Over 20 years since its initial release on the Nintendo 64, fans are still spellbound by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo’s revolutionary third-person action game unsheathed innovations like Z-targeting and the Rumble Pak, which still define the industry to this day. In spite of the title’s universal critical acclaim, timeless art style, and breathtaking soundtrack, Zelda fans always felt as though something was missing. Legends of unearthing the Unicorn Fountain, outrunning the Running Man, and finding the Triforce were whispered across the nineties Internet, leading to infamous hoaxes and wild cucco chases.
Sadly, Zelda 64’s open-world expansion Ura Zelda for the N64 Disk Drive met with a terrible fate. The prohibitive cost of the peripheral combined with disk-read problems led to the console’s cancellation in the United States. The 64DD still released in Japan, but Ura Zelda was scrapped and later remixed into The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time: Master Quest on the Gamecube, a dramatic downsizing of the original vision in which trees would regrow, monsters would stay dead, and the player’s actions would leave a permanent impact on the world. Master Quest contained remastered dungeons and more challenging enemies, but even after the release of direct sequel (or parallel universe, or something) Majora’s Mask, players still felt a phantom pain.
Decades after Link first pulled the Master Sword from the Temple of Time, Ocarina’s source code is in the wild. Presumably as a result of recent work-from-home orders, Chinese developer iQue experienced a catastrophic security breach. This lethally illegal 2 terabyte leak of Nintendo’s intellectual property and digital assets contained beta Star Fox 2 characters, confirmation of Luigi in Super Mario 64, and proof of the unreleased Pokemon MMORPG. Unfortunately for fans, Nintendo’s suits aggressively defend the Big N’s copyrighted material, and a mad scramble ensued to shut it down. The leaks stopped. Gamers feared the Zelda 64 prototype was deleted.
But petty human concerns like “laws” and “cease and desists” didn’t stop Zelda fans. As with classics Doom and Quake before it, this data dump ushered in a golden age of Zelda modding, from multiplayer to total conversions. We’ve come a long way from crooked cartridges, swordless glitches, and GameShark. Emulation also allowed improved graphics and framerates compared to the game’s original slideshow FPS and potato 320x240 resolution. Like Neo in the Matrix, clinically insane gamers have reverse-engineered Ocarina’s code and begun to create their own legends.
This morning, Don Camilo released The Legend of Zelda: Master of Time. The romhack promised 20 hours of gameplay and a satisfying resolution to the story of the N64 Zelda adventures: the third piece of the trilogy. Fans report the new mod even works on official hardware. The teaser above evokes the same feelings as the original Ocarina of Time trailer, seen below.
For what is already considered by critics to be the greatest game ever, this is only the first of many adventures to come. It’s about time.
Source: HylianModding: The Zelda Modder’s Resource
More: N64 Source Codes Have Leaked Online - Including Ocarina of Time, Mario 64, & Animal Crossing
