The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Development

Development

First shown as a technical demo at Nintendo's Space World trade show in December 1995, Ocarina of Time was developed concurrently with Super Mario 64 by Nintendo's EAD division. Both were the first free-roaming 3D game in their respective series. Nintendo planned to release Super Mario 64 as a launch game for the Nintendo 64 and later release Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64DD, a disk drive peripheral for the system. Nintendo eventually decided to release Ocarina of Time on a cartridge instead and follow it with a 64DD expansion. At its release the 32 megabyte game was the largest game Nintendo had ever created. Early in the game's development concerns over the memory constraints of the N64 cartridge led producer and supervisor Shigeru Miyamoto to imagine a worst case scenario in which Ocarina of Time would follow a similar structure to Super Mario 64 with Link restricted to Ganondorf's castle as a central hub, and using a portal system similar to the paintings that Mario used to transport to different areas. An idea that arose from this stage of development, a battle with a doppelganger of Ganondorf that rides through paintings, ultimately made its way into the finished game as the boss of the Forest Temple dungeon.

While Shigeru Miyamoto had been the principal director of Super Mario 64, he was now in charge of several directors as a producer and supervisor of Ocarina of Time. During its development individual parts of Ocarina of Time were handled by multiple directors—a new strategy for Nintendo EAD. When things were progressing slower than expected however Miyamoto returned to the development team with a more hands-on directorial role. Although the development team was new to 3D games assistant director Makoto Miyanaga recalls a sense of "passion for creating something new and unprecedented". Miyamoto initially intended Ocarina of Time to be played in a first-person perspective, so as to enable the players to take in the vast terrain of Hyrule Field better, as well as being able to focus more on developing enemies and environments. However, the development team did not go through with it once the idea of having a child Link was introduced, and Miyamoto felt it necessary for Link to be visible on screen. The development crew involved over 120 people, including stuntmen used to capture the effects of sword fighting and Link's movement. Some of Miyamoto's ideas for the new Zelda title were instead used in Super Mario 64, since it was to be released first. Other ideas were not used due to time constraints.

Ocarina of Time originally ran on the same engine as Super Mario 64, but was so heavily modified that designer Shigeru Miyamoto considers the final products entirely different engines. One major difference between the two is camera control. The player has a lot of control over the camera in Super Mario 64, but the camera in Ocarina of Time is largely controlled by the game's AI. Miyamoto says the camera controls for Ocarina of Time are intended to reflect a focus on the game's world, whereas those of Super Mario 64 are centered on the character of Mario. Miyamoto wanted to make a game that was cinematic, but still distinguished from actual films. Takumi Kawagoe, who creates cut scenes for Nintendo, says that his top priority is to have the player feel in control of the action. To promote this feeling, cut scenes in Ocarina of Time are completely generated with real-time computing and do not use pre-recorded or full-motion video. Toru Osawa created the scenario for the game, based on a story idea by Miyamoto and Yoshiaki Koizumi. He was given support by A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening script writer Kensuke Tanabe. The dungeons were designed by Eiji Aonuma.

Customers in North America who pre-ordered the game received a limited edition box with a golden plastic card affixed, reading "Collector's Edition". This edition contained a gold-colored cartridge, a tradition for the Zelda series that began with the original game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Demand was so great that Electronics Boutique stopped pre-selling the title on November 3, 1998. Later versions of Ocarina of Time feature minor changes such as glitch repairs, the recoloring of Ganondorf's blood from crimson to green, and the alteration of the music heard in the Fire Temple dungeon. The lattermost change was believed to have been made as a result of public outcry due to a portion of the song's resemblance to an Islamic chant. However, later research showed that the sound byte was borrowed from a public domain sound library, and that it was removed as preemptive measure prior to Ocarina of Time's original release.