Years later, the director of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was asked about how the game began. Takashi Tezuka answered in plain words: 'We didn't really have permission to do it necessarily.' The game came out for the Game Boy in Japan on June 6, 1993. Today it is counted among the best-loved Zelda games.
Two years earlier, in 1991, Nintendo had released A Link to the Past for the Super Famicom. Tezuka was the director of that one. It was the kind of project he described like this: 'With Zelda games we usually plan them out, every detail is considered.' A big console game, a big team, a plan for every room.
Link's Awakening started differently. 'With Link's Awakening, we were working on that after our other work was done,' Tezuka said. He called the group 'kind of like a club of people who loved Zelda and got together to make it.' The idea came from the main programmer, who, in Tezuka's words, 'wanted to challenge himself to create a Zelda experience on a portable system.'
Nobody had asked for it. 'We just had a passion to try and do something interesting,' Tezuka said. 'We didn't really have permission to do it necessarily.' So the club kept building. Once the game reached a stage the team wanted to show, 'then we took it to the company and got permission to continue developing it.' He summed up the first months in one line: 'But initially it was just a little pet project of ours.'
Tezuka thinks that start left marks on the game. 'Because we started it that way – just making a game we wanted to make – it may defy Zelda conventions,' he said. 'It might have interesting characters and situations we may not have had otherwise.' In an Iwata Asks interview he had even described the feeling of the work as making a parody of a Zelda game. When he was asked about that word later, he answered: 'When we say parody, I'm not sure where that word comes from because maybe there are translation issues.'
One of the things the club borrowed came from television. In the Iwata Asks interview about Spirit Tracks, Tezuka said he had talked about shaping Link's Awakening 'with a feel that's somewhat like Twin Peaks. At the time, Twin Peaks was rather popular. The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town.' The game is set on one island, Koholint, with a handful of residents. At the end, Link wakes the Wind Fish, and the island and everyone on it disappear.
The size of the game was also something Tezuka chose. 'I wanted to make something that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics,' he said. A Game Boy has a small gray screen and a few buttons. A small game had to be a complete one.
The same director would spend the following three decades working on Mario, Yoshi and Animal Crossing, usually from behind other people's names. Link's Awakening is one of the few places where his own words say how a game began: a group of people who loved Zelda, a working day that had already ended, and a programmer who wanted to see if it could be done. Is there something you would start tonight if nobody had asked you to, and nobody had yet said you could?