New details about the Zelda Sheik project that was in development at one point at Retro Studios have surfaced. It was reported that the spin-off of Zelda was in early development for three years, but it was an “experiment gone wrong” and was eventually canceled.
The game was revealed through concept art back in 2020. It was codenamed Project X and Sheik. DIdYouKnowGaming released a new report revealing some details about the now-canceled game. The concept art reveals that Retro had been trying to work with new ideas for the Zelda universe. This included things like new races based on Axolotls and clockwork automata. The storyline was supposed to have seen the Sheik of Ocarina of Time’s dark timeline taking part in the events that eventually led to the creation of the Master Sword.
A former programmer at Retro, Paul Tozour, said the following about the project: “I see people, you know, commenting on that concept art on the internet… and being like, ‘Oh my God, Retro was working on a Zelda game, that would have been so awesome,’ and like, I understand that feeling, but what they have to understand is it was not actually a Zelda game. At no point was it really anything like Zelda — it was an experiment gone wrong that happened to be set in the Zelda universe.”
The prototype gameplay reportedly saw Sheik traveling across an overworld before being put into a battle with groups of wolves. Tozour explained that “there were four or five wolves, maybe six, and they just be in their idle state waiting to pounce at you, then they’d jump one-by-one and you’d go ‘whack.’ So that’s literally all it was, just detecting when the player swung the Wii remote. If so, the wolf dies, and if you don’t do it correctly, you take damage.”
It is not clear if Retro Studios ever showed the project to publisher Nintendo. Retro Studios had not seemed to be concerned over the simplicity of the gameplay, but DidYouKnowGaming’s anonymous source suggested that the cancelation could have been a result of senior figures Mark Pacini and Todd Keller leaving Retro to form Armature Studio.
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Zainah Yousef
Zainah Yousef is the author of The Fallen Age Saga and specializes in gaming, social media advice, and reviews. She's been writing all her life and she probably won't stop anytime soon.
