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Miyamoto asked Aonuma to make a Zelda game with Super Mario Maker-like gameplay, which lead to the Chamber Dungeons of Link's Awakening

It's all thanks to Miyamoto
by rawmeatcowboy
21 September 2019
GN Version 5.0

We've heard Eiji Aonuma say countless times that the Chamber Dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on Switch are the whole reason the game was remade. Now we finally have some more details on how things lined up. In an interview with IGN, Aonuma reveals that it was a request from Miyamoto that set the wheels in motion.

"I talk to Mr. Miyamoto regularly about ‘the next Zelda game,’ and one time, he asked me if I could come up with a game that features Super Mario Maker-like gameplay, but for Zelda. We talked about how a game like this for Zelda would have dungeons, but it’s generally quite difficult to devise the logic needed to solve them. So we gave some thought into a more approachable style of play where you have to think about how to arrange parts that already have a solution to create a single dungeon, instead of allowing players to create complex arrangements like in Super Mario Maker 2, and that’s how we created the Chamber Dungeons for this game.

Given that the Chamber Dungeons feature is based on using rooms that already have a solution, we went looking for examples from existing titles, and found that the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening would be the most suitable, because each room is usually the size of a single screen, and seen from a top-down view this makes their layout easy to understand. A critical part of the Chamber Dungeon gameplay is understanding the original dungeons before arranging your own.”

[Link]