I thought I knew everything worth knowing about Zelda after being a fan for more or less my whole life. I know why Princess Zelda got her name, and I’d like to think that I understand what Mr. Miyamoto means when he mentions miniature gardens in his interviews. But recently, I came across something I’ve never heard anyone discussed about, not even here on the ZU forums where theorists and super fans of the games can be found. It made me feel a little bit obsessed, and I started digging for more information just for fun, not expecting to find anything remarkable. But the more I started to snoop around, it truly started to feel like I was onto something big.
You might have heard of Josef Fares, founder of the Swedish game studio, Hazelight, and also the guy who cussed out the Oscars live at the Game Awards in 2017. He’s also a big fan of Nintendo and the Zelda series. A few weeks ago, he was interviewed on Swedish television and I happened to have the TV on, so I watched and listened. One of the questions asked by the host was what his most precious item was, to which he replied, his family. When pressured a little further (because we all want to know what cool things important people own) he paused for a moment before mentioning a book he had come across. This book was supposedly written by a former Nintendo staff in the early 2000’s, but without an ISBN. “It’s really cool” he concluded, and I was inclined to believe him because up to this moment, I had never heard of it before.
Searching for a book with an ISBN isn’t easy, especially when I didn’t even have an author or title to go by. I used various word combinations for different search engines, not really hoping to find anything, as I was simply feeling curious and bored. After a few unsuccesful searches, it occurred to me that maybe the book was in Japanese, and not in English as I had assumed, so I used my extremely basic knowledge of the language and gave it another go.
After days of lazy detective work, I came across a post by an anonymous user on an old Japanese webforum who had found a copy of a small book somewhere in a store in Tokyo’s Akihabara. The user described how the author asked for secrecy in the book’s introduction, that Nintendo could never know about it or its contents or else they would be in trouble for not respecting the signed NDA. Unfortunately, the thread became locked shortly after, and I was unable to acquire any more detail. But I finally had a title and author and could continue my search.
While I won’t share the name of the author, I can share the title:「任天堂は世界的に有名」, roughly translates into “Secrets from working at Nintendo”. With this information, it didn’t take long for me to find that another copy had been sold on eBay in 2005 for $990, and this is where I hit the jackpot. The seller’s description indicated that only five copies of the book existed, and they sadly had to part with this specific one to be able to afford the newly released The Minish Cap. Luckily for me, some of the pictures they had uploaded still existed for me to see.
With the help of a translation app on my phone, I immediately translated one of the pages. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read it.
According to this classified document, the sound effect for defeating Bowser from the first Super Mario was cleverly tweaked to sound like a Cucco in A Link to the Past. Additionally, Ocarina of Time was originally slated to become the last Zelda game ever. And the split timeline created a much bigger problem than developers imagined, and they couldn’t figure out how to solve it for what seemed like an eternity.
What surprised me the most was that Homer from The Simpsons appeared to be the biggest inspiration behind Tingle’s magical catchphrase “Kooloo-Limpah!”. Tingle was designed to be an iconic figure and Homer, with his famous “D’oh!”, had become so recognizable around the world that the designers at Nintendo realized that a comical catchphrase was something the little fairy man desperately needed. An illustration seemed to have helped them brainstorm this idea.
While I highly doubt I’ll ever get to see this book in real life, I’m really happy I took the time to search for it. Now we all know of its existance! I really wish someone who owns a copy will share more of the secrets inside, but I won’t keep my hopes up. It’s almost as if it’s too good to be true.
