The fascinating discoveries behind the Zelda 64 beta project continue with a brand new interview from the MinnMax Show! The team recently interviewed Giles Goddard, a programmer who worked with Nintendo on the inside. Goddard partnered with the team to program various projects for the Nintendo 64, including Star Fox, Super Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time.
In its fledgling stages, Ocarina of Time was simply known as Zelda 64. In the interview, Goddard reminisced how he had developed remarkable portal technology in the source code of Zelda 64 that was years ahead of what the acclaimed title Portal would later rely on as a game mechanic. He even developed a demo to try out the innovation. The demo never reached the public eye, however, due to timing reasons for the game. Thus, no one outside of the Big N has known the portal mechanic was even possible for the Nintendo 64 — until now.
Goddard revealed to MinnMax that he rediscovered the source code recently in a routine backup session. “I found an old directory of source code that I backed up and it was the first map of Zelda 64 with Hyrule Castle,” Goddard recalled. “So I was doing all these experiments like you have a portal where you look through, go in, and then you get teleported to a different part of the map. You’d see through a door to a different part of the map, walk through it, then walk back through it. It was very cool tech and I had it running and showed some guys at the office who said, ‘You’ve got to put this on the internet.’ I said, ‘Well, I can’t really because it’s not my property, it’s Nintendo’s.’”
Goddard also explained how the portal mechanic worked in the prototype demo. Instead of a gun, like what Portal uses, Link would have a crystal that he could pick up and move around. The crystal would spin, and depending on where it spun, the player could see different areas of the Hyrule map, allowing the possibility of warping to other areas instantly.
“When I saw Portal, I thought, ‘I had that running on the N64. I should have released it then.’” He laughed in amazement at the prospect.
Portals were not the only technology in these demos of Zelda 64. Goddard also recalled light mapping and lighting effects, and even water reflections. The effects were a feat to pull off on 64 hardware, but were graphically intensive and slowed the program to an awkward crawl. By the time the demos were developed, Ocarina of Time was in its latter stages of development and the demos were separate from the game itself, predisposing the source code to be forgotten.
“It’s very hard to introduce later on in the game,” said Goddard. “It’s very easy at the start, but not later on.”
These and other juicy details can be found in MinnMax’s complete interview. In a time when new Zelda games continue to be made, it’s amazing how much information we can still learn and discover in the classics of yesteryear.
