Ocarina of Time 1997 Preview of Ocarina of Time

[Jimmy]

Tidying my room yesterday I came across a booklet that I got free with an old Ninty mag a few years back. The cool thing about this is that it contained a bunch of previews relating to Virtual Console releases on the N64. Included were a couple of previews on good old Ocarina of Time. A few extracts from Oct 97.

...the catridge size has doubled overnight to a silicon-mungous 256 megabits (32M

Oh for the days where a game was less than a Gig.

This time the action is set in Hyrule's misty past, when the evil Gannon [sic] was nothing but a thief, and begins with Link's coming of age ceremony (raising the question, is this the same Link as in the other games or a distant ancestor.

Interestingly, this is not too far off the plot the game ended up with. It might not be too much to say that the previewer misinterpreted a few details from screenshots, or it may be this was the original plot.

It's the dying Tree that gives Link his mission - to stop Gannon [sic] finding the triforce - and a mystical stone that he needs to place in a magical Ocarina

Again not sure if this is the previewer speculating or something that was confirmed. There is a hint in a later article that it is speculation, but I wonder if this was the plot at one point - it's not far off the final product.

And now for Christmas 97, another article:

A name change before it reaches the West is likely.

Not that likely, obviously.

[Link] after being given advice by a fairy tree, a wise man and Zelda, he sets off to track down the stones and recover the Triforce

Who is this wise man? Note the other plot details are correct though.

Although Nintendo hasn't said for sure, it seems to us that by blowing the Ocarina Link can somehow travel through time

Not far off with this one.

We arrive at this conclusion because the screenshots betray the presence of two Links: Big Link and Little Link

Evidently this detail was not revailed until the very end of 97. There is also an interview with Shigsy that mainly concerns how much time he thinks the game will last, and how much involvement he has had in it.

 

[insanity76]

Ah the memories. Some things I remember from a preview (and the only preview) I read in a magazine that your article didn't mention were that the game has a day and night cycle, one of the early missions in the game is having to sneak into the castle and avoid patrolling guards, and at a later point in the game you get a horse. If I recall this was just a couple months before OoT came out, so it was less speculation and more confirmation.

 

[Jimmy]

There was a mention of the horse system, but since it was spot on I decided not to quote it. Weird that for the first 2 or so years of development there was almost no info on the game, I'm not sure it had even been announced.