One More Game That We'll Never Play - Ubisoft's Zelda: Wind Waker
"I can see this girl's dreams... Oceans... Oceans... Oceans... Oceans... Oceans as far as the eye can see."
-Ganondorf (The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker)
Ubisoft made The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker? This guy must be high haha, no. It's true.
Apparently Ubisoft Milan's creative director Davide Soliani, and the graphic artist Fabio Pagetti, had this little big dream of making a Zelda: Wind Waker game, officially.
It was revealed by Davide Soliani on his tweet that back in 2003 he and the artist created a pitch for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on Game Boy Advance, and almost... just almost--convinced their managing director to grant them permission to create a demo for GBA. Here's how it look like:
There have been quite a number of promising looking games that never made it to be released in the end, and sadly this Wind Waker port for GBA is among them as Ubisoft killed the project before Navi even got to tell them to listen up and give it a try.
If The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is what come to your mind after you see that screenshot, yes it has a very reminiscent look of The Minish Cap, but that just about it. What I'm trying to say is Capcom didn't stole this idea and make The Minish Cap from it as some people assume, Soliani stated it himself.
You were dreamers, but sadly only you.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was one of those games that I heard many people thought it was going to be a bad one, but turned out this cartoony cel shading Link adventure was a great one. It's a shame that this ended up as a cancelled happiness. Who knows if Nintendo would have agreed to work with them in this project like they approved the Mario + Rabbid Kingdom Battle?
It would have been great to see this on GBA back then, but nowadays, if there's a tiny tiny chance they (Ubisoft Milan and/or Nintendo) would consider making this now that it's revealed, maybe not for GBA but for Nintendo 3DS or Nintendo Switch? Just saying..
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Images sources: Zelda Wiki, Davide Soliani
At least we got a pretty sweet version on DS.
Neat post.
I’ve never heard of this before! Wind Waker on the GameCube was phenomenal to me personally, and that GBA version doesn’t like too bad. I can’t believe Ubisoft were the ones behind it too.
Thanks for sharing all this!
You're welcome, I share everything I find interesting. Glad you liked it too.
I know, it doesn't look so bad, right? Even for today's standard, in my opinion. Because we have many great pixel art games available nowadays.
Well especially since I felt like 95% of the games on GBA that weren’t Pokémon were not the greatest really... so many poorly done games and this one looks to push the graphics of that system to the max.
Nice post love it keep posting
This is awesome. I was not aware that anyone was working on a GBA port of Wind Waker. Someone missed a grand opportunity here, not just us fans.
Indeed, and for reasons we don't know that probably was worth the trouble if they decided to made this happen. Not many people was aware of this until Soliani posted it about a week ago. I can't imagine the itch/pain of keeping that dead dream for himself all this time.. lol
I am sure it was eating him up a bit though he probably was able to ignore it by staying busy with other projects and such.
Stuff like this happens all the time though. I wrote about another developer, can't remember off hand which, that worked on porting Super Mario Bros 3 to PC in an effort to pitch it to Nintendo. It was a pretty faithful port for what they got done of it.
Gaming history is so interesting. To think of how things might have been had games been made...