When it comes to The Legend of Zelda, there are few peers. It has a decades-long pedigree of quality, and there's a reason why we call many similar games "Zelda-likes."
Those come and go, but not all of them see the light of day, especially if they can't get funding. In this case, a legendary creator was set to produce a "large, open-world type RPG" that would have come out directly after Zelda, but, according to an interview with Ars Technica, it was canceled.
Famed Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert opened up recently about his Zelda-like project, which he spent roughly "a year tinkering with," even going so far as to hire an artist to start getting it off the ground and in front of publishers. Sadly, not many publishers wanted to finance a top-down action-RPG, with Gilbert noting that the publisher deals were "horrible."
Gilbert explains:
"Doing a pixelated old-school Zelda thing isn’t the big, hot item, so publishers look at us, and they didn’t look at it as ‘we’re gonna make $100 million and it’s worth investing in. The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were...
