Yoshiaki Koizumi, who built Link's model for Ocarina of Time, at the Montreal International Games Summit, 2007. Photo SIJM MIGS, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
What it took directly
- statedZ-targeting (Ocarina of Time's lock-on) took from a samurai sword-fight show at Toei Kyoto Studio Park, where the ruffians attack the hero one at a time"Watching that show at the studio park was a clue toward solving that problem. Z-targeting flags one particular opponent, telling the other enemies to wait." Yoshiaki Koizumi, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011). Director Toru Osawa, on the same trip, remembers a different show: a ninja's sickle-and-chain
- statedOcarina of Time took from Takao Shimizu's chanbara (sword-fighting) demo, shown at E3 in 1996"So I took it over, and Shimizu-san told me some things he wanted me to do. He wanted me to make a Zelda game with chanbara-style action." Toru Osawa, director, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- statedNavi took from Koizumi's "Fairy Navigation System", a fairy that replaced a plain triangle targeting marker"I called it the Fairy Navigation System, took it to Osawa-san, and asked, "How's this?" He immediately said, "Let's name it Navi." Because she navigates!" Yoshiaki Koizumi, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- statedEpona (Link's horse) took from Epona, the horse goddess of Celtic mythology"Epona is the goddess of horses and fertility in Celtic mythology, so I used that." Yoshiaki Koizumi, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- documentedHyrule Field took from Epona: the horse came first, and the big field was built around her"Epona wasn’t the solution to the sheer size of Ocarina’s playable space — Hyrule’s ponderous field was built in her wake." Mark Serrels, Kotaku Australia (2013), from an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto
What it learned to do
- statedOcarina of Time learned from Super Mario 64: the memos of unfinished ideas Koizumi kept while making it"The Super Mario 64 project had passed by incredibly quickly, so a lot that I wanted had gone undone and I wanted to pour all those leftover ideas into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." Yoshiaki Koizumi, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- statedLink (the 3D player character) learned from Yoshiaki Koizumi, who had worked on player characters since the Mario games"This team included myself, Mr. Yoshiaki Koizumi who has worked on player characters since the days of Mario, and the head programmer." Shigeru Miyamoto, keynote at the Game Developers Conference, March 1999 (transcribed by IGN)
- statedOcarina of Time's cut scenes learned from Takumi Kawagoe, a programmer and film fan who edited them like theatrical movies"Kawagoe-san was a programmer, but he's a big movie fan, so he was really interested in film editing and dramatic scenes. I asked him to make some full-blown video cuts like for theatrical movies." Shigeru Miyamoto, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- statedHyrule Field's music learned from Koji Kondo's eight-measure "components", shuffled so the field never plays the same song twice"I thought about what I could do to have different music playing whenever you listened to it, and eventually I created several eight-measure "components" to play randomly." Koji Kondo, composer, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- documentedOcarina of Time learned from chanbara: Japanese sword-fighting drama, the project's founding theme"but it began with the single theme of making a Zelda game that included chanbara-style swashbuckling!" Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president, summing up the original team's account in Iwata Asks (2011)
The tradition it sits in
- statedOcarina of Time comes from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which Koizumi and Miyamoto had tried rebuilding in polygons"before Super Mario 64, I had actually been making Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in polygons with Miyamoto-san." Yoshiaki Koizumi, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- statedNavi (the name) comes from the Zelda series' habit of names that say what a thing does"I thought I should name her that way out of respect for The Legend of Zelda naming tradition." Toru Osawa, director, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
- inferredOcarina of Time's swordplay comes from Japanese period drama, as staged at Toei's film studios in Kyoto"Part of Toei's film studios in Kyoto open to the public as a theme park where visitors can see period drama sets and shows." inferred — the team names chanbara as its starting theme and went to Toei Kyoto Studio Park for ideas; nobody in the interview calls period drama the game's lineage
Where the whole form comes from
- statedThe horse in Ocarina of Time comes from the cowboy Westerns Shigeru Miyamoto grew up with"I suppose because we grew up with (cowboy) Westerns." Shigeru Miyamoto, in Iwata Asks (Nintendo, 2011)
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