The Seminal Third-Person Adventure

by Posted on

“The masterpiece that people will still be talking about ten years down the road.”
– Gamespot review for Ocarina of Time, 19981

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a towering achievement, a game that raised the bar far above all that had come before.

In 1998, 3D games were not new: 3D games with first-person, top-down, and side-scrolling viewpoints had already arrived, as had third-person platformers. But nobody had yet made a third-person game with both strong camera control and melee combat, especially not in a vast, immersive world. There was no blueprint, and design pitfalls awaited any team that tried.

Ocarina of Time solved that puzzle decisively. It was a model for making third-person 3D action games that were approachable and ambitious. It broke new ground in camera control, melee combat, level design, and world design. It achieved a high standard for readability and approachability; nothing like it had ever been made before, and it set a high-water mark that wouldn’t be surpassed for years.

A scan of what looks like a single page that has a lot of concept or illustration sketches on it, with Japanese text scribbled throughout. There are sketches of Gerudo, Twinrova, a Poe, an old concept pf Ganondorf, Ganon, a few stalfos, and more.
Concept art provided by HistoryofHyrule.com

Beginnings

To understand how Ocarina of Time came to be, we need to first learn about Super Mario 64 and Nintendo’s other early experiments in 3D.

Nintendo’s first 3D game was Star Fox on the Super NES. Nintendo hired programmers from England, experts in 3D graphics technology such as Giles Goddard, to help build it. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Zelda and Mario series, credits Goddard with teaching him how to work with moving cameras.2 Star Fox broke new ground for Nintendo, but because flight-based games where the camera always faced forward had been done before, it was less noteworthy in the greater industry.

During this time, a developer named Yoshiaki Koizumi was working on a prototype of a 3D side-scrolling Zelda game with a focus on swordplay for the Super NES–a possible successor to Zelda 2.3 This prototype was eventually abandoned, and Koizumi became the assistant director to Super Mario 64.

Production began on Super Mario 64 in 1994.4 It was Nintendo’s first third-person 3D game, and the first game where the camera had to be controlled independently of the player character’s orientation. To achieve this, the development team had to figure out:

  1. What kind of controls and controller did they need to support both the camera and Mario’s movement.
  2. How to design their gameplay and levels for that camera and movement.

The Nintendo 64 controller and Super Mario 64 were designed in tandem, with each influencing the other. Super Mario 64 was the primary in-house example that informed the controller layout for control stick-based games.5

The team started with a nearly blank canvas, placing the avatar in simple test stages and working on just the avatar’s movement and control for nearly a year. This is why Super Mario 64 had such a highly expressive avatar with so many optional actions. It was nearly a year before they moved to broader level and enemy design.6

When they finally set out to build the rest of the content, such as level and enemy design, they had learned the following:

  • The third-person cameras didn’t work well in tight indoor spaces.
  • Floating platforms in space worked best for precise platforming, allowing the camera to move freely.7
  • 3D platforming had to be more forgiving than 2D because the distances were harder to judge.8
  • Melee attacks were unreliable because it was hard to line the avatar up with enemies.9
  • Overall, 3D was a more intimidating and complicated player experience than 2D.10

Throughout development the team designed around these constraints. For example, you defeat the enemy “Mr. I” by running around it in circle–an easy action that doesn’t rely on judging distances or lining the avatar up.

The most complex and confusing new challenge for players was controlling the camera. They tried to make this easier to understand by turning the camera into a character: the Lakitu cameraman, who flew behind Mario.

The game was finally released in the summer of 1996. Many from the team would go on to help create Ocarina of Time, in many ways a direct continuation of Super Mario 64’s development ideas. Koizumi said, “[they were both] 3D open-world action games [and that he] didn’t really see the difference between them.”11

Ocarina of Time’s early development

In 1995 Nintendo announced that they were going to make a Zelda game for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, a disk-based add-on for the N64. Koizumi and Goddard, while still working on Super Mario 64, created a Zelda-themed tech demo to accompany the announcement. The demo ran on Nintendo 64 hardware and showed a simple Link model fighting a knight.12

Around this time development on Ocarina of Time officially began with a tiny team under the direction of Tōru Ōsawa. He was the narrative director, and worked as a “general” director, helping coordinate and align the other directors.13 This was his first and last Zelda game. He had previously worked as an artist on titles like Kid Icarus, Super Metroid, and Fire Emblem, and directed The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The next director to join was Koizumi, who became Ocarina of Time’s 3D Gameplay Director. He was responsible for the controls, the camera, and the avatar, including Link’s model, animations, items, and every action Link could take.14

At this stage Ocarina of Time was an enigma. The team did not know what the game would be; development was likened to “groping their way forward in the dark” while “everything was made from scratch.”15 At one point it had a jump button, just like Super Mario 64! At another Miyamoto suggested making the game first-person while exploring and swapping to side-scrolling during combat, like Zelda 2.16 They even considered placing the whole game inside Ganon’s Castle, with new environments in each wing.17

Koizumi fought for the game to remain third-person, stating he “couldn’t stand to see my Link not appear” after working on the avatar. But it would be a challenge: Koizumi said that making the game work in third-person was, “hard in ways that would have been extremely easy in first-person, like how to handle the camera and battles.” Choosing first-person would have solved many of their challenges; like needing to load the avatar model and animations into memory, controlling the camera, and judging distances between objects.18

Ultimately, the team decided to stick with a third-person view, and that meant solving the following problems.

Problem 1: Unseen Information

In fixed-camera games, designers can guarantee that information is visible. For example, in A Link to the Past, a top-down game, the screen always displays every object and enemy in the room. But when the player directs the camera, they can miss things. Eiji Aonuma, director of dungeon design for Ocarina of Time, said that “by changing the camera viewpoint just a little, players might not be able to see something they ought.”19

Problem 2: Spatial Readability

Showing spatial relationships was challenging, especially in combat. In 2D games it’s clear where enemies are and how they relate to the avatar. Distance is easy to judge, you can see every enemy around you, and the area of effect for attacks is clearly shown. But in 3D, the camera angles, visual depth, and vertical placement can vary drastically.

Problem 3: Axis Alignment

Super Mario 64 had an unsolved issue. According to Koizumi, “If you tried to beat an enemy in front of you, the axes weren’t aligned, so it was hard.”20 It was easy to get next to a target, but hard to get your avatar to face towards it afterwards. This led to experiences where players would walk their character up to an object and be unable to interact with it due to misalignment.

Game designers were still learning how to handle the direction the avatar was facing, the camera view, and the avatar’s movement as separate things to be controlled simultaneously. First-person games didn’t have to solve this because where their avatar is facing is their camera view. With Super Mario 64 they simply avoided these situations. But they had to fix it for Ocarina of Time if they wanted Link to fight by swinging his sword in front of him.

Problem 4: One-vs-Many

In Koizumi’s early combat prototypes, fighting multiple enemies at once proved to be confusing and difficult.21 Players would lose sight of enemies that moved outside of the camera frame. The spatial readability and axis alignment problems were much worse with multiple foes. Players who had to manage all these elements simultaneously were overwhelmed.

Fateful Inspiration

The team was in desperate need of inspiration to solve these problems. As the story goes, Koizumi and Ōsawa visited Toei Kyoto Studio Park, a theme park, looking for inspiration from the live sword-fighting performances. This proved to be a pivotal moment.

Ōsawa described the scene in an interview, “It was so hot that we ducked into a playhouse to cool off. They were doing a ninja show. A number of ninja were surrounding the main samurai and one lashed out with a kusarigama. The lead samurai caught it with his left arm, the chain stretched tight, and the ninja moved in a circle around him.”22

Meanwhile, Koizumi wondered how the performances managed to convincingly choreograph one-vs-many fights. He recounted that, “It’s a sword battle, so there’s a script and a certain setup. The enemies don’t all attack at once. First, one attacks while the others wait. When the first guy goes down, the next one steps in.”23

Miyamoto’s famous definition of a “good idea” is an idea that “can solve multiple problems at once.”24 The studio park trip had inspired an idea that would solve all four problems: Z-Targeting.

Z-Targeting was a lock-on mechanic. In Ocarina of Time, Link’s movement and where he’s facing are normally tied together, while the camera is controlled separately. When Link moves right, he also faces right, and the camera view doesn’t change. But when locked onto a target, the rules shift: the camera and Link both always face the target. If players press right, instead of turning to the right, Link side-steps. This solved the axis alignment problem by providing a reliable way to face a target.

Z-Targeting also signaled to the game which enemy is the focus, and that enemy steps up to engage while the others hang behind. This solved the one-vs-many problem. It ensured that Link and the target were always in the camera frame, helping to solve the spatial readability problem.

Finally, to help solve the unseen information problem, Koizumi came up with a fairy character to personify the Z-Targeting “lock-on” icon, just like they had used Lakitu to personify the camera in Super Mario 64. This “fairy navigation system”, or “Navi”, would highlight points of interests like chests or switches by flying to them.

Ocarina of Time’s Later development

Every Zelda game is built around major themes, and Ocarina of Time’s themes had become clear. Koizumi spoke of trying to create “a movie you could touch, including scenery that changed with time and a setting that let you feel the natural rhythms.”25 Miyamoto discussed how characters and relationships were more important than plot, and how the dungeons were about “a sense of dread, a sense of pressure”, and an “emotional immediacy, the sense that you are really there.”26 Aonuma said that the theme was “responsive gameplay … in a 3D environment”.27

But two major wrenches had yet to be thrown at the production.

The first was that Ocarina of Time was no longer a Nintendo 64 Disk Drive game and would instead be released on cartridge. The move to cartridges meant that they could load data faster, but the game had to fit on a 32MB cartridge instead of a 64MB disk, and they had to rely on just 4MB of RAM, down from 8MB.

This change likely forced the team to shrink the environments and reduce detail. The Kokiri Forest in the 1997 demo was twice as large as the final version28, and the developers have said they were disappointed that memory constraints forced them to make a sparse Hyrule Field29. On the other hand, Koizumi had built so many animations for Link that they couldn’t be held in memory, so they had to load them on demand–and they couldn’t load from disk fast enough!30 The cartridge let them keep the huge set of animations.

The second major wrench was the introduction of child Link. For most of the production there had only been an adult Link.31 This addition meant changing the flow through the game, rewriting the story, creating older and younger versions of many characters, and more.

Lasting Legacy

After a final year of fever-pitched excitement, Ocarina of Time was finally released. It was a seminal masterpiece, nothing like it had ever been made before. 1998 was a year of genre-defining games, like Metal Gear Solid, StarCraft, Half-Life, and Thief. Even amongst those giants, Ocarina of Time’s impact stood out. It gave players their first polished third-person action game with easy camera control, fluid melee combat, and traversal through complex environments. Its context-sensitive A button enabled a vast diversity of actions. It delivered an expressive, responsive world that was imbued with natural rhythms, memorable characters, and mind-mending dungeons that pushed players to think spatially in three dimensions. All while upholding Nintendo’s high standard for approachability.

Every third-person action game since stands on Ocarina of Time’s shoulders. It etched in stone, in players’ expectations, and in developers’ minds a blueprint for what a Zelda game should be, and what action-adventure games could be at their utmost peak.

References

  1. Gerstman, J. (1998). Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Review. Retrieved from Gamespot: https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-the-review/1900-2543677/
  2. Iwata, S. (2011, 05 10). Iwata Asks: Steel Diver. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/steel-diver/0/0/
  3. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  4. Walker, I. (2020, 8 3). Super Mario 64 Took 622 Days To Develop, Suggests ‘Gigaleak’ Document. Retrieved from Kotaku.com: https://kotaku.com/super-mario-64-took-622-days-to-develop-suggests-gigal-1844599172
  5. Reyes, J. (2022, 11 22). How Super Mario 64 Influenced The N64’s Controller. Retrieved from SVG.com: https://www.svg.com/1113018/how-super-mario-64-influenced-the-n64s-controller/
  6. Miyamoto Speaks. (1996, 10 01). Nintendo Power
  7. Koizumi, Y. (2007, 11 27). Super Mario Galaxy: The Journey from Garden to Galaxy. Montreal International Games Summit. Montreal, QC, Canada. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25Ab7RyUPs
  8. Highsmith, A. (1996). Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews. Retrieved from Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/mario64/
  9. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  10. Koizumi, Y. (2007, 11 27). Super Mario Galaxy: The Journey from Garden to Galaxy. Montreal International Games Summit. Montreal, QC, Canada. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25Ab7RyUPs
  11. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  12. Hanson, B. (2021, 5 24). Exclusive: Early Zelda 64 Prototype Featured Portals. MinnMax. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48hGPwwyCQ
  13. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  14. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  15. Iwata, S. (2011, 5 26). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Development Staff. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/3/0/
  16. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  17. Iwata, S. (2011, 05 26). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/4/0/
  18. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  19. Tanner, A. (1998, 11 16). Developer Interviews (1101). Retrieved from GlitterBerri’s Game Translations: https://www.glitterberri.com/ocarina-of-time/1101-interviews/
  20. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  21. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  22. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  23. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  24. Iwata, S. (2019). Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Legendary CEO. San Francisco: VIZ Media LLC.
  25. Koizumi, Y. (2007, 11 27). Super Mario Galaxy: The Journey from Garden to Galaxy. Montreal International Games Summit. Montreal, QC, Canada. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25Ab7RyUPs
  26. Highsmith, A. (1999). Ocarina of Time – 1999 Developer Interview. Retrieved from Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/ocarinaoftime/
  27. Patrick Thorpe, M. G. (2013). Hyrule Historia. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books.
  28. Grosso, R. (2021, 2 1). Links to the Past: The Development Timeline of Ocarina of Time. Retrieved from TechRaptor: https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/development-timeline-ocarina-of-time-1
  29. Miyamoto, S. (1999, 03 15). Shigeru Miyamoto’s 1999 GDC Keynote . GDC. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9DlhDRZ0yA
  30. Iwata, S. (2011, 06 16). Iwata Asks: Ocarina of Time 3D: Original Development Staff Part 1. Retrieved from Nintendo.com: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/0/
  31. Grosso, R. (2021, 2 1). Links to the Past: The Development Timeline of Ocarina of Time. Retrieved from TechRaptor: https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/development-timeline-ocarina-of-time-1