The Early Stages of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Nintendo showed a playable 2D Zelda prototype developers used to experiment and to test their ideas.

During this year’s GDC, Nintendo gave audience a behind-the-scenes look at the development of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It appears that developers created a playable 2D Zelda as a way to experiment and to test their ideas.

Look at the 2D prototype below:

As you can see, this is a 2D Zelda, but we used this as a way to experiment. So you can say this is a legitimate prototype of Breath of the Wild. It’s very nostalgic.

Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Game Director

Link burns down tress, use logs for transportation, just like in the final 3D version. You have to admit that this is an amazing way to test your project.

I thought that the quickest way to bring this idea to life and to present this to the rest of the team would be to create this in 2D. So I brought the character data to the technical director, Mr. [Takuhiro Dohta], who will be coming up after this, and asked him to make it.