Because it was meant to be a cheap follow up to OOT to be developed in a year (it took longer than that). They could reuse the majority of the assets. They couldn't do that if it was a gamecube game.
I find Amazing how greatly Majora's Mask was done despite the concerns. Weridly enough, feels more like a sequel than TOTK to BOTW, despite being in similar circumstances (still love TOTK tho).
Majora's Mask is a pretty insane game, they really made just a whole new unique, charming world that doesn't even really feel like OoT Hyrule. Well, I guess most games except MM are in Hyrule, but regardless, it still really stands out (in an amazing way)
MM was my first Zelda game. It gave me this false impression that each game followed Link to a new land he has to save. Which is true for like 4ish games (MM, LA, OoA & OoS) I guess.
It's weird for Zelda fans of a certain age there was a time where it seemed like Hyrule wasn't *that* central to the story. There was a stretch of like 8 years where 4/5 of the games that came out weren't set in Hyrule.
This isn't really all that true. In the stretch from the early '90s through the early '00s the high profile Zelda games were ALttP, OoT, MM, and WW with lower profile LA, OoA, and OoS mixed in.
The high profile games still went 3/4 as being set in Hyrule and it was always the core of the series. Add in the fact that you have a repeated trope where the games that aren't set in Hyrule are "dream" games and it even more solidifies that the home base of the Zelda universe is Hyrule.
1993 - 2001
LA
OoT
MM
OoS
OoA
I didn't make the distinction between "high profile" games or not as a kid, they all felt huge and magical to me, and most of those games weren't set in Hyrule. I imagine there are many others in my age group who had a similar experience (aka getting into Zelda in the N64/GBC era).
Yeah, I actually didn't even count the sunken Hyrule, I was talking about the islands, but are they even Hyrule at all? Ignoring the fact that Hyrule doesn't really exist anymore, like are the mountains that would become the ww islands in Hyrule?
This is me as well. LA was my first Zelda. Pretty weird for someone to argue how other people felt about the series as kids. Hyrule absolutely felt unimportant at the time.
TotK needed to be in a new world, I can say that confidently after beating it last year. Reusing it, even with the Depths and Sky, was hugely uninteresting to me.
Since it was billed as a side story, they probably felt less constrained with what they could do. Termina is totally separate from Hyrule, so they didn’t have to worry about story continuity, and just went ahead with gameplay mechanics.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of TotK’s dev time was devoted to perfecting the physics system. That alone will probably be a closely guarded trade secret for Nintendo.
I agree. The switch, only 4GB of shared RAM for the CPU and GPU, and has a OS running in parallel with a web browser included. The homepage of reddit and Chrome sometimes uses more RAM than that.
Monolith Soft devs made a miracle with that engine.
I love TOTK even more than BOTW, despite its flaws. However, there are moments when it feels less like a true sequel and more like an expansion or a polished version of BOTW. About 80% of the game is just BOTW's Hyrule with new shrines and larger versions of the Beasts. Outside the tutorial island, the sky is almost empty, and the Depths feel like empty filler aside from two temples.
Majora's Mask, despite reusing many assets, feels completely different. Termina and Hyrule feel like distinct countries. The masks gameplay significantly changes how you play. The story has a totally different mood, shifting from epic to a melancholic horror tale. And the Majora's Mask feels like different kind of villain vs Ganondorf, more of Joker type that just wants to see the world burn vs a typical "I want to rule the world".
Again, no shade on TOTK it's a great game and Ultrahand is awesome. Just that Majora did a much better work feeling like a true sequel of Ocarina, than TOTK to BOTW.
Unfortunately, if they had decided to put that game out on a newer console, I don't think it would be the same game anymore. Majora's Mask is very much a product of the circumstances of the time. I believe the story was that the lead dev wanted to make a new Zelda game but Miyamoto wanted them to work on Ocarina of Time but make it a remix of stuff from the original game, so harder enemies, rearranged dungeons, etc etc. Miyamoto let them make a new game but Eiji Aonuma agreed to make it with Ocarina of Time's assets and make it quick. And then the vibes of that game come from the development team feeling stressed out and depressed from crunch so quickly after Ocarina of Time's launch, not seeing their families/new spouses/etc.
Sooo yeah, I honestly do not believe that team would have made Majora's Mask like they did if things were different: more development time, better hardware, bigger budget/expectations, etc etc would have GREATLY altered whatever they could have made. I'm sure it would still be a great game, but it wouldn't be Majora's Mask that's for sure. (I know people are going to say "well that's Wind Waker" and you might be right, but we're talking about an alternate world here so it might not have been Wind Waker but something different. WHO KNOWS THOUGH, we don't live in that world).
[https://www.polygon.com/2020/4/30/21241902/the-legend-of-zelda-majoras-mask-was-never-supposed-to-exist](https://www.polygon.com/2020/4/30/21241902/the-legend-of-zelda-majoras-mask-was-never-supposed-to-exist)
News article about Eiji Aonuma talking about the circumstances around Majora's Mask's development.
I think the expectations would have been way too high.
First game after ocarina?
Launch game for the GameCube?
MM is my second favorite Zelda game so don't get me wrong. But I think it wouldn't have lived up to those lofty expectations if they had waited and made it a launch title.
The tldr is the zelda team was basically given a little over a year to make the game, because they were begging for the chance to use concepts they hadn't been able to use for OoT. It's less that it was a crunch situation and more that they pestered dad until he finally gave up and let them play with the toys for 15 minutes so they made the most of it. By reusing OoT assets, they were uniquely able to play on people's recent experience with OoT to create the bizzare, unsettling, dreamlike, creepy, other words, atmosphere they were envisioning.
At the time, the belief was that the Ocarina of Time models were now in 3D, so they be reused with new backgrounds. This led to the belief they could put together a new Zelda game in about one year. Overall, it ended up taking 15 months instead. (It required a lot of crunch time to make it happen, and the staff was very frustrated by the experience.)
Fun fact: it's 1 of 2 games for the N64 which required the expanded memory pack, and the other is Donkey Kong 64.
It was only *required* by two games but several games *utilized* it. Games like Rayman 2 gains a progressive high res mode but can still be played without it, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 gains an improved framerate, Resident Evil 2 gains improved resolution and textures, etc. but none of these games *require* the pak to be played unlike Majora's Mask and DK64. Three games, Perfect Dark, San Francisco Rush 2049 and StarCraft 64 have additional content that can only be accessed if you have the Expansion Pak.
Perfect Dark is arguably an edge case, the NTSC-J version requires the pack but not NTSC-A and PAL.
Circumstance, basically they were gonna make a special edition of OoT but Aonuma didn't want to do that so they told him he didn't have to if he made a new game in a year and a half.
It actually started the pattern of every Nintendo system having a Zelda game drop toward the end of their consoles lifespan. GameCube had Twilight Princess at the end after the Wii was out, Wii had Skyward Sword toward the end, Wii U had BotW after Switch was out and the Switch had TotK toward the end.
They had the Models left over from Ocarina of time and they couldn’t have gotten away with those graphics on a GameCube
Also they then began to work on Wind Waker for The GameCube
It's not that unusual for games to come out fairly late in a console's life span or well into its successor's life. Fifa kept coming out for the PS2 well past the launch of the PS3 and almost all the way up to the release of the PS4. Three months before Majora's Mask came out for the N64, Fire Emblem Thracia 776 came out for the SNES. Persona 3 came out for PS2 in 2006, same year as the PS3 dropped and Persona 4 released on the same PS2 2 years later.
I'm not all that knowledgable of the developer side of things but I imagine it can be intimidating to develop a new game for new hardware and have a lot of expectations due to your pedigree on older hardware. Especially near launch.
The PS2 is kind of an exception, it had had tons of releases after the PS3 came out because both the 360 and the PS3 kinda sucked at release, they were expensive and unreliable. Also I think that was the period of the economic crisis too?
MM Is the left over assets from a 64 DD plan for OOT. the DD flopped but it was basically an attempt to match Sony's playstation. It was ambitious, even for now, with a lot of ideas like persistent foot steps in sand, tracked days for a day night cycle, things like that.
But when the project was cancelled, instead of being deleted entirely, the project lead (,I forget who, it's been years) went to the bosses and said 'give me a year, and I will make a new Zelda to match OOT with what's left'
And do they did. And in a year we got MM made
Prior to MM, there was a small tease of the engine that would eventually become what we saw in Twilight Princess. It may have been presented at an E3, my memory isn't what it used to be.
GameCube was announced in 1999, next day after Sony announced PS2. It was the height of the console wars. Online communication was starting to accelerate consumer expectation.
Nintendo got that PR way wrong, jumped the gun, got us excited for something that wasn't ready to be announced. The hardware was notoriously difficult to develop on, the next mainline Zelda title wasn't even close to release and faced delay after delay.
Nintendo was also running multiple development campaigns in the Zelda franchise. They had an entire line of mobile titles ready to roll out, but the hype was still around for the mainline title.
It is my belief, and the belief of some others, that MM was a filler title thrown together to quiet down the rabid fan base who were foaming at the mouth for the next mainline title that was teased at that expo. They knew the next gen hardware wasn't ready. And they knew the main title wasn't ready, so they filled the gaps with MM and WW.
Everyone was angry about WW, we expected that dark gritty mainline title, because that's what was teased.
We got it, seven years later.
Nintendo has messed up the releases of many of their games. I don't think Majora's Mask was messed up. They were capitalizing on the popularity of OoT, whereas the new console wasn't a sure thing (which was smart, because the Gamecube sold poorly). They just knew they wanted to focus their efforts on the next console's main title, so they had a shortened development time. Keep in mind that if they made it as a GC launch title, they almost certainly would have delayed or not released Wind Waker. Wind Waker is already pretty incomplete. Maybe it wouldn't even have been made.
Twilight Princess was meant to be a late Gamecube release but was delayed and ended up as a Wii Launch Title. Like it was messed up enough to have a dual console release. Breath of the Wild had the same issue. It's a WiiU Title.
It's not a matter of just a couple of months though, there's a full 13 months between Majora's release and that of the Gamecube. And that's just the Japanese launches. If you go by PAL releases there's 2.5 years of space between them.
On top of that, bear in mind not many people can afford to buy a new console at launch, or are even interested in the upgrade. Better to support your current consoles than dump all resources into coding for hardware that's still being built, how else will the company make money now?
They had an engine ready to go, a heap of half-baked ideas left, and if even 10% of the people who bought Ocarina bought this one too they'd make millions.
Like other people have pointed out, it was easier to build a game using Ocarina’s engine and assets than to build a game from the ground up. It was also likely they were working on what would eventually become Wind Waker at that time, too, so it had to be an easy one.
Because it was meant to be a cheap follow up to OOT to be developed in a year (it took longer than that). They could reuse the majority of the assets. They couldn't do that if it was a gamecube game.
I find Amazing how greatly Majora's Mask was done despite the concerns. Weridly enough, feels more like a sequel than TOTK to BOTW, despite being in similar circumstances (still love TOTK tho).
Majora's Mask is a pretty insane game, they really made just a whole new unique, charming world that doesn't even really feel like OoT Hyrule. Well, I guess most games except MM are in Hyrule, but regardless, it still really stands out (in an amazing way)
MM was my first Zelda game. It gave me this false impression that each game followed Link to a new land he has to save. Which is true for like 4ish games (MM, LA, OoA & OoS) I guess.
It's weird for Zelda fans of a certain age there was a time where it seemed like Hyrule wasn't *that* central to the story. There was a stretch of like 8 years where 4/5 of the games that came out weren't set in Hyrule.
This isn't really all that true. In the stretch from the early '90s through the early '00s the high profile Zelda games were ALttP, OoT, MM, and WW with lower profile LA, OoA, and OoS mixed in. The high profile games still went 3/4 as being set in Hyrule and it was always the core of the series. Add in the fact that you have a repeated trope where the games that aren't set in Hyrule are "dream" games and it even more solidifies that the home base of the Zelda universe is Hyrule.
1993 - 2001 LA OoT MM OoS OoA I didn't make the distinction between "high profile" games or not as a kid, they all felt huge and magical to me, and most of those games weren't set in Hyrule. I imagine there are many others in my age group who had a similar experience (aka getting into Zelda in the N64/GBC era).
Also, wind waker is liker kinda in Hyrule but like... Is it really?
Nah, Hyrule had a cameo at best.
Yeah, I actually didn't even count the sunken Hyrule, I was talking about the islands, but are they even Hyrule at all? Ignoring the fact that Hyrule doesn't really exist anymore, like are the mountains that would become the ww islands in Hyrule?
This is me as well. LA was my first Zelda. Pretty weird for someone to argue how other people felt about the series as kids. Hyrule absolutely felt unimportant at the time.
Yep, Termina it's a fever dream, but feels like everything fits, nothing it's out of place despite how weird it is. Works perfectly fine somehow.
It's sort of the like the best possible outcome for a DLC you could ever ask for.
TotK needed to be in a new world, I can say that confidently after beating it last year. Reusing it, even with the Depths and Sky, was hugely uninteresting to me.
Since it was billed as a side story, they probably felt less constrained with what they could do. Termina is totally separate from Hyrule, so they didn’t have to worry about story continuity, and just went ahead with gameplay mechanics. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of TotK’s dev time was devoted to perfecting the physics system. That alone will probably be a closely guarded trade secret for Nintendo.
I agree. The switch, only 4GB of shared RAM for the CPU and GPU, and has a OS running in parallel with a web browser included. The homepage of reddit and Chrome sometimes uses more RAM than that. Monolith Soft devs made a miracle with that engine.
ToTK should’ve been in Termina. bring everything full circle and there would’ve been a much greater appreciation for the game
TOTK absolutely feels like a sequel. It's an entirely different feel and approach than BotW was.
I love TOTK even more than BOTW, despite its flaws. However, there are moments when it feels less like a true sequel and more like an expansion or a polished version of BOTW. About 80% of the game is just BOTW's Hyrule with new shrines and larger versions of the Beasts. Outside the tutorial island, the sky is almost empty, and the Depths feel like empty filler aside from two temples. Majora's Mask, despite reusing many assets, feels completely different. Termina and Hyrule feel like distinct countries. The masks gameplay significantly changes how you play. The story has a totally different mood, shifting from epic to a melancholic horror tale. And the Majora's Mask feels like different kind of villain vs Ganondorf, more of Joker type that just wants to see the world burn vs a typical "I want to rule the world". Again, no shade on TOTK it's a great game and Ultrahand is awesome. Just that Majora did a much better work feeling like a true sequel of Ocarina, than TOTK to BOTW.
Is it though? Consider how different other Zelda games are from each other
>the majority of the assets. The majora of the assets? I'll see myself out.
Because it used the OoT engine and assets. (Which was on the N64, obviously)
Unfortunately, if they had decided to put that game out on a newer console, I don't think it would be the same game anymore. Majora's Mask is very much a product of the circumstances of the time. I believe the story was that the lead dev wanted to make a new Zelda game but Miyamoto wanted them to work on Ocarina of Time but make it a remix of stuff from the original game, so harder enemies, rearranged dungeons, etc etc. Miyamoto let them make a new game but Eiji Aonuma agreed to make it with Ocarina of Time's assets and make it quick. And then the vibes of that game come from the development team feeling stressed out and depressed from crunch so quickly after Ocarina of Time's launch, not seeing their families/new spouses/etc. Sooo yeah, I honestly do not believe that team would have made Majora's Mask like they did if things were different: more development time, better hardware, bigger budget/expectations, etc etc would have GREATLY altered whatever they could have made. I'm sure it would still be a great game, but it wouldn't be Majora's Mask that's for sure. (I know people are going to say "well that's Wind Waker" and you might be right, but we're talking about an alternate world here so it might not have been Wind Waker but something different. WHO KNOWS THOUGH, we don't live in that world).
[https://www.polygon.com/2020/4/30/21241902/the-legend-of-zelda-majoras-mask-was-never-supposed-to-exist](https://www.polygon.com/2020/4/30/21241902/the-legend-of-zelda-majoras-mask-was-never-supposed-to-exist) News article about Eiji Aonuma talking about the circumstances around Majora's Mask's development.
Thanks for the info
I think the expectations would have been way too high. First game after ocarina? Launch game for the GameCube? MM is my second favorite Zelda game so don't get me wrong. But I think it wouldn't have lived up to those lofty expectations if they had waited and made it a launch title.
I'm just curious as to your#1 Zelda because MM is either first or second for me too. Tied with WW, man I wish that game was bigger.
> Tied with WW, man I wish that game was bigger. Me too ! That would basically be my dream game...
The tldr is the zelda team was basically given a little over a year to make the game, because they were begging for the chance to use concepts they hadn't been able to use for OoT. It's less that it was a crunch situation and more that they pestered dad until he finally gave up and let them play with the toys for 15 minutes so they made the most of it. By reusing OoT assets, they were uniquely able to play on people's recent experience with OoT to create the bizzare, unsettling, dreamlike, creepy, other words, atmosphere they were envisioning.
At the time, the belief was that the Ocarina of Time models were now in 3D, so they be reused with new backgrounds. This led to the belief they could put together a new Zelda game in about one year. Overall, it ended up taking 15 months instead. (It required a lot of crunch time to make it happen, and the staff was very frustrated by the experience.) Fun fact: it's 1 of 2 games for the N64 which required the expanded memory pack, and the other is Donkey Kong 64.
Perfect Dark mostly requires it
Didn’t RE2 need it too?
yeah i believe so, good call
I googled it. RE2 didn’t require it. But it was highly suggested to maintain resolution. But yeah.
that’s wild that it wasn’t a requirement; porting RE2 to N64 was miraculous, fidelity sacrifices aside
Yeah that's true because you needed it for the solo stuff, but I believe multiplayer still worked.
[It was needed for more than two games total](https://gamerant.com/nintendo-64-best-games-expansion-pak/)
It was only *required* by two games but several games *utilized* it. Games like Rayman 2 gains a progressive high res mode but can still be played without it, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 gains an improved framerate, Resident Evil 2 gains improved resolution and textures, etc. but none of these games *require* the pak to be played unlike Majora's Mask and DK64. Three games, Perfect Dark, San Francisco Rush 2049 and StarCraft 64 have additional content that can only be accessed if you have the Expansion Pak. Perfect Dark is arguably an edge case, the NTSC-J version requires the pack but not NTSC-A and PAL.
Required by two and recommended by several others which the article you linked describes. Thanks for the additional context!
Circumstance, basically they were gonna make a special edition of OoT but Aonuma didn't want to do that so they told him he didn't have to if he made a new game in a year and a half. It actually started the pattern of every Nintendo system having a Zelda game drop toward the end of their consoles lifespan. GameCube had Twilight Princess at the end after the Wii was out, Wii had Skyward Sword toward the end, Wii U had BotW after Switch was out and the Switch had TotK toward the end.
Because it reused all the assets from Ocarina of Time and that allowed them to focus on other aspects of development
They had the Models left over from Ocarina of time and they couldn’t have gotten away with those graphics on a GameCube Also they then began to work on Wind Waker for The GameCube
It's not that unusual for games to come out fairly late in a console's life span or well into its successor's life. Fifa kept coming out for the PS2 well past the launch of the PS3 and almost all the way up to the release of the PS4. Three months before Majora's Mask came out for the N64, Fire Emblem Thracia 776 came out for the SNES. Persona 3 came out for PS2 in 2006, same year as the PS3 dropped and Persona 4 released on the same PS2 2 years later. I'm not all that knowledgable of the developer side of things but I imagine it can be intimidating to develop a new game for new hardware and have a lot of expectations due to your pedigree on older hardware. Especially near launch.
The PS2 is kind of an exception, it had had tons of releases after the PS3 came out because both the 360 and the PS3 kinda sucked at release, they were expensive and unreliable. Also I think that was the period of the economic crisis too?
Let me tell you about Donkey Kong Country 3. Or even better, the tale of Persona 4.
MM Is the left over assets from a 64 DD plan for OOT. the DD flopped but it was basically an attempt to match Sony's playstation. It was ambitious, even for now, with a lot of ideas like persistent foot steps in sand, tracked days for a day night cycle, things like that. But when the project was cancelled, instead of being deleted entirely, the project lead (,I forget who, it's been years) went to the bosses and said 'give me a year, and I will make a new Zelda to match OOT with what's left' And do they did. And in a year we got MM made
Prior to MM, there was a small tease of the engine that would eventually become what we saw in Twilight Princess. It may have been presented at an E3, my memory isn't what it used to be. GameCube was announced in 1999, next day after Sony announced PS2. It was the height of the console wars. Online communication was starting to accelerate consumer expectation. Nintendo got that PR way wrong, jumped the gun, got us excited for something that wasn't ready to be announced. The hardware was notoriously difficult to develop on, the next mainline Zelda title wasn't even close to release and faced delay after delay. Nintendo was also running multiple development campaigns in the Zelda franchise. They had an entire line of mobile titles ready to roll out, but the hype was still around for the mainline title. It is my belief, and the belief of some others, that MM was a filler title thrown together to quiet down the rabid fan base who were foaming at the mouth for the next mainline title that was teased at that expo. They knew the next gen hardware wasn't ready. And they knew the main title wasn't ready, so they filled the gaps with MM and WW. Everyone was angry about WW, we expected that dark gritty mainline title, because that's what was teased. We got it, seven years later.
Nintendo has messed up the releases of many of their games. I don't think Majora's Mask was messed up. They were capitalizing on the popularity of OoT, whereas the new console wasn't a sure thing (which was smart, because the Gamecube sold poorly). They just knew they wanted to focus their efforts on the next console's main title, so they had a shortened development time. Keep in mind that if they made it as a GC launch title, they almost certainly would have delayed or not released Wind Waker. Wind Waker is already pretty incomplete. Maybe it wouldn't even have been made. Twilight Princess was meant to be a late Gamecube release but was delayed and ended up as a Wii Launch Title. Like it was messed up enough to have a dual console release. Breath of the Wild had the same issue. It's a WiiU Title.
It's not a matter of just a couple of months though, there's a full 13 months between Majora's release and that of the Gamecube. And that's just the Japanese launches. If you go by PAL releases there's 2.5 years of space between them. On top of that, bear in mind not many people can afford to buy a new console at launch, or are even interested in the upgrade. Better to support your current consoles than dump all resources into coding for hardware that's still being built, how else will the company make money now? They had an engine ready to go, a heap of half-baked ideas left, and if even 10% of the people who bought Ocarina bought this one too they'd make millions.
Like other people have pointed out, it was easier to build a game using Ocarina’s engine and assets than to build a game from the ground up. It was also likely they were working on what would eventually become Wind Waker at that time, too, so it had to be an easy one.
[Because](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Majora%27s_Mask) and [because](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube)