Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was so secret most Nintendo employees learned of it at E3

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The sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – now known as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – was such a tightly-guarded secret within Nintendo's corridors that the vast majority of employees only found out about the game's existence along with the fans.

Nintendo of America ex-marketing and PR leads Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang (formerly the director of social media marketing and original content, and senior manager of creator relations and original content, respectively) recall that the open-world sequel was perhaps the most top secret project in all of their years working at the company, courtesy of a recent YouTube video.

Ellis says the sequel held a "higher level of security than anything else" he's ever worked on, and "less than 10 people probably at Nintendo of America" knew about the game before its similarly shadowy reveal trailer during the Nintendo Direct at E3 2019 – one that didn't even come with an official title, release window, or gameplay glimpse attached.

"I had to do all of these teams' jobs in secret, and when this [the reveal] happens, feed them this thing and tell them what to do with it," Ellis, one of the few people who did know about the game's existence before its reveal, says. "For example, the social team, who I was overseeing at the time." Ellis didn't usually create social media content for the publisher's various channels or write press releases and whatnot, but in this case, he did because the rest of the team had to remain in the dark.

That also means that for many Nintendo employees, including Yang, their first time finding out about the sequel came when they watched the Direct stream live together. Although Yang had already seen the rest of the presentation in advance, the trailer's appearance at the end came as a complete surprise.

"We popped off," Yang says. "That was the first time I've had a surprise at Nintendo in all of my, at that point, 12 years or something... It was crazy." The duo also remember that it was the first and perhaps only time Nintendo had ever kept a secret from that many staff members so close to a project's reveal.

Before E3's eventual demise, Nintendo would also screen their presentations for the media before they went live for the rest of the world. The version of the Nintendo Direct that the press saw and that Nintendo employees rigorously prepared was missing that final One Last Thing moment.

I can't say I'm entirely surprised, either – Breath of the Wild was the game that ushered in the Nintendo Switch era and it very quickly became one of the most lauded games of all time. For good reason, I might add. It's still one of the best Switch games ever, and funnily enough, also one of the best Switch 2 games so far thanks to some very sweet technical improvements. No surprise that it's follow-up carried so much hype, then.

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