Nintendo devs discuss jumping from NES to SNES with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

A portion of a Retro Gamer interview with Nintendo director Takashi Tezuka and Writer Kensuke Tanabe...

“In Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link, we wanted to include sword combat with a variety of different moves into the gameplay, and so decided the project would use a side-scrolling view that made use of our experience from Super Mario games. We made two Zelda games for the NES, both making the most of that hardware. But then with the next Zelda for the SNES, we were able to add even more new things to the gameplay.

When we were starting the project, we experimented to see if it was possible to include a multi-world structure into the game. Our plan was that events in the hub world would have an effect on the other, overlapping worlds, In the end, we decided it would be best for us, the developers, as well as for players to have this as two worlds; one light, one dark. We felt the best way to represent this overlap of light and dark, and to represent the changes between them, was to use the same slanted top-down view used in the original The Legend Of Zelda game.’