Bill Trinen has posted a new update on the official Nintendo Treehouse blog, giving some insight into cooking in Breath of the Wild. He starts by describing a time when he interpreted for Mr. Aonuma for a presentation called “The Evolution of a Franchise: The Legend of Zelda,” and goes on to mention that in the presentation and subsequent interviews, Mr. Aonuma compared making a Legend of Zelda game to making a stew, and also admitted that he was interested in making a game about cooking. Bill talks about his first time playing Breath of the Wild, and how experimenting with the cooking in the game made him realize that Mr. Aonuma “finally achieved his goal of making a game about cooking.”
The post also contains interesting information about ingredients in the game, along with some concept art for a few different ingredients and dishes. The most interesting part of the article, however, is the story of how crab dishes became a part of the game during the development process.
Nate Bihldorff, the localization manager at Nintendo Treehouse, was play-testing the game and trying out different recipes, when he tossed some crab and spicy peppers into the pot to cook — he discovered that, at the time, crab was used as an ingredient for elixirs, rather than in food dishes. Growing up on the East Coast, Nate had been raised eating crab, and was baffled that it wasn’t a food option. He immediately contacted Breath of the Wild’s director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, and begged him to add crab dishes to the game, explaining that people love to eat crab.
With such a long development time, I’m sure there are plenty of fun stories from the development team like the one above, and we can only hope that more of them are published on the Treehouse blog in the near future.
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Written by Jaxson Tapp
As a lover of gaming and the written word, Jaxson currently fills his time not only with playing games, but also writing about them. Ready for anything, Jaxson’s passion for puzzle games, JRPGs, tough platformers, and whimsical indies helps him bring a well-rounded opinion to Nintendo Wire’s reporting.
