Ocarina of Time might be the first video game where I obsessively followed its development. It was a pre-cursor to games culture today where we pore over video footage, speculate and — for want of a better terms — get hype. But back then it was screenshots.
This is a collection of screenshots from the development of Ocarina of Time, right from the start until close to release. What’s so interesting to me is how dramatically the game changed during its development. Ocarina of Time seemingly took ages to come. I remember delay upon delay upon delay. I think being so close to it all back then, watching it all play out over such a long period of time, it was difficult to really see how it was evolving and transforming into the landmark game it would become.
Even today I find the development of Ocarina of Time fascinating. I was lucky enough to spend some time chatting to Miyamoto about the process of making the game, and it always struck me as a time where new ideas were being created every single day, where the foundations of modern game development was being invented on the fly. It must have been an incredible time. Back then it seems like Nintendo were a little less stringent when it came to showing off games in progress, which is why there are so many early screenshots of Zelda. I doubt we’ll ever see this kind of history in progress from a Nintendo game again.
You can check out the full collection of screenshots here. There are almost 50 of them!
Comments
8 responses to “A Treasure Trove Of Old Ocarina Of Time Screenshots”
Wait wait wait… An Arwing?
they used the physics from it for a boss battle I believe and it can be accessed with codes or hacking the game or some such.
yes, that is correct.
Wait a sec, is that an Arwing in the last screenshot??
Huh, I remember reading in cheat code things about an Arwing, but never knew what they were talking about.
http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Arwing
…Huh. Interesting.
i remember good’ol ign64, wasting away my internet youth on 56k dial up watching videos of zelda64 coming thick and fast – this one is still my favourite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlKFwxQ6ufM
i think i was more taken by the music composition – if anyone knows who made the tunes, let me know!
Wow, talk about an improvement. The finished product really came out beautiful.
I remember gawking at all of these in old Hyper magazines. The chrome effects blew my mind back then.
Also, this makes me sad – I got rid of my 3000+ mag collection this year after a move.