Satoru Iwata finds out all about the making, and remaking, of a classic.

All across Europe today gamers will be reliving one of the biggest games to ever be released as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is made available on the 3DS. The title, that we gave a favourable review to, has been one of the most highly anticipated 3DS titles and is the focus of the newest edition of Iwata Asks.

Nintendo's president spoke to Toshio Iwawaki, Eiji Aonuma, Takumi Kawagoe, Yoshiaki Koizumi and Toru Osawa, all key staff members of either the original Ocarina of Time or the 3DS remake, about both the N64 classic and the just-released 3DS version. The full discussion is very extensive and worth a read.

During the discussion many interesting facts about the classic were revealed. For instance originally Ocarina of Time was only going to feature adult Link, Z-targeting originated due to a ninja stage show, development started with only 3 people and Link has long underwear to counteract his cool earring.

Producer Eiji Aonuma described the making of Ocarina of Time as "a mess right up to the end", although it all obviously paid off. The game changed quite a lot during its development, as Zelda titles often do. As mentioned earlier originally the game just featured adult Link so when they decided to include young Link this introduced a host of new problems. Several elements that Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to see included in Ocarina of Time were, such as archery, while others such as horse battles were introduced in later games.

The discussion also reveals some interesting insights into other characters and what role they ended up playing. While many gamers find Navi can be irksome the design of Navi actually played a large role in the storyline, colour schemes and hint system featured in Ocarina of Time. The developers wanted to indicate the enemies you were fighting but didn't want just a plain triangle. This led to to Fairy Navigation System, later shorted to 'Navi', itself a shortening of 'Navigation'. It was also revealed that Epona is the goddess of horses and fertility in Celtic mythology and the idea to include the beloved horse was originally conceived during development of Super Mario 64.

The discussion contains many more interesting facts about the history and making of the title and is well worth a read if you can tear yourself away from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.