Japan got Ura Zelda GameCube disc before we got our Master Quest stateside, so I played through it in Japanese first. Zelda Gaiden would later be revealed as, you guessed it, Majora's Mask.Īt this point, Nintendo was probably sick of answering Ura Zelda questions and we all assumed the project had been canceled. In an interview in Famitsu Magazine in 1999, Nintendo squashed those rumors and confirmed that the two were distinct projects. Many rumors followed, including speculation about Ura Zelda moving to a lock-on cartridge a la Sonic 3 & Knuckles or having morphed into a new on-cartridge project codenamed Zelda Gaiden (Zelda Side-Story) that was to remix Ocarina of Time and feature new adventures with the same characters. This Ura Zelda 64DD add-on disk was to be released in 1999, a year after Ocarina of Time – in Japan, of course, as Nintendo of America had no plans to bring the disk drive to the US. In the future, I want some new areas and new dungeons to be available for players who have already finished Ocarina of Time, where they will find new challenges.” There is Another There were several ideas that I could not incorporate because of the time shortage and other reasons. More specifically, if you connect Zelda with the disk drive, an icon will appear on screen, announcing 'Ura-Zelda', or 'Another Zelda'. "Ocarina of Time has been designed with the disk drive system in mind. Miyamoto about the game in a 1998 interview and he shared: “Ura” being the Japanese word for “another” or “other side” – almost implying the B-Side of a hit single. “I think some people were disappointed, but some were happy-none more than myself!”Īs fans of Nintendo’s games, we were of course disappointed that we weren’t going to play what could’ve been, but we also didn’t have to wait long for another surprise when Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that an Ocarina of Time add-on adventure was in the works, code-named “Ura Zelda”. Yoshiaki Koizumi, who handled the animations system for Link is quoted to have said “I can't move my Link on the Nintendo 64DD” – and expressed relief that the game was moved to cartridge. “If there weren't many movements and you could fit them in the memory, you could read them to memory from the magnetic disk beforehand, but there were 500 patterns.” “ROM cartridges don't have moving mechanical parts, so you can retrieve motion data in an instant wherever it is, but with a magnetic disk, it takes time to move certain mechanical parts, so depending on where the data is, it takes time to retrieve it, so you couldn't make Link move,” Satoru Iwata said in his Iwata Asks column in 2011. Lukewarm reception of the 64DD, falling cartridge ROM prices, and some unexpected challenges with the drive’s load speed and seek time put the nail in the coffin of Link’s standalone DD adventure. Just a year later, Nintendo announced that Zelda 64 was going to release on cartridge instead. The dream of a persistent Hyrule didn’t last long. Here's my Nintendo 64DD - it attaches to the expansion slot of a (Japanese) Nintendo 64 and is able to front-load 64MB magnetic disks that can feature standalone games or expansions to cartridge titles. The latter became more of a focus when Nintendo finally showed off footage of what would become The Ocarina of Time a year later at Shoshinkai 1996 – including the confirmation that the anticipated Zelda sequel would be made exclusively for the 64DD. But it also highlighted the ability to create expansions for existing games and allow for more dynamic worlds. Nintendo promised that the drive would solve the storage limitations and cost issues some publishers – such as top SNES third-party publisher Square – were complaining about when Nintendo announced it would stick with cartridges as the storage format of choice with the N64. My connection with the Master Quest edition of one of my favorite games of all time goes back all the way to 1995 when Nintendo first teased its Nintendo 64 “bulky drive” add-on, known as the 64DD at its annual Shoshinkai Show in Japan. “ Nintendo's Doubly-Delayed Disk Drive Disaster 64
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