For those of you too young to know or
remember, Nintendo originally slated Zelda 64 as being a release
candidate for the highly anticipated N64 Disk Drive. This piece
of hardware would attach to the bottom of the N64 unit and allow you to
play games off of disks, or use disks to store save files, customized
content, and expand the capabilities of cartridge games. It also
had much more storage space on it, starting at around 64MB (in
comparison,
Ocarina of Time, the largest game made for the N64
at the time of its release, was 32MB; the largest game ever released
for the N64 on a cartridge was
Pokémon Stadium 2 at 64MB).
Image courtesy of Z64 Station
The Disk Drive was first shown off at the Shoshinkai convention in
1995, but took four years before it was released. Realizing that
the N64DD was not going to make it, they changed Zelda 64 to a
cartridge title, promising that the N64DD would instead be used to
provide an expansion to the game. The expansion would have
included additional dungeons, sub-quests, and other bonus
content. For this reason,
Ocarina of Time was launched
with built-in N64 Disk Drive compatibility and recognition, in addition
to being able to differentiate expansion-enabled files from regular
files.
Unfortunately for us, the N64 Disk Drive had horrible sales in Japan in
1999 and was sold to RANDnet, which eventually discontinued the
device. It never left Japan's shores.
Several years later, Nintendo released as part of a promotional campaign
Ocarina of Time Master Quest (called Ura-Zelda in Japan), claiming it to contain a previously-unreleased version of
Ocarina of Time
that was originally meant for the Disk Drive expansion. However,
all of the changes were in the arrangement of the dungeons. There
were no additional enemies, added sub-quests, new weapons, or
never-before-seen characters. If this had been released on a
disk, it wouldn't have used up more than a couple megabytes and would
have hardly justified using a disk!
Although there is some debate as to whether this was truly the N64 Disk Drive, the majority consensus here at ZSO is that the
Master Quest,
at best, was an additional feature that would have been provided on the
disk acting in a similar manner as the Second Quest did in the very
first Zelda game. If it isn't incomplete, it was a huge waste of
Nintendo's money.
Which unfortunately means that we really don't know what was intended to go into the expansion for
Ocarina of Time. It may have been
Majora's Mask, since it starts where
Ocarina of Time
ends, or it may have been a larger, better OOT with some of the more
mysterious minigames, sub-plots, and quests explained (running man,
anyone?). Who knows?
