At One Point, Nintendo Wanted Ubisoft To Make A Ganondorf Game

Despite the name of the Legend of Zelda series, Link has mostly been the star and focus. Occasionally, that has changed: Tingle was given a spinoff series that was mostly released in Japan and Europe, while Zelda herself finally got a game of her own in Echoes of Wisdom. In both cases, gameplay was divergent from the main series; Zelda’s game emphasized puzzle solving and ingenuity over attacking and battling. You might think the one Zelda character who will never get a game is Ganon, known as Ganondorf in human form, as he’s the bad guy.

Turns out Nintendo considered it once. The website insidergaming.com managed to gather testimony from several former employees of French video game studio Ubisoft, who all confirmed that at one point, they were told by Nintendo to put together a prototype for a Ganondorf game.

Originally, the protagonist was up in the air: Nintendo just wanted a new spinoff related to the Zelda universe and told Ubisoft to go nuts. The team cooked up a brand new protagonist that hadn’t appeared in any game before. No public details were shared about this new character, but after seeing it, Nintendo told Ubisoft to substitute the character for Ganondorf. After this was done, they OKd production of a prototype with the goal of presenting it to Nintendo high-ups by late 2023.

As similar stories have shown, it’s difficult for a third party to get full approval to make a Nintendo game. Big N rejected the Ganon-game prototype, and it is unknown why, nor is it known why they wanted the evil tyrant to get his own game in the first place.

So far, the only Nintendo-Ubisoft collaboration that has made it to store shelves are the two Mario/Rabbids strategy games for Switch.