 The Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening, should never have existed. Nobody at Nintendo had any plans of making a Zelda game for the Game Boy. While there had been a Zelda game and watch game, the expectation was that the series would remain on Nintendo's bright, colourful home consoles. Yet while nobody at Nintendo was all too interested in a Zelda Game Boy game, one programmer from a neighbouring company was engaged with his own secret project. This is the story of the Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening, and the after-school club that changed a major Nintendo series forever. Work was wrapping up on the Legend of Zelda, a link to the past for the SNES. The game's development had been a little rocky, as the ambitious project had required more and more staff towards the end. Satoru Iwata described its creation and the development of many other Zelda games as an exercise in suffering. In an effort to get a link to the past finished, Nintendo contracted out some of the programming to a different company. SRG Co Ltd develops a range of computer programmes and has an office inside Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters, so they were a perfect choice to help finish up some of the technical elements of the struggling Zelda game. One worker, Kazuhaki Morita, was set to work programming the game, but he quickly found himself wondering what more could be done. There were a lot of ideas for a link to the past that simply couldn't be included in the game due to time constraints and other limitations. For example, the idea of combining bombs and arrows together to make projectile explosives. While most workers felt a sense of relief as a link to the past was finally finished, Kazuhaki wanted to do more. He managed to get hold of a development kit for the Nintendo Game Boy and, just for fun, started experimenting with it in his spare time. Long after everyone else had finished work and gone home, Kazuhaki would tinker with the development kit. His goal was to see if he could port a link to the past, or at least, elements of the game onto the Game Boy. This little hobby project began to draw attention from some of his peers. A few other developers joined Kazuhaki in what they later called the After School Club, as they worked to make their own unofficial Zelda fan game. The project was kept hidden from Nintendo's higher-ups for quite some time. Shigeru Miyamoto, who had been heavily involved with every aspect of a link to the past, had moved on to other projects, so he didn't pay that much attention to what the developers were doing for fun. Because the project was more of a fan game than something more serious, the After School Club began throwing in silly ideas from other Nintendo games. Why shouldn't Mario or Luigi appear in the game, or Yoshi, or even Kirby? The team would eventually go on to describe their Game Boy project as a parody of a real Zelda title. They relished the freedom of making something that wasn't tied down by corporate ideas of what a game should and shouldn't include. Ideas like letting the player take a chain chomp came from this experimentation. Why was it included in the game? Because it was funny. Where most Zelda games felt like a chore by midway through development, this game was only becoming more enjoyable, and many Nintendo employees wanted in on the fun. Eventually, the team revealed their fan game to their bosses, who gave them permission to keep working on it with plans to give it an official release. To aid with this, they were given additional resources in the form of a second Game Boy developer kit. Several new additions to the team suggested that Link's Awakening feature a more prominent narrative than had been present in previous Zelda games. Yoshiaki Koizumi had come up with some law for Hyrule when creating the game's instruction booklet. Because of this, his friends encouraged him to join their After School Club to add a story to their game. Takashi Tezuka, who had joined a link to the past partway through its development, was heavily inspired by the popular television show Twin Peaks. He wanted to make a surreal, dreamlike game, set in a small town populated by what he called suspicious characters, with bolder personalities than their counterparts in the previous Zelda games. These elements would carry forward into all future Zelda games, becoming some of the defining traits of the series. According to I.G. Ornuma, who would later become the overseer for all Zelda titles, I'm certain it was an important element in the series making a breakthrough. If we had proceeded from the Legend of Zelda, a link to the past, straight into the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, without the Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening in between, the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time would have been different. Link's Awakening ended up being a tight, enjoyable Zelda game that redefined what the series would be going forward. When the game was finished, rather than feeling burned out or tired by making two Zelda games back to back, its chief developers would remember it fondly, relishing the chance they'd had to make a game for fun, out of a genuine passion, rather than out of corporate mandate. Almost, Satoru Iwata would later suggest, as if they had awakened from a dream. The moral of the story is, have fun. Experiment. Try a new hobby. Do something different and let yourself relax. Kazawaki Morita began making Link's Awakening out of a genuine passion. The game developed as a quirky, offbeat title because he was having fun without worrying about what would be profitable to his company. Yes, Link's Awakening went on to become a successful commercial project, but that's not really what matters. What's important is that the after-school club were able to blow off steam, mess around, and make something they could be proud of that incorporated their interests. Whether for an afternoon or a year, why not try a similar project yourself? It'll do you the world of good.