Link’s Awakening is such a weird and wonderful game, and it’s hard to imagine it any other way. A driving force of the game’s mysterious plot is the Wind Fish’s Egg, which fits in perfectly into the strange land of Koholint Island. It compels the player into a story unlike any other Zelda title before (or indeed after) it.
The concept of the world ending when a large egg breaks on top of a mountain, however, was an idea put forth years before Link’s Awakening.
Oddly enough, this fascinating piece of information surfaced in an interview about a completely different game, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Nintendo Official Magazine asked Retro CEO Michael Kelbaugh and Producer Kensuke Tanabe if they had any ideas that weren’t implemented in the final game. Kelbaugh responded by saying that, in his experience, there was always something left “on the drawing board that you wish you could have gotten in”, but added that “those thoughts inspire future games and ideas that you use on the next game.”
Tanabe followed this with an interesting example. “I worked on the overall concept, storyline and structure of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and there were some ideas that didn’t make it. Out of these ideas, there was one I really wanted to see in a game and we finally decided to use it as one of the basic concepts for the setting of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening a few years later (this was, in fact, that the world ends when a massive egg breaks on top of a mountain).”
I would love to know how much consideration was put into this concept at the time of A Link to the Past’s development. Who knows if the Wind Fish, the Siren Instruments or the maze inside of the egg were planned for A Link to the Past too?
