Shortly after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, the game’s lead designer, Eiji Aonuma, was tasked with making another game in one year by reusing the assets of their then most acclaimed title. Ocarina had taken three years to make, but its sequel, Majora’s Mask, took one year and came out the other end as one of the most unique in the series and another of the most heralded games in history.

Time constraints — normally the cause for many-a-headache and perpetual stress — in this case happened to inspire something spectacular. Much of that games magic was due to their limited time: the game’s famous repeating three-day cycle was developed because they needed a way to compress development. The character-driven side quests urging you through the small, but dense Termina, grew out of that need also, as did the reused 3D models and characters from Ocarina that afforded the game its alternate-reality/purgatory vibe.

It seems like everything that people love about that game was directly or indirectly a result of their restricted circumstance. Twenty years on, and Majora’s Mask is still one of most different, melancholic and talked-about games in the series. It makes it even better that it was a thoughtful and tonal counterpart to its admittedly more straightforward predecessor — which you could argue was the necessary groundwork for the real masterpiece.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: hot off the success of their surprise hit, Super Smash Bros, Nintendo wanted to capitalize on its success by quickly making another Smash entry in time for the release of their new console, the GameCube. Masahiro Sakurai and his HAL Laboratory had 13 months to pull Super Smash Bros Melee together, and the result is still the most beloved in the series. Sakurai has admitted that it’s the sharpest to this day, and the competitive Smash community would agree.

Nintendo happened to strike gold twice in a span of two years, literally. They proved time constraints could inspire greatness. But all you have to do is look to your television to see how people do it week-in, week-out. Shows like SNL and South Park air the week they’re made, pushing their creators into fervent periods of creativity and imagination that have resulted in some of the most hilarious and innovative comedy on the air — at least, that used to be the case for SNL.

Another constraint that stimulates savvy is cash. Low-budget horror, while far from consistently innovative or great in general, has produced plenty of original and inventive films. It’s been proven time and time again that all you need to be scary is the thought of something hidden in the dark, and that doesn’t cost money — which is great for studios.

One such example is One Cut of the Dead, a Japanese horror-comedy surprise success from 2017. Seemingly a hammy tale of a horror director conjuring the dead to get a real reaction out of his actors, it achieves so much more than that. You should definitely watch it.

It was made for a paltry $25,000, even lower than most low-budget horror. The cast and crew was comprised mostly of director Shinichiro Ueda’s film-school friends, and yet, it’s far better than most horror — low-budget or otherwise. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll also understand how its shoe-string budget directly influenced the narrative. In this case, a group of friends put together a film that’s emotionally affecting, inspiring, and original, all because the filmmakers were up against a wall.

So does this mean that pain and limitation is necessary to produce a good product? It’s hard to ignore that there’s some truth and evidence behind the idea that, sometimes, magic can happen with a little push.

But not everybody is getting that push right. Today’s video games are also developed in a hurry. It’s already well documented that the industry has a damaging addiction and expectation for crunch time and overworked staff. Studio execs want games with more content and prettier graphics, and developers are forced to develop massive games in the same time frame as Ocarina, which is comparatively tiny to today’s standards. If it’s not finished by launch, release a day-one patch worth 15 GB. Bada-bing, bada-boom. The focus sometimes seems to be more on profit rather than creating an original experience.

It would be rosy to think Nintendo weren’t also after profit — or other vilified goals — with Majora’s Mask, too. They wanted to capitalize on the game’s success quickly before the Nintendo 64 was officially obsolete. But in defence of Shigaru Miyamoto, he reportedly was asking Aonuma to produce what would have been the Master Quest version of Ocarina in a year. Aonuma convinced Miyamoto to let him make something new, under the condition that it would release at the same time as the proposed Ocarina update.

Obviously, the best work is often made with ample time. Artwork, music, almost all of science, or even entire companies require dedication and commitment over time. Nintendo’s latest and most recent Zelda game to be up for GOAT (Greatest of All Time), was in varying degrees of development for six years. The case remains that something extremely valuable happens under a crunch. But if it was so easy to replicate that process, it’d be commonplace. So then, what is the special sauce behind it all?

Part of it, I think has to do with environment and focus. An environment that fosters honest creativity and ideas over flash or content is more likely to create something original and new. Like a group of your friends from film school.

While they don’t often make (real) games anymore, Valve always caught as much wind for their non-existent corporate structure as their ground-breaking games. They say in their employee handbook, “We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish. That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager.”

At Nintendo, which does have a more traditional structure, their mantra with a new game is to develop an entirely new mechanic. “People always ask us whether we take risks on purpose. But to us, we don’t really take risks — we just keep trying new things,” Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s GM of development, said in a Guardian article. “The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to make people happy. The result is that we come up with things other people have not done.”

It’s a modest way of putting it, but just look at their consoles over the years. While PlayStation and Xbox continued pushing different variations of the same rectangle with improved hardware, Nintendo introduced integrated motion control as well as stylus screens, and have played with different levels of portability for years.

Creative Development

Creative genius, or whatever you want to call it, is dependent on the groundwork you lay before it. A proper foundation of planning, researching or designing is key.

In the case of both Majora’s Mask and Melee, their success had to do with the foundation before them. Ocarina was a prototype of Nintendo’s 3D scope and scale, much in the same way Super Mario 64 was. Super Smash Bros was a side-project, an experiment with fighting games amidst the craze of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. A photographer with a brand new camera isn’t going to take her first photos of Everest. She’s going to capture her dog in the living room.

Ultimately, the message here is clear: Japan is obviously the king of entertainment, all hail Japan! But no. The country certainly has something figured out in achieving the right kind of substance in their creative efforts.

I think, though, that innovation is difficult to obtain in true form. Some go searching for it, and don’t find it, while others find it by accident. But there seems to be harbingers for it, like the right environment and foundation. My hope is that more developers and other creative people recognize the right ways to foster that, because it’s safe to say we really enjoy the results.