Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom physics lead knew the game was going to be "great" when he saw its first prototype, but then reality hit: "Are we really doing this? Development is going to be chaos"

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's lead physics programmer knew the open-world RPG would be a banger when he saw its very first prototype, and then the dread of actually putting the game together hit him.

Speaking at GDC this year, lead physics programmer Takahiro Takayama joins technical director Takuhiro Dohta and lead sound engineer Junya Osada in giving a one-hour talk about how the Nintendo gem was put together. 

It's Takayama's opener, though, that really hammers home the dread of thinking an idea is cool before realizing you've actually got to make it a reality. 

"When I first saw the prototype, I knew that this was going to be a great game," he says. "But I also knew this was going to be very, very difficult. Are we really doing this? Development is going to be chaos. The more I thought, the more I worried. But in life, it's sometimes important to have the courage to push forward." 

A huge appeal of Tears of the Kingdom's predecessor, Breath of the Wild, was that you could go around and do what you want – from trying to complete the game without doing all the suggested content to taking advantage of the physics and world interactivity. Tears of the Kingdom takes all that and adds the ability to fuse items together to push that sense of sandbox experimentation further. 

It's a cool idea that was clearly a nightmare for Takayama, who had to make the physics of the game work. For one, some items in the game are animation-driven rather than physics-driven. That's normally fine, but when you give players the Ultrahand tool that lets you slap things together, you get "chaos" that causes "daily problems." 

Takayama's design headaches proved to be our gains, though. Tears of the Kingdom launched to critical acclaim, and now the man can rest. To quote the gentleman himself, "In life, it's sometimes important to have the courage to push forward." 

After 250 hours, a Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player lost an 82% complete save and declared, "I'm free," until he tragically realized he could get it back.