The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Timely Flagship for the N64. Onno Koelman Imagine the year is 1997. You are a (worried) marketing director at Nintendo of America. Why are you worried? You have little market share and system sales are plummeting. Your initial strides into the next generation gaming market were well met (with the help of Mario 64 you sold as many Nintendo 64’s in the opening week as Sony sold Playstations in first 13 months). However, software support is currently severely lacking. Sony now has over 100 games for their console. You have a measly 25. Granted, your games are of a higher caliber, but none of them are strong enough to sell a platform by themselves. The Nintendo giant, which is accustomed to commanding the market from above, not begging at its feet, is a sinking ship. There is, however, one small glimmer of hope. You get one chance to save this system – and the name of Nintendo – from disgrace. You need to make a game so engrossing, so revolutionary, so magical that people will buy your entire system just to be able to play it. You are going to make the game of the Millennium, because you have to. You are going to make the fifth game in the second most popular series alive. You are going to make The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The release of this game (Zelda 64) was not only timely, it was crucial. A below-par game that tried to ride on the shoulders of an icon was not going to solve the Nintendo’s problem. The game had to be a winner, and head game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, knew it. For decades he has been designing smash-hit games (all the Marios and all the Zeldas). Each time Nintendo releases a new system they rely heavily on Miyamoto to produce a new Mario and a new Zelda in order to give the customers the security that there will be at least two phenomenal games for their new system. This pattern has repeated itself for the NES, SNES and N64. Nintendo boxes the system with the newest Mario Bros. and then a little further down the track releases a spectacular Zelda. It worked with the NES, it worked with the SNES (even though Zelda’s presence was not vital for the survival of the SNES) and hopefully it would work again with the N64. Mario 64 started the system off to a record-breaking sales pace and now, two years later, Zelda would have to put in a repeat performance.Not many things were going Nintendo’s way at this point in time (1997). They knew they had released a superior system that was capable of handling flashy graphics and high quality games. But their software support was lacking. Nintendo has never been a company that produces mass quantities of average games. Their competition, however, did. The Playstation had almost four times as many games as their N64 which means they catered to a wider audience of gamers. Compound this problem with the devastating blow that Square was leaving Nintendo and would not be producing any more best selling Final Fantasy games for them, but would produce them for the Playstation instead. Square had produced several brilliant Role Playing Games (RPG’s) for the SNES including ChronoTrigger, Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy III. Now, however, they claimed that since their games were using more and more full motion video (FMV) they couldn’t fit their game onto a cartridge – they needed a CD format, the Playstation. When gamers heard this argument we all nodded our heads, fair enough, they needed the storage space, and RPG fans went out and bought a Playstation in anticipation of Final Fantasy VII (released mid-1997). Square’s departure from Nintendo hurt Nintendo’s fan base. As gamers we lost a little confidence. The N64 probably wasn’t going to have great RPG’s, we thought, because it’s in cartridge format and the system just isn’t good enough to produce great games for. We were wrong. How were we to know what a 3-D exploration/RPG game was going to be like? And that using programming tricks Miyamoto’s team could put it all into a cartridge format? We’d seen 3-D Mario but as Miyamoto says, that game didn’t use all of the N64’s potential. In contrast: “I think Zelda 64 is utilizing about 90 percent of the N64 potential,” says Miyamoto. “When we made Mario 64 we were simply utilizing 60 to 70 percent.”1 The Zelda cartridge is the biggest cartridge ever made at 256-megabits (most games compare at 100-megabits). A quote from an article on project reality addresses the storage problem “Storage will be based on a revolutionary Mega-memory silicon-based cartridge format which will allow the system to access a minimum of 100 megabits of data for each game, which is five to six times the memory of the current 16-bit games. The silicon-based cartridge format will have an access time two million times faster than that of current CD-ROM technology, providing a speed video users have so far only been able to dream about.” 2 The N64 may not have been right for Final Fantasy, but it was perfect for a new Zelda. The next generation console was designed in part through a partnership with Silicon Graphics. It had 64-bit, fast-access graphics, CD-quality sound, and was capable of real-time rendering and awesome anti-aliased graphics at a ‘blistering’ 93.75 MHz3. What this means is that the system was designed for processing polygon-graphics at high speeds, exactly what is necessary to have a real-time interactive 3-D world. But Nintendo had already shown they could give their gamers a 3-D world. How were they going to build on this and show us all what the N64 could really do? They inserted combat. Fighting in three dimensions can be quite a nerve-wracking experience. You have a limited field of view, and an enemy could sneak up from behind you or climb on the roof and drop on you. In 2-D there aren’t any surprises – you can see the whole screen. The extra realism of 3-D added so much to the game. The sense of fear and excitement is heightened and freedom for action is simultaneously increased. In general you as a player are tested more thoroughly – how well can you keep track of targets in a 360° field of view? How fast can you turn and aim? Run and jump?Because of this extra freedom your success in the game better reflects you as a player. And since the vast majority of gamers play games for the challenge, you have a winner in Zelda. Not only does Ocarina of Time make full use of the N64, it uses the entire control pad as well. With the
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