Miyamoto and Aonuma on Zelda

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Q: The music score is especially impressive, and borrows from other styles such as classical. Did Koji Kondo primarily work on this? And, how much emphasis was placed on sound design?

Aonuma-san:

Throughout the Zelda series Koji Kondo has been responsible for the composition, and he is again responsible. And, because the story takes place 100+ years in the future, head of Ocarina of Time, they really decided to feature some of the familiar songs from that. They've implemented it in a way that they think will be appropriate, since it's set in the future from there. So, you'll hear familiar themes from the Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, perhaps. But, also, we've reworked -- I think -- some of the background music from Link to the Past as well. You'll also hear that, and I actually have very little input when it comes to the sound. I let them work on their own. So, for me it's a lot of fun to see how the sound takes shape, and how they're using the different effects in battles and such. Something else that's important to mention is that usually on a game we'll have two to three composers, but this time we actually bumped it up to five to six people. Essentially, we've more than doubled the number of people. Part of the reasoning behind that was the rushed development schedule, but also that we wanted to have very high quality sound with The Wind Waker.

Q: Can you discuss the Game Boy Advance connectivity, and talk about why you implemented it the way you did?

Aonuma-san:

When we started development, Mr. Miyamoto said he knew that Zelda games had always been one-player. But this time we wanted us to allow, say, a father to interact with his son or any second player to interact. We thought this was a good way to introduce that.

Q: Regarding Ura Zelda, is there any different between the 64DD version that was in development and the GameCube version? Did it use any functionality with the 64DD? And, is it coming to the U.S.?

Miyamoto-san:

Although we did develop Ura for the 64DD, it didn't use many of the special features. So it was very easy to port over to the GameCube without cutting any features. Why we did it, well that was because the 64DD was only released in Japan and it was only sold to subscribers of the RandNet system. For a long time we wanted to make it available for play and find a way to do that. It was expensive to make cartridges, so we had through about different ways. One thing we thought about was tie-ups with magazines. Once GameCube moved to disc media, though, it became much more feasible to make it available. In terms of how we've done it, we didn't want to make it limited edition. So we've tried to make it available to as many people as possible.

Also, I'm not sure if you're aware but Ura Zelda isn't very different from the Ocarina of Time; it's more of a second quest. People who played through Ocarina of Time would be able to play through Ura Zelda and get a few laughs at some things, find some things more difficult, and take a few varied paths. However, even if you do play all the way through the end it will not unlock anything special.

We hope to be making an announcement sometime soon, so please wait until then.

Q: Was it very difficult to do those ports from the N64, and might you be considering doing it again with other N64 titles?

Miyamoto-san:

When we switched from the cartridge to disc media, we did it in a way that would make it very similar. In terms of the actual port, it was quite simple. Technically, it's easy to port N64 games, but what types of games would people really want to play and would there be a value there?

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