Re-creating a Classic: A Conceptual Expansion of the Gameplay, Mechanics, Story, and Themes of The…

Re-creating a Classic: A Conceptual Expansion of the Gameplay, Mechanics, Story, and Themes of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Part One: Childhood Revisited

Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a classic work, part of the fabric of gaming history. Many of the things we take for granted in modern gaming can be traced back to the innovations this game introduced. As I write this, Ocarina of Time has long been considered to be one of the most well-loved and influential games ever to have been produced, and, as I mentioned in the landing page for this project, 27 years after its original release, it has recently been announced that a full remake of the game is on the way.

If I were so inclined, I could easily write pages of notes on how this game revolutionised the world of gaming, and why it was loved by generations of gamers and critics and developers alike.

But most of that has already been written. No sense writing it again.

Instead, I’m going to rewrite the game.

…

Imagine a world without Ocarina of Time. It simply never existed. Yet, somehow, all the innovations and developments in game design that this game helped to promote happened anyway. We have the modern world of gaming, but Ocarina’s spot in history was filled by something else, some other franchise, or a group of independent titles released about the same time. And then, in this world without Ocarina, some developer has a meeting at Nintendo, where they pitch a new title idea.

The developer hands them a draft version of the game script, and a low-resolution playtest version of the game their team have been working on that looks like it was designed during the Nintendo 64 era.

It’s a puzzle-solving action adventure, dealing with the themes of growing up and maturing. It’s a standard Overcoming the Monster plot, with our hero setting out to confront the Big Bad. However, in travelling to each of the separate areas of the world his horizons expand, and he makes important friendships that will develop throughout the game as he matures. They’ll start off as fairly simplistic, childish ideas, and eventually grow into deeper, more mature, understandings and themes. Our hero needs these relationships to grow into the mature adult hero he needs to be to defeat the Ganondorf, the King of Evil, but it’s not quite as simple as he thinks it’s going to be. After the initial phase of success, where he sets out into the world, conquering the monsters in the dungeons and gaining respect for his actions, he will return to confront the big bad, only to be outwitted into furthering his goal to take over the Kingdom of Hyrule, the game’s setting.

From then on, we’re in the Nightmare Stage of the plot, where the big bad takes control, and remakes the kingdom in his own image. The world becomes dark and dismal, dangerous, isolated. The people the hero has come to care about are plunged into a world of evil, from which there appears to be no escape. The familiar locations our hero travelled through are twisted and warped, the people in the various towns and locales he visited have to deal with a frightening new reality, where Ganondorf is in charge and he silences anyone who dares to oppose him.

In order to defeat the King of Evil, the hero must overcome more trials, and in doing so gain the maturity he needs to overcome evil. But he cannot do it alone. He needs those relationships he built in the first part of the game. Each of his relationships is tied in with at least one of the trials he must face, and, as he quickly learns, each time he overcomes the trials one of his friends is awakened as the Sage of the Temple he has cleared.

He needs the Sages' power to defeat the Big Bad, but the catch is every Sage he awakens must stay in the Sacred Realm and have no more to do with the mortal world. Because he comes to know that his time with his friends is short, the relationships our hero holds become increasingly precious to him. However, he also comes to accept his duty is to protect the happiness of the world by defeating Ganondorf and freeing the people from the yoke of his control. Just because things are different, doesn’t mean the friendship is gone, and it is those lasting bonds he formed which will eventually give the hero the power to finally defeat Ganondorf and bring peace back to Hyrule.

Each victory is also a loss, but each loss is a stepping stone to a greater victory that was worth the price he had to pay to obtain it.

Underlying all of this, there’s a time travel mechanic. Our hero begins as a child, and defeats the Big Bad as an adult, and has the unique ability to travel forwards and backwards between those two times at will. He can literally revisit his childhood friends, his old time, with a more mature understanding. Our hero could, in principle, save them from their impending fate, and not just them but the whole world. But in reality it is only when he lets go of the past, and his naïve childhood dreams of keeping each friendship in the same state it always was, that he gains the power to defeat evil. It’s only in coming to understand himself, and his friends, that they can have victory, even if that means that the relationships that they used to have is no longer available to them.

…

Well, those Nintendo executives read the script, play the game, and decide, yes, they like the pitch. They especially like how willing this developer is to accept that his game will need to undergo conceptual revision for them to be able to justify releasing it onto the market. They greenlight the new project, The Ocarina of Time, and assign the developer a dedicated studio and all the resources he’ll need, as well as a project supervisor to help bring out the full potential of his initial vision.

The game this developer pitched really attracted our attention, so we want to give it every chance of succeeding. That’s where I come in. My job is to make sure the script and gameplay design is top-notch. I’m the guy who helps the developer to iron out their narrative and characters and concepts, before we send the game off to the other stages of production.

That’s the fiction.

Now, this is a thought experiment, I’m not actually going to produce a playable game at the end of this project. I’m just playing around with the concepts and ideas, seeing what I can do with them, in the same way there’s a thriving community of players doing speed, glitch, limited item, or three-heart runs. It’s all about finding a new way to have fun with the game.

I’m not really going to write this project as though I’m literally talking to the developer of the game, that’s just a frame. My real audience is, of course, the actual audience, you, and readers of my work generally.

I assume you know the game. You’ve played it, or you’ve watched somebody play it, or at least read a walkthrough once. If you haven’t, that’s fine, but I’m going to pretend you know the game as well as I do, and I’m sharing my ideas on how to improve it on that basis.

This is going to be more or less a stream-of-consciousness style first draft, and then I’ll be seeing how I can improve my ideas as I go. So, basically everything I say is provisional, my only absolute requirement is that the game must, at all times, deliver the same basic experience as the original. I’m trying to make a more expansive Ocarina of Time, not a completely different game. It still needs to be recognisably Legend of Zelda.

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Sound like fun? Alright, let’s get started, then.

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