While Link’s Awakening is the Game Boy title most fans would rank highest among the best Zelda games ever made, the Oracle games aren’t far behind. Made by Capcom’s Flagship team under Nintendo’s supervision, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages had a famously troubled development, but it’s a wonder it got made at all given the contentious way the project had begun.
The partnership between Capcom and Nintendo was the brainchild of Yoshiki Okamoto, who had produced classics like Final Fight and Street Fighter 2 at Capcom. In the late ’90s, he wanted his team to remake the original Legend of Zelda for Game Boy Color, then use those learnings to make a trilogy of original games for the platform.
Of those four games, only two were ultimately released: the Oracle games. All of this information is widely documented on various fan wikis, but a newly translated quote from Okamoto suggests that he was pretty audacious about his plans, and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Even if it meant threatening Shigeru Miyamoto himself.
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“I especially like Zelda [1]. But Nintendo wouldn’t port it to Game Boy Color,” Okamoto said in a 1999 interview with the German magazine Total, which was recently translated by Did You Know Gaming. “So I told Mr. Miyamoto I’d produce it myself… but we couldn’t come to an agreement. So in the end, I threatened him. I said if Nintendo’s not up for it, we’ll release an identical game with different characters and just call it something else.”
I guess Miyamoto has a better sense of humor than Nintendo’s lawyers, because this threat ultimately got the proper bargaining underway. Given how Nintendo typically treats products it thinks are similar to its own, well… I can only imagine the sassy, Palworld-style court drama headlines we’d have been getting back in the day.
Of course, Capcom couldn’t truly make good on its end of the deal. The remake was canned when it hit development issues, so Okamoto’s dream never really came true, and the planned trilogy was cut down to just two games. But Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages turned out to be great games, and Nintendo again collaborated with Capcom on The Minish Cap a short time later, so I suppose it all worked out in the end.
Check out our guide to the best Game Boy Color games of all time.
