“We tried The Games Factory and then Multimedia Fusion, which are more powerful software to create a game without any programming,” Christopho says. The birth of Solarusįor the growing team’s second project, they decided to branch away from RPG Maker due to the tool’s limitations. “But people loved the tribute to Zelda: A Link to the Past, started to help me improve the game, and soon enough, we were a team that decided to make a second Zelda fangame,” He recalls. “Of course, it was hard to make interesting enemy fights on paper.” “What surprised me the most is that actually, the game I drawn on paper when I was a kid, and then the first RPG Maker version, were really far from official Zelda games,” Christopho remembers. The game was largely a success, though it did suffer from the flaws you might expect from someone’s first independent game project-Christopho cites long, gruelling mazes, poor boss design, and limited four-directional movement. He eventually released Zelda: Mystery of Solarus, his own fangame based on his childhood drawings and designs in 2002. At that time, I did not imagine that it would be possible for this to become a real videogame one day, but I remember having a dream about it.”įast forward to 2000: Christopho at last had computer access, and began creating Zelda games with RPG Maker 2000. I made my brother, my sister, my parents and my friends play it. “I did not have a computer, so all of this was on paper! But there was a world map and various dungeons and mazes.