Nintendo Power Artist “Hadn’t Actually Played Any Zelda Games” Before Creating His Take On Hyrule

The work of legendary Japanese artist Katsuya Terada can be seen all over game history. This is the man who designed the cover art for the Super Famicom’s Prince Of Persia and the Sega Saturn’s Virtua Fighter Remix, who worked with Nintendo on game guides for Dragon Warrior and The Legend of Zelda, and who created those iconic Link’s Awakening and A Link to the Past illustrations for Nintendo Power magazine.

It’s quite the portfolio, and one that you might assume came from a young artist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the source material. However, as reported by our sister site Time Extension in a recent interview, Terada-san “wasn’t what you’d call an avid gamer” and hadn’t accompanied Link on any Hylian adventures before starting on his now-iconic sketches.

“I hadn’t actually played any Zelda games,” Terada-san told Time Extension, “However, I was already familiar with the worldview of the game from Japanese game magazines at the time”.

Despite not having played a Zelda game himself, the artist confessed that Nintendo was pretty relaxed about presentations of Link and of Hyrule, which meant he “could basically do whatever I saw fit with my work on Nintendo Power. I remember being free to draw what I wanted.” How times have changed, eh? Heck, Terada-san even said that the lower resolution of the Famicom games at the time resulted in “much more room to exercise my imagination”.

Freedom aside, the artist was aware that his job was to translate the gameplay into something a bit more realistic, so he “made sure not to deviate too much from the original visuals” — no going off-piste and doing something rash like, we don’t know, giving Link pink hair or anything, then… *ahem*.

Time Extension followed the above Zelda discussion by asking Terada-san if there were any other Nintendo characters that he’d like to one day tackle in his own style. “Oh! I liked Metroid a lot,” the artist responded, “so it might be nice to draw something from that if I got the opportunity to do so for work”.

We’re practically salivating over the thought of seeing Maridia, Brinstar, Norfair and the like realistically rendered in the same style found above. Sure, Nintendo Power might not be around to publish it these days, but a new Metroid game is always going to need new promotional art *cough* Prime 4 *cough*.

Be sure to head over to Time Extension to read the full chat with Katsuya Terada, where he talks about his artistic inspirations, designing the Prince of Persia cover and how a job offer from SEGA resulted in him landing a working arcade machine in his house.