Dear Reader:
LizardCube dev on revamping Wonder Boy, wanting to remake Zelda
UPDATE - A portion of this interview has been removed due to request.
A portion of a USGamer interview with LizardCube's Omar Cornut...
On revamping Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap for modern consoles
"Wonder Boy was part of me knowingly saying, 'I'm going to make this because it's my comfort zone, I know the Master System technology.' It was a mixture of aligning my interests: Sega Master System and making games. It was a game I was fantasizing about for fifteen years. I always wanted to make something with the series.
It was also sort of a cop-out in a sense that I wanted to start my company, but I knew that designing a new game is so terrifyingly hard. I was happy to make something that seemed easy. It's always ten times harder than you realize, but making the game was still comparatively easy. I've been wanting to do it for so long that it was easier to scratch that off my list.
Improving an emulated game is pretty hard and I don't think people have done it a lot. That was a more interesting problem than just converting all of the code. I thought it was more interesting to build this thing where I could improve an emulated game. I don't think that's been done before. It sort of emulation-based, but it's hybrid and weird. The game is mixture of hacking the original ROM and hacking the emulator."
On a desire to remake the original Legend of Zelda
"Part of me wants to make new games. The creative me is sort of ashamed to be making remasters. The technical me finds the process very interesting. If we were to make another remake, we need to find something that first we love enough and then this game has to be something we can get the license for. I wouldn't mind remaking The Legend of Zelda, but Nintendo is never going to let us."