Eiji Aonuma designed marionettes before overseeing the wildly popular video game series Zelda. Its latest title, “Tears of the Kingdom,” has now sold 10 million copies.
“I found myself at times wondering, ‘should I be doing this at my age?’” said the 60-year-old Aonuma in an interview earlier this month, after traveling here from his home in Kyoto for a launch event on the eve of the game’s release. “I’m kind of reaching my limit here and I don’t want to push myself too hard.”As games have gotten bigger, production has become longer and more arduous. The weight of expectation from the Zelda legacy can be overbearing.
But in the 1980s, as Nintendo rose in prominence, he admired the artwork of its emerging franchises, including a new game called “Super Mario Bros.” He reached out to a company artist to express his admiration and landed an interview with Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who was impressed with Aonuma’s design work and hiredHis first job was designing character icons, known as sprites, for 1991’s “NES Open Tournament Golf.
After the success of “Ocarina,” Miyamoto passed on stewardship of the series to Aonuma. The follow-up, “Majora’s Mask” in 2000, used a “Groundhog Day”-style feature, asking players to keep reliving three days to solve all of its puzzles. “Wind Waker” in 2002 bucked industry trends toward higher-fidelity graphics that chase realism, instead showcasing a cartoonlike art style, in keeping with Aonuma’s insistence that Zelda games remain timeless.
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