English game programmer Giles Goddard is an instrumental games industry veteran, especially among Nintendo fans, having worked on Super Mario 64, Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, Steel Diver, and more. And back in May, he revealed to MinnMax that he had at one point worked on a demo for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time that involved portals — the same type of tech used in Valve’s Portal series, but a decade before Portal arrived. This Nintendo 64 tech demo had never seen the light of day before, but this morning, Giles Goddard finally released a short GIF teasing how portals could have worked in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Goddard estimates this build dates to sometime in 1996 or 1997, but he has evidently been reluctant to share more from these R&D demos due to the fact that all of this stuff is technically Nintendo’s property, even if he happens to still have copies of it. Incidentally, Goddard and his team also created the famous Spaceworld 1995 Zelda 64 demo with Link and the metallic enemy to show off the hardware’s graphical effects.
— Giles Goddard (@giles) November 2, 2021
So, we may not see more The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time tech demos with portals or anything else anytime soon. (Such things are what the Gigaleak is for, I suppose.) But for more about Giles Goddard, check out the time he pitched an ultra-realistic F-Zero game that Nintendo rejected — or how Shigeru Miyamoto wouldn’t stop smoking in his office during the development of Star Fox.
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