Ubisoft Milan reportedly pitched a Zelda game to Nintendo that would have taken place in a new universe with a totally different protagonist, but the plan fell through, leading to one of the biggest what-ifs in gaming history.

Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson says the project was internally titled Goliath, so as to appropriately echo the size and scale of what Ubisoft Milan hoped to achieve with the game. It was an ambitious plan, and one that former Ubisoft developer Gian Marco Zanna described as a “new big bang in the video game universe.”

This description, while dramatic, is accurate; Ubisoft Milan’s Zelda game would have been drastically different from anything we’ve seen from the series thus far. Rather than following Link’s adventures in the wilds of Hyrule, it would have been a spin-off title in the broader Zelda universe featuring a brand-new, “never-before-seen character.”

However, during its early concept phase, Nintendo reportedly asked that this protagonist be changed to the franchise’s ultimate big bad: Ganondorf. This would have been the first time Ganondorf was the central, playable character in a Zelda game, and on paper, it sounds like a fantastic idea… but unfortunately, it didn’t end up coming to fruition.

Sources told Henderson that Ubisoft Milan was given a deadline of late 2023 to come up with a prototype for this Ganondorf game, but Nintendo reportedly rejected their proposal when the time came, for reasons that have not been made clear.

Ubisoft Milan was behind the highly-lauded Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, which IGN scored a sparkling nine out of 10 .

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