Trivia / The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

• Bad Export for You: The original N64 release got a pretty unique and infamous case of this in Spain: the game was planned to be translated to Spanish (it was going to be the first big game translated to Spanish in-house by Nintendo of Europe) and it was largely advertised as such by Nintendo Spain over a year in advance^note There weren't plans for Latin American Spanish since Nintendo of America didn't decide to start localizing for that territory until around a decade later. However, although the translation of the text itself was completed, the launch of the game was moved to slightly earlier^note Aparently, Nintendo of America pressed for the game to be released a few weeks earlier for Black Friday, and the move was also applied to Europe, which completely took the Spanish localization team by surprise, and suddenly didn't have enough time to implement and test the localization in the game. Thus, instead Ocarina of Time was released in English in Spain, but the Spanish version included a 150-page booklet with all the in-game text translated into Spanish. Although Spaniards obviously weren't happy about this at the time, the booklet nowadays has become a collectors item of sorts. However, this was addressed in the 3DS remake, which did include a fully-fledged Spanish localization, both for Spain and for Latin America, since Nintendo had had an in-house Spanish localization team for both territories for years by that point^note since 1999 in the case of Spain, and since around 2007 for Latin America and localization was fully integrated in the development cycle.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Unless the player is fast with button presses, Navi doesn't normally say "Listen!" right after "Hey!". Her automatic halts of the gameplay doesn't include the "Hey" at all.
• Blooper: In the 3DS version of Master Quest, everything has been mirrored to mess with players used to the game's original layout. However, this truly means everything. So when you enter the Royal Family's Tomb and find the Sun's Song written on a grave, it's been transcribed backwards.
• Breakthrough Hit: This game cemented Eiji Aonuma's career as the figurehead developer of the Zelda series, though he wouldn't become the sole director and later producer of the series until The Wind Waker.
• Creator Backlash: Miyamoto and Aonuma have both apologized for the Water Temple, as it went beyond fairly challenging to simply maddening due to a combination of the bad item UI for the Iron Boots and the water level adjusting mechanic. The Master Quest (aka Hard Mode) expansion's redesign of the dungeon actual makes it easier than the original. In the 3DS remake, it ended up being the only dungeon to experience any major changes aside from the graphical facelift — icons and luminous wall markings were added throughout the dungeon to make remembering where to go to change the water level easier, along with an additional cutscene during one water level change that reveals the opening of the pit inside the central tower. The reassignment of the Iron Boots to being a normal button item instead of being body equipment also made the dungeon less infuriating.
• Creator's Pest: Miyamoto admitted in 1999 that he shares much of the fandom's dislike of Navi, as he considered the way her hint system worked to be a little too unfriendly to players, in part because she was written to have a somewhat "stupid" level of intelligence. The only reason Miyamoto didn't outright remove Navi from the game is because he wanted a way for fans to remember what they were doing after a month or two of not playing.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Fujiko Takimoto as Young Link.
• Defictionalization: Not Ocarinas themselves, of course, but many people have begun making and selling Ocarinas that look like the ones from the game.
• Development Gag:
  • Phantom Ganon's use of Portal Pictures for his fight's first phase is a remnant of how the game was originally going to use them for traveling through the world (a la Super Mario 64) instead of having Hyrule Field.
  • The fishing pond manager was based on the owner of Bucket Mouth, a relatively famous fishing spot in Japan. This is the same place as the Bucket Mouse^note A mistranslation due to translators unfamiliar with the location in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
• Dueling Works: With Final Fantasy VII, which released the previous year on the rival Sony PlayStation to great acclaim and sales. For Nintendo, whose president had taken Square's decision to develop for the PS1 instead of the Nintendo 64 rather personally, topping the latter game was likely a matter of defending its honor, in addition to Nintendo proving that using in-game graphics to compensate for the smaller storage space of the Nintendo 64's cartridges could produce games every bit as epic as the PS1's FMV-laden CD-ROM extravaganzas.
• Dummied Out:
  • Quite a few things. Most notably the Wind and Ice Medallions (and their associated Temples, though the Ice Cavern retains some of the elements of the Ice Temple, and the Forest and Water portions of Ganon's Castle have more in common with the scrapped Wind and Ice Temples than the Forest and Water Temples) and... an Arwing as a fightable enemy, which was originally used to test Volvagia's attack pattern and Z-Targeting.
  • The Medallions were going to be C-items, but their effects were either removed or recycled as different items. Example being Din's Fire, and a puzzle that requires it having the Fire Medallion's design present on the spot where you're supposed to use it (it was removed in the 3DS version).
  • Gerudo's Fortress has an extra Heart Piece that is inaccessible except with cheats/hacking — it's only present when Link is a child, but Link can't enter the area until he's an adult because a guard blocks his path when he's a child.
  • The English-language release contains the original Japanese version, which can only be accessed by using a cheat device or an emulator to change the game's region code. The same is true for both GameCube rereleases as well as Master Quest.
  • Some code from the abandoned 64DD development remains in the game- using hacks to activate the code only causes the game to crash, however. The code seems to be intended to allow the cartridge to access the disk drive.
  • The game also contains leftover code for an interesting attack - shooting beams from Link's sword! Some hacks have partially restored the ability, which can harm or kill distant enemies but doesn't actually appear to hit them: the projectile briefly appears in front of Link and fades away without moving. Also, it is used the same way as a spin attack (holding down the button and charging up), rather than being at full health. It isn't immediately clear if this was intended to replace the spin attack when Z-targeting was used, or why exactly it was taken out.
  • In Zora's Fountain, there is a cliff behind Lord Jabu-Jabu that is completely inaccessible. There's a spawn point there, and the cliff textures extend quite a bit beyond the masking trees, but none of it is used. There's also a dummied-out ocarina pedestal that was supposed to appear in front of Jabu-Jabu. It was also originally possible to jump off the waterfall in Zora's Fountain to go to Zora's River, but it was blocked by a fence for unknown reasons in the final game, as seen here with an also-unused Triforce area transition.
  • In both this game and Majora's Mask, Navi/Tatl has a description for Gold Skulltulas, but it's unused since they can't be Z-Targeted. The same is true for Dead Hand's Hands and Big Poes in OoT.
• Killer App: Managed to be this for both the N64 and the 3DS.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition:
  • Gold-colored cartridges for the first release, and the Master Quest version for Wind Waker's release. It has a "Limited Edition" in Germany that came with a Strategy Guide and a shirt (possibly unlicensed).
  • Also the special "Collector's Edition" released in limited quantities for the Nintendo GameCube, and featuring The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, Ocarina, Majora's Mask, and a trial version of Wind Waker.
• Milestone Celebration: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate brought back Young Link and Ganondorf's Ocarina of Time design in time for the 20th anniversary of Ocarina; neither had been playable in a Smash game since Melee. And who does all three Links plus Zelda fight as a boss for their classic mode routes? None other than Ganon from Ocarina of Time.
• Orphaned Reference: The Wind Temple and the Ice Temple were respectively replaced by the Forest Temple and the Water temple during development yet their respective Medallions still have a whirlwind and a snowflake on it. Their sections in Ganon's Tower also feature fans and ice.
• The Red Stapler: Over two decades later, replicas of the Ocarina of Time and other Zelda-styled flutes can still be found at ren faires, gaming and anime conventions, and the like.
• Referenced by...: Anodyne: A reference to Navi's "HEY!! LISTEN!!": One of the first lines is:
  "Hello? ... Young? HEY! Listen, you are about to wake up…"
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The Master Quest version was completed some time before August 2000 for the 64DD add-on device. Said device was such a commercial failure that the game's release was canceled, and it sat in Nintendo's inventory for years as they pondered what to do with it. Ideas included a magazine mail-in offer and a sweepstakes prize, but they only finally found a solution in the form of the 2002 GameCube port, which even then was largely done as a promotional bonus. It would take until the original game's 3DS remake for Master Quest to be properly released commercially, even then in a somewhat modified form.
• Star-Making Role: Ganondorf for Takashi Nagasako, he would become a prominent Nintendo's Japanese voice actor.
• Throw It In!: According to an Iwata Asks, the fishing mechanic started off as designer Kazuaki Morita entertaining himself while developing the Water Temple by putting a fish in the boss' pool and modelling a stick for Link to use as a fishing rod to get it. (Basically the equivalent of playing Solitaire at work). His work was quickly discovered, and the other devs were impressed enough that they shoved the fishing minigame into Lake Hylia, admitting that they had trouble finding an area in the game to place it. It helped that the previous game in the series also included a fishing minigame, though it was much less involved.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • Finding the Triforce, defrosting Zora's Domain within the game, beating the Running Man. The former is based on pre-release trailers showing Link finding the entire Triforce; the second only happens during the ending, and the latter is impossible; the programmers couldn't figure out a good prize for beating him, so the Running Man always beats you "by one second". Even if you somehow cheat the race to finish in 0 seconds.
  • Also, the Temple of Light as a hidden dungeon. This one was proven false, though it's theorized that it was in the beta version, but was removed.
  • If you use a cheating device to lock the time and fight Stalchildren in Hyrule Field, they'll get bigger every so often without limit, since their normal limit is the night ending. That's not the legend, that part's true. The legend part, is that someone apparently decided that if you did this for long enough, eventually you'd be faced with a giant Stalchild, so big that you can climb it to a secret dungeon to find the Triforce and/or insert-amazing-item-here. Or, kill it and then use its skull as a warp pad or enter its mouth as an entrance.
  • One persistent rumor that made its way onto many cheat sites was that the entire population of Goron City would become hostile if you bombed Hot-Rodder Goron enough times.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was originally going to be released on the ill-fated 64DD add on, but was moved to cartridge once it became clear that the 64DD might not even see a US release.
  • The now infamous Ura Zelda expansion was planned for the 64DD as well. Ura was supposed to re-add features and content cut from the base game during its transition from the 64DD to cartridge, while remixing the existing dungeons. Due to the failure of the 64DD and Aonuma taking a majority of the Ura team to work on Majora's Mask, the project ended up becoming a mere shell of its former self and what was left ended up becoming the Master Quest. One of the cut ideas was a persistent world, which ended up getting recycled into the Animal Crossing series. Some of the other ideas, such as the NPCs having set schedules instead of being static and more mask related side quests, were used in Majora's Mask.
  • Mahito Yokota (main composer for Super Mario Galaxy) originally wanted to remaster the soundtrack for orchestra for the 3DS version, and even prepared several tracks, but Koji Kondo abruptly asked him to "recreate the N64 sound." In the end, only one orchestral track made it into the game: the credits for the remake.
  • Ocarina was originally going to be mostly in first-person, with the camera going into third-person during combat. This was quickly dropped due to the guy who made Link's model not standing the thought of not seeing Link all the time. The idea of a first person adventure game with some third-person moments was used for a different franchise.
  • Originally, there was no Child Link. Just Adult Link for the whole game.
  • During this phase, Link's design was much closer to what it was in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, likely as it was shown in the reveal tech demo. His design was changed when Yoshiaki Koizumi showed his first in-game model to his wife, and she famously replied "All Nintendo characters have funny noses! Don't you have any handsome ones?". Koizumi heeded his wife's opinion, and along with the game's illustrator Yusuke Nakano, changed Link's appearance based "on a world-famous Hollywood actor at the time" in order to make him more physically attractive^note He's never confirmed who that actor was, but most people speculate it was Leonardo DiCaprio, for obvious reasons. Needless to say, it was a rotund success, and this design became the most beloved design for the character ever since. So if you are attracted to men, send your thanks to Koizumi's wife.
  • The game was envisioned to have some Dating Sim elements; which is the main reason for so many plot-important women compared to men. The idea was dropped due to the storyline making all of Link's potential choices unavailable in some fashion.
  • The final battle with Ganon was originally going to be a Colossus Climb, and was dropped for the same reasons as the first person mode. Though it would later be implemented in Super Mario Galaxy with Megaleg, which shared a good chunk of the same development team.
  • The Forest Temple and the Water Temple respectively were originally planned as the Wind Temple and the Ice Temple. The medallion designs reflect this. It's more apparent in Ganon's Tower, as the forest section has fans all over, and the water section is completely ice and snow. Adult Link was also supposed to have a sixth temple to go through, but it ended up getting cut.
  • The game runs on a heavily modified version of the Super Mario 64 engine. Originally it was going to be much more similar, down even to using the iconic Portal Pictures. This idea was considered because the developers weren't sure at first if they were going to be able to pull off a large, open world on the Nintendo 64. Fortunately, they were able to get it to work. The Phantom Ganon boss battle is a Development Gag of this idea.
  • Old plans had the plot beginning with Link taking part in a Kokiri coming of age ceremony where he found a dying fairy who told him to warn Zelda that Ganondorf was trying to get the Triforce.
  • Fresh off the success of Super Mario 64, Charles Martinet told Shigeru Miyamoto that if Link had dialogue in this game, he would be interested in voicing him in English.
  • Originally, Ingo was going to burn down the ranch after you beat him in a race and escaped with Epona, but then someone asked what would happen if you re-entered the ranch after escaping. This led to Ingo suddenly undergoing a Heel–Face Turn instead.
  • The Sage Medallions were going to be equippable items that had special powers (early screenshots show the Forest Medallion sitting in one of the C-Button slots). Some have suggested that they would have served the same function as the fairy spells. The best evidence is that Darunia says that his Medallion contains "the power of the Fire Spirits"; furthermore, when you have to simultaneously light dozens of torches to open the Shadow Temple, there is a massive image that perfectly matches the Fire Medallion on the platform where you cast Din's Fire, which was likely a clue to players on what to do (the image was removed in the 3DS version). Others have argued that the Medallions would have served as the game's Warp Whistle, a function eventually replaced by Ocarina songs. The "giga leak" has been thoroughly explored in regards to this idea- the linked video details their proper use.
  • The "giga leak" of Nintendo files from 2020 exposed a lot of unused content from numerous games (and even unknown, unfinished games were discovered) including files for early enemies, maps and more. A dump of map files left on an N64 test cart (which contained an F-Zero beta so most of the Ocarina files were overwritten) also revealed a lot of unused beta maps. Youtube is packed with multiple videos that only begin to dig into much of this beta content and ROM hackers have been working on piecing this content together into a functional state, if not inserted into the game itself. Many of the early beta maps were too large to even run on an actual N64 console, which explains why many of them were altered or cut. The same could be said of a lot of the cut content due to the limited space offered by the game cartridge. Most ROM hacks adding this content back into the game will need to be run on a powerful emulator as a result.
  • The Gigaleak also contained some unused content for Master Quest when the game was still in development for the Disk Drive, revealing that the expansion was going to feature more content than just remixed dungeons. The first content being a Boss Rush, in which the player was going to navigate smaller versions of every dungeon in the game (excluding the Ice Cavern and the Gerudo Training Grounds) where they would fight the dungeon's mini-boss and then the boss itself before moving on to the next dungeon. Both the Swamp Spiderhouse and Beneath the Well from Majora's Mask were also planned for Master Quest as extra dungeons before being repurposed for the sequel. The boss rush would later be reused years later for the 3DS remake, albeit in a more traditional way.
  • Originally, Link would have summoned Epona by blowing into a reed, which was scrapped because the developers realized having another musical instrument item alongside the eponymous Ocarina would have been redundant. They would reuse this idea in its sequel Twilight Princess where it made more sense since there was no competing instrument item in that game.
  • Ganondorf's transformation into Ganon was going to be much more gradual.
• Word of Dante:
  • Many fans who ascribe to the "fourth Triforce piece" theory point to the extra triangle at the bottom of the Hylian Shield as evidence, even after the game's creators went out of their way to disproved the theory. ^note The Hylian Shield in all later games lacks the lower triangle, instead giving the red Loftwing on the design a long tail. Aonuma stated at one point it was a move made just to get people to stop asking about it. Despite this, the possibility of an extra piece to fill in the middle space is used heavily in fan fiction and by people who only really played Ocarina of Time. This was part of what finally set off the creator of the website Gannon-Banned.