The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a 1998 action-adventure game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64, the first entry in The Legend of Zelda series to use three-dimensional graphics.⁴¹² Players control a hero named Link on a quest through the land of Hyrule, seeking to save Princess Zelda from a usurper named Ganondorf.⁴⁸ Widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made, it was recorded by Guinness World Records as the highest-rated game of all time at 97.7 percent according to the aggregation site GameRankings.⁵

The game was released in Japan on November 21, 1998, and reached North America roughly two days later, on November 23.²⁶ Its development staff numbered more than 200, with a budget in excess of $12 million, an effort the Chicago Tribune likened to the production of a motion picture, backed by an unprecedented $10 million marketing campaign that included a trailer shown in movie theaters as well as television and magazine advertising.⁶⁷ Anyone who preordered received a special gold-colored cartridge in a commemorative box; a record 325,000 domestic preorders were placed, and the matte-gold cartridge was an allusion to the series’ roots.⁶⁹ The title’s memory, 256 megabits or 32 megabytes, made it the largest Nintendo 64 cartridge produced, requiring newly designed programming, data compression, and cartridge technology.⁶⁹

Development

The project, known during production as “Zelda 64,” began life as the flagship title for the 64DD, Nintendo’s “Bulky Drive” disk-drive attachment; the plan was that Super Mario 64 would sell the console and Link would sell the expansion.⁹ As the 64DD slid into vaporware, Nintendo shifted the game to the cartridge format, which relieved fan fears that the switch would reduce the game’s content.⁹ It suffered repeated delays — from early 1997 to the 1997 holiday season, then to April or June 1998, and finally to November 1998 — yet appeared in the United States less than a week after its Japanese release, a fast turnaround for a text-heavy title requiring localization.⁹ The first screenshots, showing a blocky Link fighting a reflective Stalfos, appeared even before the Nintendo 64’s own release.⁹

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s general manager of entertainment analysis and development, led the game and described trying “to develop a new Zelda adventure that is unlike any other game available,” with a design formula in which roughly 70 percent of play concerns objectives and the rest secrets and exploration.⁶⁷ Miyamoto has attributed the wider series’ sense of discovery to his childhood memory of exploring the woods, an origin reflected in the young Link who begins the game.²⁰ A design decision made by Miyamoto from the start of development was to replace the magic spells of earlier Zelda games with magical music played on the ocarina, according to The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia.⁴⁸

Gameplay and structure

Link begins as a boy in the Kokiri Forest, an outsider of Hylian descent who alone lacks a fairy until the Great Deku Tree assigns him the fairy Navi and summons him to begin his quest.¹²¹⁹ After gathering three spiritual stones and drawing the Master Sword from the Temple of Time, a seven-year time jump propels the story forward, and players control a teenage Link exploring a Hyrule changed under Ganondorf’s rule; by playing a song on the Ocarina of Time, Link can travel back and forth between the two eras.⁴⁸ Ganondorf uses the opening Link creates to enter the Sacred Realm and seize the Triforce, the series’ trio of golden triangles.⁴⁸ The story is set roughly ten years after a conflict known as the Hyrulean Civil War, and functions as a prequel to the earlier games in the series.⁶²¹

The game introduced control innovations that distinguished it from earlier 3D adventures, chiefly C-button item selection and Z-targeting, a lock-on system for enemies.⁹ Rather than a jump button, Link jumps automatically at ledges, a deliberate choice to keep the game from becoming a platformer.¹²¹⁸ Combat was made central, with familiar enemies from the 2D games — Dodongos, Tektites, Peahats — rendered in three dimensions.⁴⁸ Link’s arsenal blends returning tools and new ones: a slingshot, bow, boomerang, hookshot, bombs, and megaton hammer, alongside tunics that let him breathe underwater or withstand heat and boots that let him sink or float.¹² Music serves both puzzle and narrative functions: Link learns Epona’s Song from the farmgirl Malon to summon his horse, Saria’s Song to stay in touch with a childhood friend, and other melodies to alter weather or move through time.⁴⁸

The world was praised as coherent and detailed, spanning dark forests, canyons, towns, dungeons, and castles, with Hyrule Field serving as a large central hub crossable on horseback.⁶¹² Dungeons made pointed use of the third dimension — the Escher-like halls of the Forest Temple, the many-leveled Water Temple, and the Spirit Temple, which requires the player to progress as both young and adult Link.⁹¹² They also taught players through environmental cues, as in Dodongo’s Cavern, where bomb flowers and cracked walls coax experimentation, and in the Great Deku Tree, where the player must fall through a web-covered hole by leaping from an upper plank.⁴⁸ As young Link, planting magic bean seeds creates beanstalks that grow into platforms seven years later, tying the two eras together for side quests.¹² A complete run gathers 100 Gold Skulltulas, 36 pieces of heart, and numerous item upgrades, with playthroughs commonly running well over 20 hours.¹⁷¹⁹ Nintendo estimated the game would offer between 50 and 100 hours of play and expected to sell at least 3 million copies.⁶

Reception and legacy

The Chicago Tribune awarded the game four stars, praising its combination of graphics, story, and breadth, and declaring that it set new standards in interactive entertainment.⁶⁷ GameSpot’s videogames.com gave the title its first-ever perfect 10.0; perfect scores were common, and one publication declared it the “Game of the Millennium” while another called it the “best game of all time”.⁹ IGN posted its review on November 25, 1998, two days after the North American launch; the staff played roughly seventeen hours straight from a single copy delivered under Nintendo escort, having earlier seen a preview build at the Zelda Summit event in Seattle.² The early review copies IGN’s staff played contained red blood when Ganon is struck in the final battle, later replaced with green “sweat” in retail versions, a change attributed to concern over the game’s T rating.²

Some drew connections between the game’s fantasy setting and older literary traditions; commentators have linked its pastoral landscapes and its portrait of childhood and growth to J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” and to Miyamoto’s own philosophy of games as a way for adults to recover the mindset of a child.¹⁴²² The design leaned heavily on its predecessor The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, inheriting items such as the boomerang, bottles, hookshot, bombs, and hammer, and adapting its two-world structure into the game’s shift between eras.¹⁸ Later entries in the series inherited its template — a philosophy that most 3D Zelda games, including Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, followed, sometimes to the point of covering familiar ground.⁴⁸

The game was remade for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 as Ocarina of Time 3D, with crisper graphics and interface changes such as making the iron boots a quickly swappable item to ease navigation of dungeons like the Water Temple.⁴⁸¹⁹ It was later made available through Nintendo Switch Online’s Nintendo 64 emulation service, running at 720p and about 20 frames per second on Nintendo Switch 2, with options for suspend points and a CRT filter.¹⁶