Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto Defends Remakes Amid Ocarina Of Time Reveal

Nintendo Legend Shigeru Miyamoto Says Remakes Make Classics "More Playable" For Young People Published Jul 23, 2026, 6:20 AM EDT James Lucas is an Executive Editor at TheGamer who has worked in professional journalism since 2018. A Newcastle University graduate with a degree in Journalism, Media, and Culture, they have written hundreds of guides, news stories, and original reports, with bylines in IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, sourcing interviews with studio heads, legendary industry figures, prominent actors, and more. An expert on FPS games, Soulslikes, RPGs, and survival horror, James has intimate knowledge of a wide variety of titles, providing in-depth coverage and exclusive profiles. Some of the games they have extensively covered include: Half-Life 3, Counter-Strike, Elden Ring, and Fallout. They pride themselves on their consistently thorough research, leveraging nearly a decade of industry experience. You can reach them at James.t@thegamer.com Sign in to your TheGamer account Remakes are practically a motherlode cheat for studios, but they’re still divisive. Especially when the originals aren’t available on current-gen platforms, or when developers decide to spend resources updating ten-year-old titles with marginally better graphics. Cough, The Last of Us, cough. However, Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto is a staunch advocate for remakes, suggesting that they help shape future projects and bring classic titles to a whole new generation of gamers. “Some people might say there are a lot of remakes, but after five years, a lot of people have outgrown games and stopped playing them,” Miyamoto said in an interview with Famitsu. “Young people today don’t have the opportunity to play games from ten years ago, so remaking them to be more playable and releasing them again is a good way to meet the demand. Letting people know the original games also leads to future developments, so we’ve been actively pursuing that recently.” This philosophy doesn’t always hold true. Just look at the Dead Space remake, which underperformed by EA’s metrics, leading the series to be shelved. But typically, remakes are used to supplement releases and onboard new developers. Resident Evil is a prime example, as the remakes not only retold the original stories for a new audience, but directly laid the groundwork for Requiem and its 30th anniversary celebrations. Making The Highest-Rated Game Of All-Time "More Playable": Is It Even Possible? Over the last decade, Nintendo has launched remakes of Super Mario RPG, Link’s Awakening, and Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to follow suit later this year. It’s one of the boldest remakes in the industry’s history, as the original boasts an impressive Metacritic score of 99 — cementing it as the highest-rated game of all-time. Making it “more playable” won't be easy. Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see how Nintendo remaking Ocarina of Time influences the future of the series in a post-Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom world. As Miyamoto said, returning to the classics “leads to future developments." So, perhaps we'll see more classic Zelda games in the vein of Ocarina of Time following the remake, just like how the Link’s Awakening remake led to Echoes of Wisdom. Systems Released 2026 Developer(s) Nintendo Publisher(s) Nintendo Franchise The Legend of Zelda Number of Players Single-player Genre(s) RPG, Action, Adventure