. And I’m not uploading a lot of stuff to archive.org, for instance. But what I do is I find things. I’m in more of a curatorial role, where I’m pulling out the interesting stuff I’m finding from a variety of obscure sources.

And I’m putting it all in one place that makes it far more accessible, makes the act of researching this stuff far, far more accessible than it was without me. And I think that’s kind of demonstrated by the fact that I do have those journalists and game historians that are using my site as a resource to themselves. So I think, yeah, there is a gap there that I’m filling.

In the bigger picture, I would say we are not generally doing game preservation as well as I would like.

Mad:
Yep, I agree with that.

Nichols:
The Video Game History Foundation, a couple of years ago, they had a big lawsuit with the ESA. It was something about being able to lend digital video games from libraries. There’s some rights thing where they’re not treated like books are. I forget the details.

Unfortunately, the Video Game History Foundation lost that lawsuit, but some of the stuff they brought out as evidence was like they estimated something like 87 percent of games are not really preserved.

Mad:
Wow, 87?

Nichols:
That’s an insane number.

Mad:
That is crazy.

Nichols:
Yeah, that’s taking a broad view, right? Like that’s including stuff like RPG Maker games that somebody made or flash games that have all disappeared to the Internet. They’re not just the brick and mortar store games, but all games. I’m very fortunate that I’m downstream from their efforts.

There’s also a group called Gaming Alexandria, and they do a ton of scanning of old game magazines, and a lot of those magazines get published on a website called RetroMags.com. So there’s this thriving online community that’s doing preservation in a sense that they’re buying old magazines and scanning them and putting them online. I would not be able to do my database, at least not nearly as well without their efforts. So I’m super grateful for that.

But not every series is as well served as the Zelda series. This is one of the most popular series in the world. That’s why I’m able to do this for Zelda. It would be a lot harder for someone to do this for most other game series.

Mad:
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And also it’s probably one of the larger fandoms we have. Like in terms of size and also commitment, so I can definitely understand that.

Overall, how do you think a sort of quote unquote successful video game archive or fan made archive would look like to you? Is there anything specific that’s important? Community values, maybe completeness, which we mentioned that you probably will never achieve. Or maybe accessibility. How do you think overall it looks?

Nichols:
I think the real measure is whether other people are finding value in the database for their own passions or own projects. And maybe also… Am I successfully doing that demythologization I talked about, right? Am I helping open people’s eyes to the more day-to-day lived experience of what it’s like for these developers to make these games.

And I feel like I am achieving both of those measures. So I’m very happy about that. And a lot of those other things you mentioned kind of contribute to those.

Mad:
Right.

Accessibility and Approachability

Nichols:
Like accessibility. I do care a lot. I put alt text on every quote I post and on the articles I post on my actual website. That’s accessibility from a disability perspective.

And I value approachability as well. Like is the site well organized? Do people get intimidated? I care about those things because they enable both of those other aspects of success.

Mad:
Well, when you said that, that actually reminded me of there was this person explaining why designing things in cities from a disability perspective helps everyone. And she was mentioning like the simple idea of having a sloped ramp towards a crossing.

And it turns out it helps everyone, even the people who don’t need a ramp. And it doesn’t make anything worse for anyone. On the contrary, it helps absolutely everyone. While the goal was to help disabled people. And I think accessibility from the perspective that you mentioned, I think kind of also works like that. Of course, it’s important to be inclusive. No question about that. But also it helps everyone else.

Nichols:
Right. It’s called the Curb-Cut Effect. When making things accessible helps everyone, not just those with disabilities.

Mad:
Yes, that was exactly what I was talking about.

If Hyrule interviews disappeared tomorrow, what do you think would be lost beyond just a collection of links and quotes. Is there something more to it?

Nichols:
Yeah, I think we’ve talked a lot about the value that I feel like I’m bringing in, like what does success look like. So I think it’s basically just the loss of those. Right now there are people being exposed every day to quotes that I’m posting. Every day they’re getting a more well-rounded view of what went into this series that they love. And for some of them they’re getting their first glimpse of game design thinking, right?

Small things can inspire people. I used to work on a MOBA called infinite Crisis. It was kind of a failed game. In my head this was a kind of a small, failed game. But somebody approached me a few months ago and they were like, “Hey, you know, you wrote some patch notes for that game years ago where you explained your design thinking about a change you made and it really opened my eyes to game design. And now I’m a game designer”. I never expected a patch note I wrote for a failed game to have inspired someone to become a game designer. So every time I post a quote from someone who’s much more successful than me, like Shigeru Miyamoto [laughs], and their design thinking… I might be inspiring future generations every time I get them to look at stuff for the first time through a game they love.

So yeah, I think that would be a big loss.

Also quite literally some of what I have in there would probably never be seen again. I have links to Archive.org pages that no one else is ever gonna find.

Mad:
That feels a little bit scary to me. Also [someone in] chat wrote that he was just reading today about GTA 6 not being released on physical media, which is also being discussed from a perspective of preservation of games, right and that also made me think… how much are we losing daily of such important pieces of games in history like that. And it’s a little bit scary. I’ll be honest with you. It’s a little bit scary. I understand things come and go in this world, things are not permanent, but it feels a little bit sad and scary that we’re losing that.

Nichols:
Yeah. There’s the whole saying that once something is on the Internet it’s on the Internet forever, right?

Mad:
But it’s not true, it’s not true at all only when you’re beyond say Barbara Streisand, right?

Nichols:
Somebody has to be spending money to host things. Yeah, so things are gone all the time.

Mad:
To touch on maybe personal reflections on working on this. What has this project taught you about your own relationship to Zelda and you know, maybe even broader to gaming in general yeah?

Existential

Nichols:
Yeah, I guess getting a little slightly existential here…

There are about 40 years of history that I have interviews from. My earliest ones are from the early to mid 80s. And every time I post a quote I put the age of the people who are speaking because I want readers to be able to… Shigeru Miyamoto or Eiji Aonuma or whatever, they had the opinions that they shared in an interview in the 90s, right? But their opinions might change [over time]. The 90s were 30 years ago! So I want people to not just see a quote in isolation, I want to try to put it in context.

So I’m always looking at people’s ages and I’m always writing down how old someone was when they said a thing. And it has made me very keenly aware of how short a 40-year career can really be.

I’m 16 years into my game design career. And making a new game today takes six or seven years if you’re making a triple-a game from start to finish. So I can feel the sands going down my hourglass. How do I make an impact as a game designer in the limited time I have? It makes me look more closely at the choices I’m making around my own career. I would have been thinking about that anyways, but it definitely throws it into stark relief for me.

Of course it affects me all the time in terms of actual design thinking too, but we’ve kind of talked about that part a little bit more already. So that’s one of the big parts for me, it helps me look at my career holistically as part of a 40-year chunk.

Mad:
When you look at the archive now, do you see it as a research tool, a tribute, or maybe even a self-portrait? It could be so many things.

Nichols:
Well, the answer is kind of “all of the above.” I do see it as a research tool. We’ve talked about that a little bit, but I’m very excited that people are using it as a research tool. Yes and I also do look at it as a tribute [to the Zelda team’s work]. But this is… me putting out there and into the world my own tastes and values. I make this because I am interested in this, so it is a reflection of myself. It’s a tribute in the sense that these things I value are things that other people have made, so it is part of my appreciation of them and who they are. So yeah, like I guess it really is all of those things. Whoever came up with that question was very smart [laughs].

Mad:
Darya [Shulha], yes. It’s always safe to say that. Darya has this way of crafting the questions where it often touches on something maybe the person wasn’t even thinking about, right? I think it lands really well. It makes you think a little bit further.

Nichols:
Yeah, I never thought about it that way. I’ve never framed it as a self-portrait before but yeah, it totally is.

Mad:
I also think that’s a really fair perspective. After of course looking at the project itself, what you do and talking to you now, I think it’s very much a reflection of you. A specific part of you and your personality.

Yeah, so to close this off a little bit. I have a couple of maybe rapid-fire questions. What was one interview quote or idea in the archive that still stays with you personally.

Nichols:
So I was actually prepping for this answer [laughs]. I had a hard time picking one, but I did pick one.

Mad:
We can do the top three.

The One That Sticks With Me

Nichols:
Well, I only wrote down one. Basically there is this… Shigeru Miyamoto himself does not talk about this very often, but Satoru Iwata, who was the president of Nintendo from 2002 to 2015 or so, has said that Miyamoto’s definition of a good idea is “something that solves multiple problems in a flash.”

And this gets to this idea in design where, when you’re designing a game or really when you’re designing anything you want all the elements of the thing you’re building to reinforce each other. You want to make sure all your choices are aligned towards shared goals, and you want your systems to complement each other and you want your features to work towards the same end. You don’t want them to feel like they’re pulling in opposite directions or pulling the player towards different themes or different emotions. They should work together. And one very simple way you achieve that as a game designer is by… when you’re when you’re thinking of design changes, especially at the level of like adding or removing features, you need to be able to justify every addition you make in multiple ways. You need to be able to say “this reinforces that, and that, and that.”

I have been exposed to that answer in other places. There’s an architecture book I read where that was one of the rules, and one of my old leads at Bungie used to say that too. But I first encountered it as a Miyamoto quote and it really stuck with me, because to me it is the definition of good game design practice. Every design decision you make is something that’s solving multiple problems or addressing multiple needs.

Mad:
We sort of had a theme in this interview of life changing little things, and this might be your life changing little thing. Where it changed your perspective on game design. You mentioned that person who read one of your old patchnotes, like it feels like maybe this is that moment for you. Maybe I’m wrong, but it gave me the same impression.

Nichols:
It’s definitely a moment like that for me, for sure.

Mad:
That’s really awesome, and also the fact that you said it is a theme in so many different areas. Like an architectural book and all of that. It seems reasonable to me that it would be because it’s a really profound thought.

If someone wants to understand why you did all of this amazing work, what is sort of a short description of it?

Nichols:
I wanted to embrace my own tastes and my own aesthetic as a game designer, so I decided to really learn from the people who made my favorite games.

Mad:
That is amazing. No, it’s a really well-put answer. It’s awesome.

Nichols:
Thank you. I spent like a half hour trying to decide what that sentence was gonna be. [laughs]

Mad:
I really admire the work you’re doing and the passion behind it. Even in this interview, and you crafting your answers it really shines through. Maybe part of your personality if you put it that way, the attention to detail maybe is the good way to put it. And I love it. It really speaks to me and it’s amazing. So much respect to you for doing what you do and I absolutely enjoyed talking to you today. We had a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for your time.

Nichols:
Yeah, thank you so much too. I really enjoyed this chat.

Mad:

And of course, thanks to everyone in the audience, as always we really appreciate you. Thank you again so much.