Modders are recreating a demo of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shown a year before the game came out.
The mod for Ocarina of Time aims to recreate the demo made playable in 1997 at Nintendo’s defunkt Space World event. The N64 masterpiece wouldn’t go on to launch until November 1998 in Japan.
A modder known as Zel is spearheading the effort, whichuses the Zelda ’97 “overdump” as well as data from the infamous Nintendo “gigaleak” of July 2020.
In January Eurogamer reported on how the demo build, found on an old N64 development cartridge used to hold Nintendo racer F-Zero X, turned up fresh details on early ideas for Ocarina of Time, such as Link being able to turn into his fairy Navi.
According to the Forest of Illusion Twitter account, which is dedicated to preserving lost bits of Nintendo history, this demo included a series of magical spell medallions that granted eye-opening effects, such as the Soul Medallion that let Link become Navi and fly around.
Here’s the F-Zero X development cartridge which contains the Spaceworld 97 Zelda 64 data in the overdump. There doesn’t appear to be much code or music, just graphics and maps. Zelda 64 data begins at 0x1000000 in hex.https://t.co/DsFpv5uVau pic.twitter.com/JUyOjGRP5w
— Forest of Illusion (@forestillusion) January 19, 2021
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Other medallions let Link fire light arrow-esque attacks or hide within a cloak of darkness to avoid enemies. Another medal let Link warp when in danger, while two more let him create and extinguish fire.
There’s a very different world map for Hyrule, too:
Hyrule World Atlas from the 1997 Zelda 64 overdump! Now that is incredibly different! pic.twitter.com/EMykH1eMub
— MrTalida (@MrTalida) January 19, 2021
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Fans even translated some of the text found in the game, and suggested early versions of Ocarina’s plot would have played out very differently. For example, the Deku Tree was going to be a prison for the game’s fairies – including Navi – which Link would then set free.
While it’s not possible to boot the version of Zelda found on the old F-Zero X development cart, maps, items, textures and script still existed, which gave observers a good idea of what that build of Ocarina of Time would have been like.
The community then made the maps playable, although they were barren, without NPCs, enemies or traps.
Enter Zel, who began working with his team to recreate the entire Zelda ’97 demo experience, adding enemies and NPCs back into the recovered maps. This work was supplemented with information and areas from the gigaleak.
This week, Zel released a trailer for this in-development recreation, below:
It’s a pretty impressive effort, a chance to experience the Zelda those who were at Space World in 1997 played (check out the video below to see what that all looked like). The team plans to release a build of the recreation soon.
