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Back in May we shared an interesting nugget of information from Giles Goddard relating to a pre-Ocarina of Time ‘Zelda 64’ demo. Goddard is well known for moving to Japan on the ’90s alongside Dylan Cuthbert to assist Nintendo and produce games like Star Fox; he did some notable work on visual technology in the N64 era such as producing the Mario face that can be manipulated in Super Mario 64. He got our attention earlier this year when he described an early Legend of Zelda demo on the N64 that utilised a portal concept.
He described working on the concept when producing R&D work for the hardware. Like the core mechanic that drove Valve’s Portal to extraordinary popularity, the idea was to view an area through a portal and step through, being immediately transported.
Replying to a query on Twitter, Goddard has now shared a very brief GIF of the demo in action; it shows a first-person perspective and the character stepping into a crystal.
It’s intriguing to see in action, though as Goddard stated earlier in the year R&D stages for game engines often have ideas like this that never find a way into the end product. In a follow up tweet he explains that it incorporated an Ocarina of Time environment because “they were making Ocarina around the same time as SM64 and I think I just asked one of the artists for some test data for my portal / lightmap / mirror tech demo.”
Notably, he seems to also rule out any kind of wholesale sharing of the tech demo, stating that “technically I shouldn’t have any of these backups”.
It’s fun to see the clip, in any case; let us know in the comments if you’d have liked to see the concept make it into the final game way back in the day.
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