The treasures hidden in the past decades of the industry are true gems. Failed projects like the rescue of Dreamcast's Castlevania remind us that there is still a lot of history that we don't know.
One of the most interesting was revealed at the time by 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 that previous demo.
The developer's job was to test mechanics and functions of the console to see how far you could stretch your potentialFor example, he was responsible for the 1995 Spaceworld demo, which featured 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 “The first Zelda map for the Nintendo 64 with just Hyrule Castle,” Goddard explains.
You had a portal where you could look through it, walk in, and be teleported to another area of the map. You'd look through the door to a different part of the map, walk through it, and then walk back through it. It was pretty cool technology, I had it working, and I showed it to some guys in the office, and they were like, “You've got to put this on the internet,” and I was like, “Well, I can't, I don't actually own it, it's Nintendo's.”
However, as you all know, This feature never saw the light of day.. The truth is that the similarity with Portal, Valve's work, is evident and Goddard himself realized it years later.
When I saw Portal I thought “oh, I actually had that 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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In VidaExtra | The canceled Zeldas: these were the untold adventures of the Hero of Hyrule