The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Development

Development

Link's Awakening began as an unsanctioned side project; programmer Kazuaki Morita created a Zelda-like game with one of the first Game Boy development kits, and used it to experiment with the platform's capabilities. Other staff members of the Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development division joined him after-hours, and worked on the game in what seemed to them like an "afterschool club". The results of these experiments with the Game Boy started to look promising, and following the 1991 release of the Super Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, director Takashi Tezuka asked permission to develop a handheld Zelda title; he intended it to be a port of A Link to the Past, but it evolved into an original game. The majority of the team that had created the Super Nintendo Zelda game was reassembled to advance this new project. Altogether, it took them one and a half years to develop Link's Awakening.

Tezuka recalled that the early free-form development of Link's Awakening resulted in the game's "unrestrained" contents, such as the unauthorized cameo appearances of characters from the Mario and Kirby series. A Link to the Past script writer Kensuke Tanabe joined the team early on, and came up with the basis of the story. Tezuka sought to make Link's Awakening a spin-off, and gave Tanabe instructions to omit common series elements such as Princess Zelda, the Triforce relic, and the setting Hyrule. As a consequence, Tanabe proposed his game world idea of an island with an egg on top of a mountain.

Later on, Yoshiaki Koizumi, who had previously helped with the plot of A Link to the Past, was brought into the team. Koizumi was responsible for the main story of Link's Awakening, provided the idea of the island in a dream, and conceived the interactions with the villagers. Link's Awakening was described by series producer Eiji Aonuma as the first Zelda game with a proper plot, which he attributed to Koizumi's romanticism. Tezuka intended the game's world to have a similar feeling to the American television series Twin Peaks, which, like Link's Awakening, features characters in a small town. He suggested that the characters of Link's Awakening be written as "suspicious types", akin to those in Twin Peaks—a theme which carried over into later Zelda titles. Tanabe created these "odd" characters; he was placed in charge of the subevents of the story, and wrote almost all of the character dialog, with the exception of the owl's and the Wind Fish's lines.

Masanao Arimoto and Shigefumi Hinu designed the game's characters, while Yoichi Kotabe served as illustrator. Save for the opening and the ending, all pictures in the game were drawn by Arimoto. Yasahisa Yamamura designed the dungeons, which included the conception of rooms and routes, as well as the placement of enemies. Shigeru Miyamoto, who served as the producer of Link's Awakening, did not provide creative input to the staff members. However, he participated as game tester, and his opinions greatly influenced the latter half of the development.

The music for Link's Awakening was composed by Minako Hamano and Kozue Ishikawa, for whom it was their first game project. Kazumi Totaka was responsible for the sound programming and all sound effects. As with most Zelda games, Link's Awakening includes the recurring overworld music; the Game Boy arrangement of this theme, titled "Field", was created by Koji Kondo and Ishikawa. The staff credits theme, "Yume o Miru Shima e", was co-composed by Kondo, Hamano and Ishikawa; it was later arranged for orchestra by Yuka Tsujiyoko, and performed at the Orchestral Game Music Concert 3 in 1993. Super Smash Bros. Brawl includes a remix of the game's "Tal Tal Heights" theme.

In an interview about the evolution of the Zelda series, Aonuma called Link's Awakening the "quintessential isometric Zelda game". At another time, he stated that, had the game not come after A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time would have been very different. Several elements from Link's Awakening were re-used in later Zelda titles; for example, programmer Morita created a fishing minigame that reappeared in Ocarina of Time, among others. Tanabe implemented a trading sequence; Tezuka compared it to the Japanese Straw Millionaire folktale, in which someone trades up from a piece of straw to something of greater value. This concept also appeared in most sequels.