Seemingly overnight, the Nintendo fanbase has taken the internet by storm with a plethora of new screenshots, character models, sound bites, and other game assets flooding timelines everywhere thanks to the unraveling of data from a recent security breach at Nintendo.
Back in May, Nintendo revealed that a server hack at a Wii-era partner, BroadOn, resulted in hackers obtaining a wealth of legacy Nintendo data (i.e., data dating from the Wii to possibly as far back as the original NES). Data miners found most of the data, which was posted on various sites like 4Chan, to be corrupted or encrypted, and have been slowly chugging away at deciphering it since. As of this writing, last night seemed to be the night everything came together.
Content relating to Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Star Fox 64, Super Mario 64, and many, many others was unveiled to the public for the first time and caused quite an uproar as the source code for numerous N64 games was finally deciphered by hackers. Decompressed audio files and artwork began to flood Twitter, and we can finally hear the decompressed version of the infamous “Do a barrel roll!” from Star Fox 64. One of the most exciting pieces of information gleaned from all of this was the discovery that Luigi does, in fact, exist in Super Mario 64’s game files and is able to be pieced back together through careful manipulation of the data.
Most relevant and exciting to us here at Zelda Universe, however, are all of the leaks surrounding the N64 Legend of Zelda titles. As stated above, the leaks include information and files for Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, but they also contain content for Nintendo’s commercially failed N64 peripheral, the 64DD (64 Disk Drive). It’s fairly common knowledge at this point that there was originally intended to be an expansion to Ocarina of Time for the 64DD that ended up getting canceled due to the objective failure of the hardware add-on, which ended up leading to the creation of Majora’s Mask; however, this is the first time we’re really getting to see content from this scrapped project.
What seems to be prototype versions of Kokiri Forest, Gerudo Fortress, and possibly even Ganon’s Tower show us what Nintendo was toying around with during the earlier stages of development for some of our favorite games. Prototype areas constructed for the 64DD expansion also seem to have been remade into assets for Majora’s Mask rather than having been scrapped entirely. Why let all that hard work go to waste, right?
Watching the internet come together to share in the excitement of these previously unknown elements to their favorite games has been nothing short of wonderful. I’m sure Nintendo is abuzz trying to shut down the spread of their secrets, but I think we can all agree that having something that we can all come together and enjoy is precious and much needed in current times. There’s much more than we can cover here, and I highly recommend scrolling through Twitter and soaking in all the artwork, sound bites, character and location models, and — of course — the memes that have come about because of this. Your day will definitely be far improved.
