Nintendo confirms its in-house Zelda team built the Ocarina of Time remake

Nintendo has confirmed that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 was developed in-house by EPD Production Group No. 3, the team responsible for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The confirmation comes from the first two chapters of Ask the Developer Vol. 24, which Nintendo published on November 2, three days before the game goes on sale.

HokWai Ng directs the remake, his first time leading a Nintendo project. Ng joined the company as a planner in 2006 and later worked on game design for Tears of the Kingdom. Series producer Eiji Aonuma shares producer duties with Hidemaro Fujibayashi, who directed both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Art director Aya Shida previously worked on Pikmin 3, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Tears of the Kingdom, while program director Hiroki Taguchi joins Breath of the Wild. Masato Ohashi, the music lead and one of the sound directors, previously worked on Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the Splatoon 3 Expansion Pass.

Aonuma said the decision to rebuild the game was partly about the people making it. Many of his current collaborators have "only experienced developing the more recent titles," he said. He questioned whether those developers fully grasped what the 1998 game meant to the series and argued that rebuilding it from the ground up would expose them to its structure and development style in a way that could shape future Zelda games. He also cited the series’ 40th anniversary as a factor.

The producer gave the team near free rein to change whatever it felt needed changing and said he was surprised at how little it altered. Aonuma described the appeal of Ocarina of Time as a carefully paced adventure that builds the player’s skills and understanding of the story step by step. Nintendo wanted players accustomed to choosing their own path from the outset in Breath of the Wild to experience that more guided structure. In a separate interview with AFP, Aonuma credited younger staff, some of whom had never played the original, with helping decide how the game should play today.

Nintendo said the first two chapters cover the values carried over from the Nintendo 64 version, the team's focus on preserving the original experience, and the remake's art direction. The second chapter is titled “The visuals may change, but the experience does not.” Chapters three and four are scheduled for November 3.

The interview settles months of speculation over who was building the game. In September, Norwegian retailer Elkjop listed Monolith Soft as the developer on its store page, pointing to the Xenoblade Chronicles studio that has supported EPD on recent Zelda releases. Others expected Grezzo, which developed Ocarina of Time 3D for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 and went on to make Majora's Mask 3D, the 2019 Link's Awakening remake, and 2024’s Echoes of Wisdom.

The original Ocarina of Time, developed by Nintendo EAD, launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1998 as the first Zelda game with 3D graphics. The Switch 2 release is its second full remake, following the 3DS version.