Ocarina of Time Has Been Sold to Me Nine Times, and Only One Version Taught Me Anything

The first time I saw the Ocarina of Time title screen I was standing in a shop, holding a controller tethered to a kiosk by a cable too short to stand comfortably, watching a horse gallop across a field to a piano. I didn't know you were supposed to catch her. I thought it was a cutscene that would never end.

That was 1998. Sometime in the next week, Nintendo will hand me the same game again on Switch 2. Between those two moments, Ocarina of Time has been sold to me about nine times. The count is the interesting part.

N64, 1998. Gray cartridge. The save file I lost when a friend pulled the cart out mid-save because he thought the light was a battery indicator and he was helping.

GameCube, 2003, twice. Master Quest shipped as a pre-order bonus for The Wind Waker — mirrored world, redesigned dungeons. The Collector's Edition disc bundled it with Zelda I, II, and Majora's Mask. Both were pack-ins. Nintendo has almost never sold this game on a disc it didn't already have to fill.

iQue Player, 2003. China only. A controller with the console inside it, flash memory, games pulled down at kiosks. Almost nobody reading this has held one. That version isn't a footnote — it's a whole alternate history of how Nintendo could have sold games, in a market it otherwise walked away from.

Wii Virtual Console, 2007. 1200 points. Wii U Virtual Console, 2015. $9.99. Switch, 2021, inside the Expansion Pack. 3DS, 2011 — Ocarina of Time 3D by Grezzo, the only one that's a genuine remaster: boots, textures, and a Water Temple that finally marks its water levels on the map. Switch 2, now. The source article calls it the second time Nintendo has rolled out a remake on different hardware, which means the 3DS was the first, and I don't yet know what shape this one takes. I'm not going to pretend I do.

Nine times. Here's the opinion: only one of those versions taught me anything.

Master Quest is the one. It assumes you know the layout and then turns it inside out. Mirror the world, move the puzzles, leave the enemies alone. It doesn't make the game harder the way a difficulty slider makes a game harder — it makes your memory worthless. I could run the Deku Tree in my sleep. Master Quest put me in rooms I'd cleared a dozen times and I didn't know which wall was real.

That idea — the second pass that reorganizes instead of inflating — is everywhere now. Scholar of the First Sin moved Dark Souls II's enemies around to make veterans re-learn a map they'd memorized. Pokémon remakes reshuffle the dex so the route you knew has different things standing on it. Master Quest was doing this on a GameCube pack-in in 2003, and most people never finished it, because it was a bonus disc and bonus discs get one evening. That's not a failure. That's a game for a smaller audience doing something the main release couldn't afford to.

Small thing, and then I'll stop: the drum fill on the file select screen. Every version has it. Every version I've booted, the drum hits, and I'm eleven again holding a controller too big for my hands.

I own four of the nine. I've finished two. I set the Wii U version down after an hour and I don't feel bad about it — I'll go back.

What I want from Switch 2 isn't a fourth texture pass. I want to know what this game looks like made by people who grew up on Breath of the Wild's openness. Maybe it's just a sharper N64 game in 4K, and honestly, that's fine — that'll be somebody's first Ocarina, and it'll be the best one they ever play.

"How many do you own" is a fun question and a bad measure. Someone owns exactly one, on a 3DS they still charge, and that's the whole relationship. Ocarina of Time doesn't need your collection. It needs your one playthrough.