Dear Reader:
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening started development without permission
Coming from a Game Informer interview with Director Takashi Tezuka...
“The main programmer wanted to challenge himself to create a Zelda experience on a portable system to see what he could do, and I was into the idea. We just had a passion to try and do something interesting. We didn’t really have permission to do it necessarily. We were just playing around Once we got it to a certain level of creation and completion that we wanted to show, then we took it to the company and got permission to continue developing it, but initially it was just a little pet project of ours. Because we started it that way – just making a game we wanted to make – it may defy Zelda conventions. It might have interesting characters and situations we may not have had otherwise.”