Thanks in part to the huge amount of
hype that built up right before the game was released, thousands of
hardcore fans right away delved into the game, hoping to uncover the
secret to getting the Triforce. Thousands of rumors spread across
the Internet at light speed, and virtually every fansite was doing its
part to discover more stuff in the game. One of the
earliest discoveries was none other than the Crooked Cartridge glitch.
Discovered in other games prior to
Ocarina of Time, the Crooked
Cartridge glitch is where you slowly lift the cartridge out of the slot
while the N64 is on. As soon as you had enough room, you would
lift up on the left side of the cartridge only until the pins on that
side no longer touch. At this point, the sound, Link, and
numerous other things get
very glitchy. Leaving an area
or doing anything that required a lot of reading from the cartridge
would guarantee a game crash, and it was pretty hard avoiding crashes
at any rate. But if done successfully, it would let you walk
through various barriers far earlier than you were supposed to, which
meant leaving Kokiri Forest with nothing but an ocarina.
As many soon discovered, the Crooked Cartridge glitch was more
dangerous than useful. The tricks you could do with it weren't
terribly useful or helpful, and you could easily corrupt your
savefiles, delete them, or worst of all, damage the game and/or
N64. Typically, this sort of damage would be along the lines of
the game taking many, many tries before it works, or the N64 crashing
randomly. Worst case scenario, you'd have to replace both the
game and the N64.
The dreaded "I am so dead" screen that one frequently saw with Crooked Cartridge
Some popular sites at the time included TriforceGuy's ADD-riddled investigations and
Zelda: The Legacy.
