“Ask Sam” Interviews Return to ZeldaPower

OoT BetaOur friends at ZeldaPower have recovered the old “Ask Sam” Interviews which have quite a few details pertaining to the development of Ocarina of Time and with what we know as the Ocarina of Time Beta. These interviews are about 10 years old and provide some really interesting facts about the development of one of the greatest games ever created. Due to their age and their importance, ZeldaPower has recovered these interviews from Archive.org, the internet archive. The original interviews were not written nor recorded in English, so the webmaster of ZeldaPower, Kao, has made them much easier to read for us English speakers. Jump inside for some interesting facts, along with links to the articles, and some pictures from Ocarina of Time Beta.

These two articles were originally part of a threesome, but the third part was never published, and was lost. So, while they are incomplete, in a sense, there are still some great goodies and cool information from these interviews.

As a few examples, take a look at these:

When the game was originally started, Nintendo worked on dungeons first to try things out. The first dungeon they made was an exact replica of a dungeon from the original Zelda on the NES! Interesting, huh? However, this game was just a test, because it was a short and easy to design levels.

Also, another removed dungeon was the Skultula Temple. This was a dark, scary place situated in the Lost Woods. Of course the Lost Woods was also very different compared to the final version. For instance, you could walk anywhere you want. To access Skultula Temple, you needed to follow a ghost into the forest. If you can’t keep up, you lose! Skultula Temple was also very big and had a nasty Skultula boss! Again, this temple was removed from the final version of the game. Play Majora’s Mask and you can kind of see what this temple looked like if you visit the Skultula house!

You may remember that in a lot of preview images you could have medallions in your inventory, like the forest medallion for example. Well did you know that these medallions actually did what the Ocarina did in the final version?

Like he said, “Interesting, huh?” I find it really cool that they used the older games as a basis for testing purposes when they started developing this great game. In the interview, he also talks about how the shovel was an item that was going to be originally implemented in the game and was going to be used for several side quests, including a mini game like the one in A Link to the Past. The developers must have thought that taking ideas from older games would give them a good stance on where the game stood, and how well it blended with the rest of the series. The interview talks about some of the scrapped ideas for the temples that, in my opinion, would have been really cool.

Well, as I said, there is a lot of good stuff in these articles. Since I didn’t quote everything, I’d suggest giving them a read over at ZeldaPower. You can find the first part here, and the second part here.

So, what do you think about some of the ideas that the developers wanted to use in Ocarina of Time, but were originally scrapped? Would you have liked some of them? Or are you happy that they took them out? Let us know what you think about them here, and be sure to leave some comments over at ZeldaPower’s articles!

Related: Ocarina of Time 3D Walkthrough
Source: ZeldaPower

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