Some fans have been working on a PC port of the classic Nintendo 64 game Ocarina of Time, and it looks like it’s almost ready to be released.
Ask pretty much anyone who was a gamer in the 1990s what their favorite release was, and there's a good chance many will say Ocarina of Time for the N64. In fact, the 1998 Legend of Zelda game is considered one of the best Nintendo 64 releases of all time, and for good reason. It's considered such a classic that some fans have been hard at work trying to bring the game to PC.
According to a recent report from VGC, a development team calling themselves "Harbour Masters" is around 90% done with porting Ocarina of Time to PC, with a view to possibly completing it in February and releasing it soon after that. The impressive thing about this is that, not only have the fans been working on it since "December last year," but they are achieving their goal by using a fully reverse-engineered version of the game's code. Coupled with the fact that this project, which they are calling "Ship of Harkinian," does not use the original's assets, it should hopefully be less of a legal kerfuffle once it's released.
This type of reverse-engineering seems to be a bit of a gray area when it comes to copyright infringement. Take-Two sued programmers who decompiled GTA codes in order to make their own game. What the fate of "Ship of Harkinian" will be remains to be seen, but hopefully, the team has done everything it can to make sure that the game doesn't tread on the legal toes of the original, and that it won't incur the mighty wrath of Nintendo's law department.
This is also not the first time the classic Legend of Zelda game has been remade in this way by fans. Last November, a team called Zelda Reverse Engineering Team, or ZRET, finished reverse-engineering Ocarina of Time, a project they'd been working hard on for almost two years. At the time of that report, this fan-made game was said to be around 98% complete, so it looks like there are two community-lead remakes that could be coming soon.
With modders recreating Ocarina of Time assets in Unreal Engine 5, making the now-dated, but still beloved, title look stunning and modern, it's clear that there are a lot of people out there that still have a lot of love to give to this N64 release. It may be nearly a quarter of a century old at this point, but it's clear that the fans want to see this game come back into the public eye.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is available on Nintendo 64.
Source: VGC
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