The treasures that are hidden in the past decades of the industry are true jewels. Failed projects like the Dreamcast Castlevania rescue remind us that there’s still a lot of history we don’t know.
One of the most interesting has been revealed Giles Goddard, a former Nintendo programmer. Goddard was working on a demo of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 and revealed in an interview with MinnMax that he introduced a portal system during a previous demo.
The developer’s job was to test console mechanics and functions to see how far you could stretch your potential. For example, he was responsible for the 1995 Spaceworld demowhich features a dark-haired Link battling a metal knight.
While that piece exists in video form, what was never shown was another demo that included the use of portals. “I recently found an old source code directory that I had backed up, and it was the first map of the Zelda of Nintendo 64 only with the castle of Hyrule“, explica Goddard.
“You had a portal where you could look through it, walk in, and you’d be teleported to a different part of the map. You’d see through the door to a different part of the map, walk through it, and then go through it again. It was a very technology.” Well I had it working and I showed it to some guys in the office and they said ‘oh you have to put this on the internet’ and I said ‘well I can’t, actually it’s not mine it’s Nintendo “
However, as you all know, this feature never saw the light of day. The truth is that the similarity with Portal, the work of Valve, is evident and Goddard himself realized years later. “When I saw Portal I thought ‘oh actually I had it running on the Nintendo 64, I should have released it then!'” The reason portals didn’t become a reality was because it was really difficult to introduce new mechanics during development.
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