We only have fractions of the Hylian legend ...

Wow. Ever since I saw a blurb on a Zelda fan site about the "Ocarina of Time Beta Project," I've been trying to find out more about it. At first I thought it was just some attempt to make a debug ROM playable or something, but when I read the blurb and saw that it was about the discovery of the graphic for a sword-beam (a classic ability never used in a 3D Zelda except for the Fierce Deity's Mask in Majora's Mask), I realized that there were some big possibilities hidden in the game's data. "But what exactly are these people chasing after?" I thought.

I can't be entirely sure, but I believe that this is the answer. The N64DD (see my previous post) would have been able to do some pretty unthinkable things had it not been a failure. A lot of the N64 games out there were initially being developed for it but were later moved to regular cartridge releases, including Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. In fact, the two Zelda titles were originally going to be a single one; and if you gathered all the stuff that got thrown out, you'd probably have a third game! I haven't been able to find much direct info on the "Beta Project," but it's probably an attempt to unearth everything buried in the ROM and eventually piece together the original Zelda game in its full awesomeness.

A couple of quick notes about the page I've linked to:

1. The writing is pretty bad as far as grammar goes. It's followable, but it looks like the person(s) who wrote it was either tired or slightly drunk.
2. At the end there are some tidbits about Master Quest, under the heading "Zelda: Master Quest on the GameCube." These are about Master Quest, NOT Ura Zelda (the original project), even though the writer says a couple of things like "I’m probably about 50% to 60% of the way through Ura Zelda, and to this point, the -only- changes are inside the dungeons. The overworld stuff is all exactly the same as in Ocarina of Time." Let's face it: he couldn't write well to begin with, so he could have gotten mixed-up pretty easily. With that in mind, there may be other areas where he got the two confused, but none jump out at me (perhaps the bit about Miyamoto commenting, in 2000, that "Ura Zelda has been completed for some time now," but that may very well be accurate).