The History of Ocarina of Time

Development ran alongside Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 inside Nintendo EAD from 1994, at a cost of more than 12 million dollars with a staff of more than 200. Shigeru Miyamoto, principal director on Mario 64, stepped back to producer and supervisor over five directors, among them Eiji Aonuma, who designed the dungeons, and Yoshiaki Koizumi. The story was created by Toru Osawa from an idea by Miyamoto and Koizumi, supported by script writer Kensuke Tanabe. Stunt performers were motion captured for sword fighting and for Link's movement, some 500 animations streamed through the game.

The game was first built for the 64DD, Nintendo's disk drive add-on. Performance problems with the peripheral moved it to cartridge, and the cartridge grew from 16 megabytes to 32 megabytes, the largest Nintendo had produced at the time. Miyamoto first imagined a first-person game, the better to show Hyrule Field, and dropped the idea when child Link entered the design and Link himself had to stay on screen. The targeting marker began as a generic icon; Koizumi turned it into a fairy so it would feel less robotic, the staff nicknamed it the Fairy Navigation System, and Navi was born from the nickname. For Hyrule Castle's market, Miyamoto traveled to Lower Franconia in Germany to study its half-timbered towns, and the swordplay was modeled on Japanese chanbara films.

Miyamoto wanted the game cinematic but distinct from film, so all of its more than 90 minutes of cutscenes render in real time on the Nintendo 64, with no prerendered video, letting a small cinematic team keep adjusting the story into the final months. Koji Kondo wrote the music around a hard limit: every ocarina song had to work on the instrument's five notes, a challenge he later said produced a natural result. The Japanese soundtrack album followed on December 18, 1998, with 82 tracks.

The perfect scores were the majority, not the exception: Edge gave 10, Electronic Gaming Monthly gave four straight 10s, and AllGame, Computer and Video Games, GamePro, GameRevolution and Next Generation all scored it at their maximum. Reviewers praised the level design, the sound, the cinematics and a control system they called one of the game's strongest elements. The reservations were about the hardware, not the design: IGN found the frame rate and textures short of Banjo-Kazooie, released the same year, and called the Hyrule Castle marketplace blurry. It won six awards at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, including Game of the Year.

Target locking and context sensitive buttons, built here, became common elements of 3D adventure games, and later designers kept saying so on the record. Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki called Zelda a textbook for 3D action games, and Rockstar's Dan Houser said that anyone who makes 3D games and claims they borrowed nothing from Mario or Zelda on the Nintendo 64 is lying. Publications have named it the greatest game of all time again and again, from Edge and Computer and Video Games to Nintendo Power and IGN.

The game also left a second version of itself. After release, Nintendo finished Ura Zelda, a harder remix with reworked dungeons, for the 64DD. The add-on's small audience kept it unreleased there, and it finally surfaced on GameCube in 2002 in Japan and 2003 in the West as Master Quest, bundled with the original as a pre-order bonus for The Wind Waker. The original joined the Collector's Edition disc in 2003, and Grezzo's full remake, Ocarina of Time 3D, arrived on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011.

The archive holds no standalone question or guide pages for Ocarina of Time yet. This history is its first door, and the gallery below holds its two boxes. The wider Zelda shelf, its books and censuses, lives in the archive at the foot of this page.