At this point, Eiji Aonuma’s name is just as synonymous with The Legend of Zelda as Shigeru Miyamoto – after all, he’s now led the series just as long as the man who created it. But early in his tenure with the series, Aonuma actually wanted to move on to something entirely different. Until, that is, Miyamoto convinced him that making Zelda games was his inescapable fate.
“I had worked on three different Legends Of Zelda,” Aonuma said in the June 2005 issue of Edge Magazine. Aonuma initially served as one of many directors on Ocarina of Time, and would take on more direct leadership roles for Majora’s Mask and The Wind Waker.
“I thought I had done almost everything I could,” he said. “So I told Mr Miyamoto: ‘Look, I have already done that and I have already done this, there seems to be few more things that I could do with Zelda. So can I graduate from it?’ And Mr. Miyamoto said: ‘OK!’ So I took his word, but the next assignment he gave me was: ‘You are going to take care of this new Zelda game.’ I said: ‘Wait a minute! I thought that you gave me permission to work on some other projects.'”
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Aonuma recalled that Miyamoto told him he’d “be the producer, not the director, this time, and I really want you to take some distance away from the actual designing of the game but see things differently, so that you can see the whole process from a much higher-up position.”
That new Zelda would, of course, be Twilight Princess, which would be released for Wii and GameCube in 2006. Aonuma was ultimately still credited as director for this game, but it was nonetheless here that the guard truly changed.
“The fact of the matter is, I could not think about any concrete idea other than Zelda,” Aonuma explained. Even the first title he directed, a Japan-only Super NES game called Marvelous, “shared some essence with Zelda,” as he put it. “So, yeah, somewhere in my mind I really want to take some distance away from it, but the fact of the matter is I am more and more involved in The Legend Of Zelda, and sometimes I think it is a kind of… fate for me, so I should give up escaping from that!”
Clearly, Aonuma has very much given up on any thought of escaping from Zelda. He’s served as producer on every major entry in the series since Phantom Hourglass in 2007, and is effectively now the face of the franchise. I’d offer up a Majora’s Mask quote here, but I’m not sure leading one of the most beloved video game series of all time is such a terrible fate to be met with.
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