For about a year, a group of developers at Ubisoft Milan tried to make Ganondorf a hero, or at least the character in the player’s hands.
A new report says Ubisoft Milan was building a spinoff of The Legend of Zelda until Nintendo turned the project down. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who has played Mario + Rabbids. Nintendo had already trusted the studio with Mario once, and Ubisoft Milan wanted to find out how far that trust went.
A spinoff called Goliath
According to the report, Ubisoft pitched “an original Zelda spinoff starring a previously unknown protagonist.” The studio named the project Goliath, “a name that reflected the scale of what Ubisoft Milan aimed to develop.”
That’s a lot of ambition from the co-developer of a tactics game where rabbits in costumes fight next to Luigi. Nintendo took it seriously, though, and gave the project an initial greenlight.
There was one condition. Nintendo asked for Ganondorf to be the playable character, replacing the original hero Ubisoft had planned.
Why Ganondorf is the interesting part
Ganondorf is as central to The Legend of Zelda as Link and Zelda are, but players rarely get to control him. He’s playable in spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors and in the Super Smash Bros. games, and nowhere else.
So this was a big change from Nintendo. It dropped Ubisoft’s unknown lead and put the series’ best-known villain in the starring role. Personally, that’s the version I’d have wanted to play.
Ubisoft Milan spent the year on a prototype, and Nintendo rejected it in November. “The reasons for [Nintendo’s] decision remain unclear,” the report said. We also don’t know what the prototype looked like or what kind of game it was meant to be.
Then the whole partnership came apart
Nintendo and Ubisoft worked well together through the 2010s and early 2020s. That partnership produced the 2017 crossover RPG Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and its 2022 sequel.
After the Ganondorf project was cancelled, Ubisoft Milan reportedly moved on to other Nintendo IP. Rumors say the studio pursued another game with Mario characters or a Star Fox game. (That second option is off the table: Nintendo announced and released its own new Star Fox game this year, after the character appeared in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.)
Then, in late 2023 and into early 2024, “conversations between Nintendo and Ubisoft began to break down.” The exact reason still isn’t clear.
The Milan team was broken up. Some developers moved to Beyond Good and Evil 2, which recently showed surprising signs of life. Another group left and formed Day 4 Night, the studio making the upcoming Bradley the Badger.
Nintendo has killed a Zelda spinoff before
Goliath isn’t the first Zelda spinoff to be cancelled. Retro Studios, the developer of Metroid Prime, once worked on a spinoff about the origins of the Master Sword with Sheik in the lead. One developer on that project called it “a hot mess.”
Don’t expect a game starring Ganondorf any time soon. What’s coming instead is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a remake of the Nintendo 64 classic, landing on Nintendo Switch 2 on Nov. 5. Ganondorf appears there too, still waiting at the top of his tower for Link to arrive.