Ocarina of Time might be the first video game where I obsessively followed its development. It was a pre-cursor to games culture today where we pore over video footage, speculate and — for want of a better terms — get hype. But back then it was screenshots.
This is a collection of screenshots from the development of Ocarina of Time, right from the start until close to release. What's so interesting to me is how dramatically the game changed during its development. Ocarina of Time seemingly took ages to come. I remember delay upon delay upon delay. I think being so close to it all back then, watching it all play out over such a long period of time, it was difficult to really see how it was evolving and transforming into the landmark game it would become.
Even today I find the development of Ocarina of Time fascinating. I was lucky enough to spend some time chatting to Miyamoto about the process of making the game, and it always struck me as a time where new ideas were being created every single day, where the foundations of modern game development was being invented on the fly. It must have been an incredible time. Back then it seems like Nintendo were a little less stringent when it came to showing off games in progress, which is why there are so many early screenshots of Zelda. I doubt we'll ever see this kind of history in progress from a Nintendo game again.
You can check out the full collection of screenshots here. There are almost 50 of them!
This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia , where Mark Serrels is the Editor. You can follow him on Twitter if you're into that sort of thing.