For a game as massive as Zelda TP... 2 years. Why? Because it's Zelda and Nintendo isn't going to screw over a their most top-notch title on a bad-ass port. Look at Eternal Darkness, in developement on the N64, took almost 2 years to make it GC-ready, Starfox adventures (thanks to the technical talent Rare possesses, still) took less.
Zelda TP is 10 times bigger then those 2 games put togheter and the zelda-team isn't going to be satisifed in only porting it and do a little optimizing, they probably want to re-do complete models and textures and use the new controller to a very good extent. Since the controller does open a lot of new stuff and this is Nintendo, the team probably wants to add new kind of puzzels which require re-design of worlds and dungeons.
So yes, engineering TP for the Revolution will take 2 years. Just porting it over straight probably will take 4 weeks...
The big problem I have with the alleged six weeks to port PDZ is the scope of "porting". Do they include reproducing all the artwork assets; textures, models, etc. in that time, or is that just to port the engine?
As for ZTP, I highly doubt it would take six month to port given Nintendo's push to make Revo easy to develop for (which say to me, it's just like GC), plus recent "shocking" news that the graphics aren't much better than GC (which says to me... oh you get the picture)
Microsoft said that Rare converted Perfect Dark Zero from Xbox to Xbox 360 in 6 weeks, certainly not two years!
There's a difference between "recompiled the code and ironed out the wrinkles" and "produced high res textures, updated the poly models, re-recorded the music, sound effects and voice acting, integrated better physics engines and recompiled the code and ironed out the wrinkles".
With a decent development environment and backwards compatible system libs, a recompile should be all it takes, plus a bit of tweaking for new style guides and interface rules. In this case six weeks is plenty of time.
However, to make a game truly "next gen" (whatever that really means) you should at least update the graphics and sound. If you didn't create those assets at the highest quality available and down sample them in the first case, you are going to have to re-generate them. In this case, it can take a huge amount of time, two years seems a bit long, but it will be closer to that than six weeks.
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Look at Eternal Darkness, in developement on the N64, took almost 2 years to make it GC-ready, Starfox adventures (thanks to the technical talent Rare possesses, still) took less.
Zelda TP is 10 times bigger then those 2 games put togheter and the zelda-team isn't going to be satisifed in only porting it and do a little optimizing, they probably want to re-do complete models and textures and use the new controller to a very good extent. Since the controller does open a lot of new stuff and this is Nintendo, the team probably wants to add new kind of puzzels which require re-design of worlds and dungeons.
So yes, engineering TP for the Revolution will take 2 years. Just porting it over straight probably will take 4 weeks...