August 23, 1999 - Weekly Famitsu, the popular Japanese publication, this week ran a complete interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, the big man responsible for many of Nintendo's big properties - namely, Mario and Zelda. He talked about the new Game Boy Color editions of Legend of Zelda and the future of the series on the handheld.

According to Miyamoto, Yoshiki Okamoto (the head of Capcom and Flagship) wanted to work on games and follow them up with sequels four or five months down the line, and possibly work on Zelda titles this way. Because Nintendo doesn't generally hammer out titles as frequently as Okamoto wishes, and because Miyamoto is currently busy with his own titles, Nintendo got Flagship to write the scenarios for the Game Boy Color Zelda titles. "Once we got started, we wanted to make them the right way. So we got Flagship to write up the drafts."

The first title was to be a port of the original NES Legend of Zelda. "Okamoto-san asked me, 'will you let me translate "Game 1" to the Game Boy Color?' We decided to try and transplant the game to the system, and we received a pretty good response, so we said, 'let's make a sequel!' We would make about three games to be played in any order."

As for when the games will be available, Miyamoto stated that "we'd like to release the first one this year. We'll probably start at the end of this year or in the spring of next year. If all goes well, the sequels will follow in intervals of around three to four months."

Thanks to Weekly Famitsu.