Prerelease:The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Introduction

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Introduction

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the flagship Zelda title for the Nintendo 64 and the fifth main-line entry in the series, has gone down in history as one of the best games ever made. However, creating this masterpiece didn't come easy.

This piece will take you through a month-by-month analysis of its 3.5-year design process, giving an overview of all the information that has ever been publicly released regarding the game's development.

Creating a Zelda Game

According to a 1998 interview with the father of Zelda, Ocarina of Time producer Shigeru Miyamoto, every installment in the series is difficult to create. Despite this, the design process is rewarding, because staff members always want to make something new. ただ、簡単なことがすんなり決まらなくて、安心しきってたところがプレイしてみると全然ダメってことがありましたね。

"Personally, I hate creating something, only to see it buried by stuff that's already out there. If you make something unique, that means it will have a lot of individuality, right? My only concern was that, if we made a game with a lot of individuality, it wouldn't end up being very Zelda-esque. That was the biggest challenge we faced, working on Ocarina of Time. I think the rest of the staff were even more worried than I was. I'm not the type to make the decisions about how the game is going to be, then sit back and let everyone else do all the work. Even during meetings, we have proper conversations, then decide to work on our ideas as a team. We didn't really have a clear idea about what we were going to do in the beginning, but Ocarina of Time ended up being even more amazing than I thought it would be, and I think it turned out to be very Zelda-esque in the end. " - Shigeru Miyamoto (Producer)

Humble Beginnings

The project started with just two staff members: Takao Shimizu and Jin Ikeda. Shimizu soon left to work on Star Fox 64, passing down his duties to Toru Osawa. Osawa and Ikeda were later joined by Yoshiaki Koizumi, once he had finished his work on Super Mario 64. The group continued to use Shimizu's ideas, the foremost being the incorporation of sword fighting action.

Despite these humble beginnings, the development process stretched to span 3.5 years, the development staff growing to a team of 50 people, including five directors. In the words of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, "Ocarina of Time eventually became a massive project that mobilized nearly everyone who belonged to EAD at that time," determining the future of many employees at Nintendo.

The massive scale of the project required all hands on deck. Employees recall that there was no clear delineation between jobs, with everyone lending their efforts to anything that needed to be done, regardless of specialization.

Relationship to Super Mario 64

The Zelda and Mario series have always enjoyed a close relationship, ever since they made near-simultaneous debuts on the original Nintendo. With the advent of the Nintendo 64, Nintendo found itself tasked the challenge of how to transition these two famous franchises into 3D.

Indeed, Ocarina of Time was originally being developed concurrently with Super Mario 64. As Nintendo employees created the latter title, they kept the former in mind, with Koizumi occasionally writing down notes about what he wanted to incorporate. These ideas included sword battles, fighting a large number of enemies, and decreasing the action while increasing puzzle elements. Koizumi hoped to give new life to the ideas he wasn't able to realize in Super Mario 64.

Sword Fighting

Ocarina of Time was based around a single premise: creating a game with chanbara-style sword fighting action. Chanbara is a genre of Japanese period films known as "samurai cinema" in the west, famous for its blade-driven action sequences.

Before beginning work on Super Mario 64, director Yoshiaki Koizumi had been experimenting with Miyamoto on a polygon remake of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for the Super Famicom. He described the project as "a thin, polygon Link, seen from the side, and fighting with his sword". The duo were hoping to incorporate chanbara in order to create a swordfighting Zelda game. Their plans fizzled out when the experiment didn't take shape, but Koizumi brought his ambitions to the Ocarina of Time team.

Director Toru Osawa shared his vision, and kept sword fighting at the forefront of his mind when he began writing the game's script. Osawa had inherited these aspirations from Takao Shimizu, another Adventure of Link fan and one of the two original team members. Though Shimizu left the Zelda 64 project to work on Star Fox 64 soon after the former's inception, Shimizu crystallized his vision in the form of the chanbara demo video shown at Shoshinkai, giving the world a taste of what was to come.

November, 1995

The Shoshinkai Tech Demo

Zelda 64 was first revealed to the public at Shoshinkai 1995, a video game trade show hosted by Nintendo, in November of 1995. The chanbara demo video of Shimizu's creation was only 12 seconds long, but even this short glimpse of the hero making his debut in 3D was enough to light a fire among fans. One month after the trailer's release, Nintendo Power published a short article with a description and some notes on the state of the game.

The video demo of The Legend of Zelda 64 surprised everyone at Shoshinkai. The surprise came not from the quality of the animation, which was excellent, but from the announcement that The Legend of Zelda 64 would be one of the first disk-based games for the Nintendo 64.

No release date was given for Zelda 64, but the game will be shown at next year’s Shoshinkai along with the 64DD disk drive accessory.

At this point, Zelda exists only as a few animation files, but all of that will change once development on Super Mario 64 is completed. At that time, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of previous Zelda games, and Takashi Tezuka (of Yoshi’s Island fame) will step into the director’s and producer’s chairs.

Nintendo’s creative giants wouldn’t comment specifically on how the 64DD would be used in Zelda, but they mentioned several disk uses in general terms, including the ability to save many games and customize many game elements.

For now, all we can do is admire the graphics of the demo. In the ten seconds or so of video footage, Link battles a knight in a shiny, metal suit of armour. Both Link and the knight slash at each other with their swords, and the camera moves around the fuelers. In the end, Link follows a feint with a roundhouse swing of his mighty, shining sword.

Miyamoto confirmed that the tech demo was running on actual Nintendo 64 hardware in an interview with Famimaga 64 in issue 3 from August 9, 1996.

Link's Appearance

The protagonist's first 3D look most closely resembled his appearance in official artwork from The Legend of Zelda, which had been released in 1986.

Feb. 1986	Nov. 1995

Hair	Link sports sideburns and bangs.
Face	His cartoony face sports black dots for eyes.
Outfit	He retains his green tunic, belt, and the gold rim on his cap.
Sword	Link wields a long, silver sword.
Shield	Instead of a wooden shield bearing a cross, Link sports a shield of flashy, metallic silver.

Enemies

Silver Knight

Inside a cavelike environment, Link fights against a knight of reflective silver, the same consistency as the hero's shield. This is also the same texture used for Metal Mario's model in Super Mario 64.