It’s difficult to articulate exactly what it was like to those who weren’t there, but the run-up to its release was, well, wild. What the build gives us instead is a glimpse at a very different Ocarina of Time. This means the 1997 build isn’t playable - but in this context, that hardly matters. However, the F-Zero demo was seemingly written over the top of a 1997 build of Zelda - and with careful tinkering, sleuths have been able to extract the leftover data.
The story of how this build came to be found is a long one, but the short version is this: gaming preservation fans found an N64 development cartridge of classic Nintendo racer F-Zero X. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Remember, the game didn’t come out for a year after that. The latest revelation is in many ways a holy grail: a 1997 build of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo may not exactly approve, and in some cases the means of acquisition have been illegal, but it’s been a banner couple of years for fans curious about the creation of some of gaming’s most iconic games. Things we obsessed over in the early internet of the nineties are now real.