Blast from the Past - Miyamoto shares cut content/ideas from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The following comes from a Famicom Tsuushin interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, which was originally published back in Jan. 1992.

FT: Were there other ideas you had for Link to the Past which had to be cut due to the 8MBit limitation?

Miyamoto: Yeah, a lot! But you can’t just throw every good idea you have into a game. The idea has to connect up with something else in the game, and there needs to be consistency between the ideas. There was a ton more we wanted to do, though!

FT: What kind of ideas did you have?

Miyamoto: One idea was with the lantern: if you used it on a grassy area, it would cause a huge brushfire. If you cut a little circle of grass around you, you could safely stand there in the middle of it!

FT: That sounds like it would be fun. Anything else?

Miyamoto: In swamp areas, you could use a shovel to dig a ditch, and then it you bombed the swamp breakwater it would cause the water to rush into the hole you’d dug. That idea was actually half-complete… if we’d had another 6 months, we might have been able to make it a reality.