Nintendo may have its name on the box, but the new The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is starting to look like one of the industry’s most elaborate group projects.
Bandai Namco Studios has revealed that it produced part of the remake’s visual assets and artwork under contract. Its work covered characters, terrain, animation, cutscenes, and user-interface elements—an unusually broad list for a company being introduced as development support after the game is already on shelves.
That would be notable on its own. It is more interesting because Bandai Namco is only the latest outside name attached to this remake.
Nintendo Assembled Quite a Team
Monolith Soft previously confirmed that it contributed to game design, programming, and graphics. The studio is best known for the Xenoblade Chronicles series, but it has a long history of supporting Nintendo’s biggest productions, including earlier Zelda games.
Bandai Namco’s involvement adds another major Nintendo partner to the credits. The studio has worked on projects including Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, making it one of the companies Nintendo regularly trusts with both valuable characters and technically demanding work.
The credits also point to support from several Nintendo-affiliated teams. The remake was led by Nintendo, but its scale clearly stretched well beyond a single internal group. That makes sense when you look at what changed: rebuilt environments and character models, newly produced animation, voiced cinematics, a modernized interface, and additional movement options all had to coexist with a game whose rhythms were established nearly three decades ago.
There is something fitting about so many studios rebuilding Ocarina of Time. The original became a blueprint that developers across the industry spent years studying. Its remake has now drawn on expertise from across that same industry—even if Nintendo is only letting us discover the full guest list one company at a time.
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