Miyamoto Recruited Aonuma After SNES Marvelous

For Nintendo fans in the UK, this is a tidy bit of Zelda history, a 2005 EDGE interview with Eiji Aonuma says Shigeru Miyamoto personally recruited him to the The Legend of Zelda team after seeing his Super Famicom game, Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima.

The detail was reported by My Nintendo News from the archived EDGE interview. Aonuma said he had wanted to put “some essence of Zelda” into Marvelous, a game that was noted for its similarities to Nintendo’s adventure series.

Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima was released in 1996 for the Super Famicom in Japan. It was a top-down adventure game with puzzle-solving, exploration, and a visual style that drew comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. For readers who want the hardware context, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the western name for the console family.

Aonuma’s recollection is direct, after Marvelous was released, Miyamoto approached him and asked whether he would be interested in working on Zelda. Aonuma said yes, and that answer set his career on a new path.

That move turned out to be a major one for the series. Aonuma’s first work on the franchise was dungeon design for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 in 1998. He later directed Majora’s Mask, The Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess, before becoming series producer. His work has helped shape some of the franchise’s biggest changes, including its shift to open-world design.

It is also a reminder that a strong side project can matter. Marvelous was not a blockbuster, but it acted as a calling card that caught Miyamoto’s eye. For more RetroShell coverage of Nintendo and other retro gaming stories, see our News tag.

More RetroShell news keeps the latest retro gaming stories in one place, while the original source remains the archived My Nintendo News report.