The 2004 E3 was a bit of a turning point for the Zelda franchise. It was also a very important show for Nintendo as it was the year that the Nintendo DS was introduced. As I mentioned earlier with connectivity, we learned that even if we come up with an innovated type of gameplay, unless we can convey that experience clearly, people will not be interested in it. The DS, with its direct control, touch-screen operation, and two screens, immediately intrigued people. They were asking, “What’s that? What does it do?" It was clear from your response that developers were also excited about the possibilities with this new hardware. The change in the gaming environment that brought about the creation of the DS hardware was not clearly evident at the time of the 2004 show.

I was so deeply involved with the realistic Zelda project, that I still hadn’t realized how important it was for a DS Zelda to be developed. However, Nintendo was already moving in that direction and Miyamoto felt that it was time for Zelda to move in that direction as well. The team that had developed Four Swords Adventures, had already begun work on DS Zelda. Upon returning from E3, I heard from my staff that the DS was hardware was capable of supporting toon-shading. I immediately asked my staff to implement cel-shading on the DS because I was disappointed that the cel-shaded Zelda was not received as well as I had hoped. In a short amount of time, they were able to show me 2-D Link moving in a 3-D world on the top screen, and on the lower screen, a Link shown on a map that was controlled entirely by touch. I talked about this with a member of my staff the other day, and we dug up the prototype version. Here’s a movie from it:

While I was surprised to see the toon-shaded Link from the GameCube version moving around on the DS screen, the controls were not intuitive. I asked my staff to display the 3-D world on the bottom screen and change it so that players would control Link by touching him directly. The style of playing where the player touches the screen directly, connects perfectly with the gameplay in Zelda, where the player is encouraged to interact with various objects in the environment. When I thought about what the overriding theme of the Zelda DS game that took advantage of that would be, I knew that we had to make it so that standard control would have the player touching Link and his surroundings to interact with them.

At first my staff was bewildered. Once they understood that the traditional controls were replaced by something more direct, new playstyles emerged. Players lock onto enemies and attack them by tapping, draw the path a boomerang would take, and make notes on a map. The stylus made all these interactions possible. Based on this, we were able to create the first major innovation to Zelda’s gameplay in 3-D since the Nintendo 64. In addition, we felt that although past versions of Zelda may have intimidated new uses with their complicated controls, the direct control of the stylus meant that it would be easy to entice new users even in a market experiencing gamer drift. In order to ensure that the game would appeal to seasoned Zelda players as well as new players, we added the online battle feature using Wi-Fi, a first for the Zelda franchise. Direct control functioned well on that level as well, and I will speak more about that later.