No sooner has World of Warcraft creator Blizzard Entertainment responded to a call to memorialize Robin Williams inside the virtual world of the game than a second online petition has emerged, asking Nintendo to create a similar tribute to the late actor and comedian in the next edition of its Legend of Zelda game.
“Robin was an avid player of video games, with a love for all things Nintendo, and a particular love of all things Legend of Zelda,” wrote Nick Schaedel in the Change.org petition, which has over 79,000 signatures at the time of writing. “I would like to suggest that when the [next Zelda release] is localized to English, Nintendo of America and the Treehouse name one of the characters ‘Robin’ in his memory. He won’t get to play it, but he’ll live on forever in a universe he always loved.”
Williams’ love of the Nintendo game series, which launched in 1986 with The Legend of Zelda and has continued through a number of releases since (The most recent of which being 2013’s The Legend of Zelda: Link Between Worlds), is well known, with the actor having even featured in commercials for the franchise in 2011 with his daughter Zelda — named after the video game’s Princess.
In June, Nintendo announced a new Legend of Zelda game for the Wii U console, described as being “a clean break with the past” in terms of gameplay and allowing players to explore the virtual world however they wished. The game will be released in 2015.
Nintendo has yet to comment on the Change.org petition.
