Regular readers of this blog – and I’m aware that the plural of ‘reader’ is doing a lot of work, there – will be used by now to my sudden dramatic changes of topic, so will not be shocked to read 2,000 words about a twenty year-old video game (twenty years and a day, if you’re being fussy). Have fun!
Ocarina of Time (or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, to give its full title) is one of those games it’s difficult to talk or write about because the impact was so huge. You kind of had to have been there to have felt it. Watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan now – a decent performance, sure, but if you’re younger than about 70, you’ll struggle to understand just why this event seemed, to the people watching it, to turn the entire world on its head. Likewise with Ocarina of Time. In the twenty years since it was released, sprawling, non-linear, open world 3D games have become commonplace. Its innovations, like targeted lock-on for battling, switching from third- to first-person for aiming items like the bow and arrow, and context-sensitive music (which changed when an enemy got close, then seamlessly faded back to the relevant theme when they were defeated or you ran away) have either become so widespread no one notices them any more, or have been superseded.
This isn’t surprising. 3D gaming was in its infancy at the time, with Super Mario 64, generally considered to be the pioneer 3D game, having launched only around a year previously. Ideas of how 3D games ought to work were still developing, so it was relatively easy to do things in mad new ways without anyone batting an eyelid. Even games themselves were pretty young then, really: Ocarina of Time is only the 5th official Zelda game; there have been more Zelda games since it came out than before it, and the same applies for the N64, on which Ocarina of Time first appeared, and Nintendo home consoles.
That said, Ocarina broke ground in almost every direction. The soundtrack was both excellent and hugely diverse, with most areas and many characters and situations having their own music: Princess Zelda, in particular, has her own Wagnerian leitmotif! The graphics were excellent for the time (compare Mario 64‘s blobby, cartoon trees with those in Hyrule Field, for example, which have textured bark and distinguishable leaves). Pre-rendered backgrounds were blended cleverly with real time animation to create a plausible-looking world with massive draw distances and none of the fog which other games had used to cover up the fact that the consoles struggled to render distances. Ocarina of Time actually plays with this brilliantly: the area you start in has fog, but after you beat the first level and emerge into Hyrule Field, the fog vanishes: you climb the crest of a hill and, in the distance, see a walled town with a castle behind it, a river, a ranch and a mountain with a clouded top – and then you can actually go to all those places! If you’re under 30 this will mean nothing. Duh, you will say to me, like all those darn kids. So, trust me: it was fucking amazing: a postmodern reappropriation of a feature of inferior 3D games, deployed so that the developers simultaneously show off their technical mastery and tell a story about how Link’s world has suddenly opened up.
Nevertheless, the limitations of the tech are, retrospectively, quite obvious. A modern player will likely note how empty some areas, like Hyrule Field and Lake Hylia, actually are, or the fact that the game, considered remarkably non-linear at the time, actually keeps you pretty strictly on one path. You can complete the Fire Temple without visiting the Forest Temple, for example, but that’s about it for taking things out of order, bar a few sidequests.
It also came at an inflection point in video game history, as the market shifted away from just kids to young adults. Again, this is a commonplace now, but at the time, it was sufficiently significant that major players like Nintendo didn’t wholly see it coming. Nonetheless, if Nintendo did have a serious response to the oncoming revolution, Ocarina of Time was it.
This is because what really distinguished the game from its predecessors wasn’t its technical innovations but ambition: it was, in the breathless words of every early reviewer, ‘the greatest game ever’ because it fully embraced an artistic aesthetic and deliberately, openly attempted to be a work of art. Previously, games designers had wanted better graphics so that they could make games more playable, add more distinctive characters, items and levels, or perhaps just look a little cooler. Ocarina of Time, with it’s rolling, varied landscapes and use of cinematic tropes, from lens flare to contrazooms, was deliberately using the language of film in a way that was unprecedented for a video game. Sure, previous games, such as Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64 outside of Europe, but I first knew it by its trademark dodging psuedonym) and Goldeneye OO7, had aped films: Lylat Wars has a particularly good level which is basically just the last battle in Independence Day, complete with giant flying saucer and hundreds of plucky defenders piloting comparatively dinky little craft – if you fail to beat the level in time, one of your allies flies his ship straight into the barrel of the building-destroying laser, thus saving your useless, furry arse, so you can proceed to the next level. Goldeneye, also for the N64, took a similar tack: despite being closely based on a film, most of its more direct nods are similarly tongue-in-cheek, from Moneypenny’s innuendo-filled briefings to the elevator muzak version of the Bond theme that plays when the player enters a lift, and even the hilarious, Austin Powers-style judo chop you unleash when unarmed, immortalised in the ‘Slappers Only’ multiplayer mode.
Despite the humour, these spoofs and rip-offs demonstrated something important: you could use the language of film in a game. So why not use it for something other than jokes? Ocarina of Time took up the challenge before anyone else saw it was there.
The game includes numerous elements that are there not to enhance the gameplay or show off the hardware, or even to deepen the realism of the world – a key claim of 3D gaming – but to make the player feel what is happening. An example: after you complete the Water Temple, the next time you go to Kakariko Village, which now houses the refugees from the game’s only town, you find the place ablaze, under attack by a malevolent spirit that’s escaped from the town well. Link, naturally enough, runs to attack the demon and is briefly knocked unconscious. This moment is important, but not because it has any impact on the gameplay. The burning houses are unscathed when Link comes to and no one so much as mentions it ever again, something else that will be a little jarring for modern gamers. The importance lies in the fact that it’s another trope from the movies, but this time not a visual one: after a few dizzying action scenes (or dungeons, in Zelda), there’s a moment where the baddie does something bad, or a quieter moment of reflection, so that we remember why we’re fighting/playing/watching (depending on medium and level of audience involvement). In Star Wars, Moff Tarkin blows up Leia’s home planet while she watches, helpless, so that we see that the Empire is definitely evil, and get a timely reminder of just why Luke and co. are so keen to rescue the princess. In Lord of the Rings, the Hobbits take a breather in the tranquility of Rivendell, so that we see all that Sauron will sweep away should he obtain the Ring. And in Zelda, some scary demon sets a village full of refugees on fire. What a bastard! Better hurry to the next temple and kick its arse (or, this being a Zelda game, fire loads of arrows into its GIANT FUCKING EYE).
What’s more, the game is constructed such that some of its most emotive moments (something it’s impossible to write about when discussing most previous games, as there weren’t any), like rescuing your horse from the ranch, are entirely optional. If you do go and free her, there’s a cinematic cutscene complete with a musical cue (a variation on the Hyrule Field theme) used nowhere else in the game, but you don’t need to do it to complete the game. The whole sequence of getting the horse is there simply to show you that, Yes, the bad guy is bad, and to allow you to ride around having fun. You don’t have to go to the ranch at all. This also means that one of the game’s greatest pleasures (just riding around shooting arrows and jumping over fences on horseback) is totally unnecessary. This game, in other words, isn’t (just) about getting to the end credits: the designers specifically want you to feel involved in the action, to feel like you’re really helping people.
This taps into something Nintendo understood about games: that they’re escapist for a reason. You can have a shit day at school, or work, or queuing at the JobCentre, and then you can go home and be a hero. Shigeru Miyamoto understood that and, in a creative leap comparable to Stan Lee’s creation of Spider-Man (a teenage superhero for comic books’ teenage readers) made a game that didn’t just tell you you’d saved the world, but made you feel like you’d really done it.
That’s what’s unprecedented, and that’s why Ocarina of Time, for all that it’s now aged signficantly, will remain a significant milestone in gaming history. To return to The Beatles comparison, it was gaming’s Sgt. Pepper’s moment, only it wasn’t just a genre, but an entire medium, that suddenly realised it didn’t have to be ‘just’ ‘fun’.
NB: Someone’s out there gearing up to tell me that you need Epona to jump over the canyon in Gerudo Valley before the carpenters fix the bridge. Actually, you can longshot across.
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‘Twenty Years of Ocarina of Time’ by Frank Podmore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Frank Podmore 