Overview
- Miyamoto’s archival quotes, resurfaced Monday in Retro Gamer’s 40th‑anniversary package, say Zelda 2 was “sort of a failure” and place A Link to the Past as the real follow‑up to the original.
- He said Zelda 2 began as his idea but another team built the game, and he felt it did not improve during development.
- He described Zelda 2 as a side story about what happened to Link after the first game rather than the mainline continuation.
- Looking back to 1994, he recalled building Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda at the same time, which made it hard to finish Mario and then shift those programmers to push Zelda over the line.
- He said Zelda was designed as Nintendo’s answer to text‑heavy RPGs, with exploration driven by the controller, and he chose the Famicom Disk System in Japan to enable saves, name registration, and better sound.