Ubisoft arbetade på en Zelda-spinoff med Ganon i huvudrollen

"Ubisoft Milan once pitched Nintendo on an original Zelda spinoff starring a previously unknown protagonist, according to sources familiar with the project. Nintendo liked the concept, but asked Ubisoft to replace the character with one of the most recognizable villains in video game history, Ganondorf. In the months after leaving Ubisoft Milan, the Italian gaming publication Multiplayer.it asked Gian Marco Zanna, a near-25-year Ubisoft veteran, why he, Davide Soliani, and several colleagues had decided to leave the company and form their own studio, Day 4 Night.

Zanna made it clear it wasn’t because of a falling-out with Ubisoft. If circumstances had been different, Zanna suggested, they might in fact still be at Ubisoft today. Instead, Zanna suggested that the fate of one project, led by Soliani himself, drove their decision to leave. The entire Milan team rallied behind it, and people familiar with its development believed it could have elevated Ubisoft Milan to one of Ubisoft’s flagship studios. It was a project that the entire team was confident in, and a project so ambitious that, in Zanna’s own words from that interview, “Davide didn’t want to aim for the sun; he wanted to aim for the entire universe; he wanted to create a new big bang in the video game universe.”