Somewhere in Milan, a team of Ubisoft developers spent a year trying to turn Ganondorf into a hero. Or at least into the guy you control.
According to a new report, Ubisoft Milan was working on a The Legend of Zelda spinoff before Nintendo passed on the project. If you’ve played Mario + Rabbids, this won’t shock you. The studio already got Nintendo to hand over Mario once. It wanted to see how far that trust stretched.
A spinoff called Goliath
The pitch, per the report, was “an original Zelda spinoff starring a previously unknown protagonist.” Ubisoft Milan called it Goliath, “a name that reflected the scale of what Ubisoft Milan aimed to develop.”
That’s a big swing for the co-developer of a tactics game where rabbits in costumes fight alongside Luigi. And Nintendo didn’t laugh them out of the room. The project got an initial greenlight.
There was a catch. Nintendo wanted the player character to be Ganondorf instead of the original hero Ubisoft had in mind.
Why Ganondorf is the interesting part
Ganondorf matters to The Legend of Zelda as much as Link and Zelda do. But you almost never get to play as him. He’s playable in spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors and in the Super Smash Bros. games, and that’s about it.
So Nintendo’s note wasn’t small. It took Ubisoft’s unknown lead and swapped in the series’ most famous villain. That’s the version I’d have wanted to see.
Ubisoft Milan spent the year building a prototype. Nintendo rejected it in November. “The reasons for [Nintendo’s] decision remain unclear,” the report said. Nobody knows what the prototype looked like, either, or what kind of game it was supposed to be.
Then the whole partnership came apart
The two companies had a good run through the 2010s and early 2020s. It gave us 2017’s crossover RPG Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and its 2022 sequel.
After the Ganondorf project died, Ubisoft Milan reportedly pivoted. Rumors point to the studio chasing other Nintendo IP, like another game with Mario characters or a Star Fox game. (Nintendo announced and released its own new Star Fox game this year, after the character showed up in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. So that door is closed.)
But “conversations between Nintendo and Ubisoft began to break down” in late 2023 and into early 2024. Why exactly is still unclear.
The Milan team got split up. Some developers went to Beyond Good and Evil 2, which just showed surprising signs of life. Another group left to form Day 4 Night, the studio behind the upcoming Bradley the Badger.
Nintendo has killed a Zelda spinoff before
Goliath isn’t the first one to die on the table. Retro Studios, the Metroid Prime developer, once worked on a spinoff starring Sheik about the origins of the Master Sword. One developer on it called it “a hot mess.”
You won’t be playing as Ganondorf in his own game anytime soon. What you will get is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a remake of the Nintendo 64 classic, landing on Nintendo Switch 2 on Nov. 5. Ganondorf is in that one too, still waiting at the top of his tower for Link to show up.
