Zelda 64/URA: Wouldn’t it be nice?

Zelda 64 is one of the most interesting betas in gaming. There are so many things that weren’t included in the original release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The only thing that stopped us from getting Zelda 64 into our hands was an attachment called 64DD. It could hold up to 50-60 MB of extra space when compared to the original catridges.

Zelda 64 had a nice touch of what we wanted as a kid. It had horseback sword combat, frontal spin attacks, and a lot more dungeons. These were just few things that we could have gotten our hands on. Here are a few other things missing.

• Larger Lost Woods
• Light Temple
• Different Graphical Direction
• Stepping in the sand and leaving a foot step would stay the whole game
• Unicorn Fountain that would give you a sword beam
• 2 More tunics

There is a lot to talk about with this potential, never released, master piece. Lets talk about the 64DD first as this was the item what brought Zelda 64 to it’s downfall.

The 64DD was first announced at 1995’s Nintendo Shoshinkai game show event, and later delayed to 1999. The 64DD was an attachment to the Nintendo 64 which used another cartridge to hold more data for games, and even had Wifi connection capabilities. It would allow games to have more quests, more items, more areas to explore, and attempt to mirror the success rate that future CD based games had. You would put the original cartridge into the top of the Nintendo 64 and then put the extra cartridge into the attachment. The 64DD ended up only getting released in Japan because of very poor sales.. 15,000 of them made their way into homes, while another 85,000 had to be literally thrown away.

With Zelda 64 practically completed, it had to be scaled back when the new attachment simply didn’t catch on.Ocarina of Time ended up being the result, and as people are well aware it went on to be one of the most influential games in history. While they had to change things up once the attachment flopped, much of what they did built off of parts of what Zelda 64 had set up. Still, it’s always been a big “what if” story. As great as Ocarina of Time was, how much better would the original product have been?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was then released 1998 in North America on November 23, 1998, Japan on November 21 and in Europe on December 11.