As you may have gathered if you've been checking out the news stories on our site or following our Twitter feed for the past 24 hours or so, yesterday Neil and I had the great honour of spending an hour or so in the company of the great Eiji Aonuma - the man behind the Zelda series.
He was in London for 48 hours to promote the forthcoming Spirit Tracks release and found some spare time in his schedule to chat to ONM. They say that meeting your heroes is always a bad idea - they're always a bit of a let-down in the flesh. Not so with the man responsible for every Zelda title since Ocarina Of Time though.
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Sporting a distinguished head of silver hair and sculpted goatee, he comes across like a super-cool university English professor - the kind that all the guys want to go out for a beer with after class and all the girls bat their eyelids at from the front row. He was an absolute gent too - immaculately turned out, polite, cheerful, engaging and absolutely fascinating.
Often when you're speaking to game developers and you ask about their future projects you just get a flat out, "No comment. Next question." Even though he clearly didn't want to give too much away about his plans for Link's next Wii adventure, Aonuma answered each of our questions about Zelda Wii as fully and intelligently as he could. Top man.
We could've let him chew our ears off for hours but he was on a tight schedule. However we managed to talk about most of the things on our list - Spirit Tracks, Zelda Wii, the making of Ocarina Of Time, life at Nintendo and the state of the game industry in general. You'll find a few choice quotes in the news stories on the main page but for the real meat of the conversation you'll have to wait until ONM 51 arrives in four weeks time.
I will leave you with one little anecdote to keep you going until then though. Talking about how he spent his lunch breaks, Aonuma had this to say. "Recently I have been spending my lunch with other game directors playing over local connection battle in Spirit Tracks. It is very good to do that in order to facilitate better communications between us. I have been partnering with the director of the Spirit Tracks to fight against the director of the new Wii game and yes, recently we have been winning!"
