'Nintendo Power' returns in the form of an official podcast

Nintendo's decades-spanning magazine Nintendo Power is back after a five-year hiatus, this time in the form of a podcast.

Nintendo debuted the first episode of its new Nintendo Power podcast Wednesday night, featuring the former editor-in-chief of the magazine Chris Slate, who now works at Nintendo of America. Although it doesn't have physical pages, it still manages to capture the insidery excitement that kept Nintendo Power magazine running for nearly 25 years.

In the first hour-long episode, Slate and guests from Nintendo reminisce about Nintendo's busy 2017 and Slate interviews lead developers of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

You can listen to the first episode here, or get it from pretty much any podcast service.

In the interview with Breath of the Wild producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the two developers discuss some of the design decisions that helped make Breath of the Wild one of the greatest games of 2017 (if not of all time), including its cooking mechanics, the characters Link meets, and the shrines and divine beasts that dot the landscape.

One interesting little anecdote that came up was that early on in development, before all of the non-player characters in the game had been designed, the team used stand-ins for all the characters. Those stand-ins were designed after Shigeru Miyamoto, the mastermind behind almost every iconic Nintendo franchise, and Breath of the Wild producer Aonuma.

Near the beginning of the episode, Slate acknowledges that the Nintendo Power podcast doesn't have a specific release schedule or format as they figure out exactly what works and what fans want from the show.