YouTuber Hard4Games has done a massive exploration of the newly released re-creation of the Ocarina of Time Space World ’97 Beta Experience. This is a rebuild of the Ocarina of Time beta that was shown at the Nintendo Space World showcase back in, you guessed it, 1997. Parts of this early version of the game were thought to be lost until they were discovered in an overdump back in January of this year.
The information was on a development cartridge, then half overwritten by a build of F-Zero X, and extracted by Forest of Illusion. The extracted data included maps, textures, images, items, spells, and the script.
As Hard4Games explains, modders immediately jumped on this, recreating some of the map areas and making them explorable, but the game was not fully playable.
Not so anymore, thanks to the modding team led by Zel. The beta of Ocarina of Time has been rebuilt as much as they could from this data, along with information from the Gigaleak, and some custom content based on old videos and screenshots. Now, thanks to this incredible collaboration of modders, the Space World ’97 Beta Experience is fully playable once more.
It mirrors how the Space World ’97 demo actually played by having a location selection in place of the save files menu. These were areas that Nintendo wanted to showcase to the public at the expo, showcasing the game’s variety and technical achievements.
There is also an addition to the menu selection that was not included in the expo, where you can select all the other map areas and textures recovered and rebuilt by Zel and their team. This is an incredible addition and you can see just how much additional content has been saved. This also includes different versions of the same areas, with varying degrees of build completion, extracted from the overdump itself.
There are so many interesting differences between this beta re-creation and the final product of Ocarina of Time as we know it, in terms of aesthetics, physics, and even button mapping. Something that I wish Nintendo had kept in the final iteration of the game is a manual jump button, though I can’t imagine playing with it now. I know I’d just keep running right off the edges of platforms!
This beta build, an Ocarina of Time “demake” as Hard4Games puts it, will be something many gamers will be excited to dig into to explore just how different Zelda could have been.
