Ocarina of Time Versions

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was originally released as a cartridge for the Nintendo 64 in 1998. The international release went through several revisions all the way up until days before it's full international release, and as a result the initial copies which sold during the first couple of months contains earlier revisions of the game than the copies which sold later on. Fan research has concluded that there exist at least three different international revsions, namely v1.0, v1.1 and v1.2.

Versions

Due to the nature of manufacturing, it takes some time between when a product is completed and when it hit the shelves. N64 cartridges consists of a plastic cover with a label, a Printed Circuit Board, and a set of ROM chips with other minor components. Only the label and the ROM chips has to be custom made for each game in this process, so preparing a new stock of a game-title was a simple task which would take only about a month. It should be noted that the stock of ROM chips and labels may well have been made in independent quantities, so different label versions on cartridges may not necessarily mean that the ROM chips in them are of different versions.

v1.0

This was the version which is equivalent to the Japanese version of the game. It's build date is 21st of October 1998; about one month before the game hit the shelves in the North America. Most (if not all) of the North Americal first-production-run copies of the game is of this version.

v1.1

Having a build date of just five days after v1.0 (26th October 1998), this revision replaced v1.0 in stores almost immediately after it was sold out. This version had some small changes, for example, a lot of spelling errors, bugs and glitches from v1.0 was fixed.

v1.2

Version "v1.2" wasn't completed until about a week before the North American release (10th(PAL)/12th(NTSC) November 1998). It was the first official fully international release, and contained two significant changes to make it more culturally neutral and suitable for an international market. Those two changes are that Ganondorf's blood color was changed from red to green, and that the chanting in the Fire Temple was removed completely. Another bunch of misspellings, glitches and bugs were fixed too. v1.2 replaced v1.1 in America, while being the initial released revision in Europe and other PAL territories.

Another PAL revision of v1.2 was made on the 18th November 1998, but no significant difference has been found between this revision and the initial PAL revision.

GCN

In 2003 the game was re-released on two different bonus disks for the GameCube, along with an alternate "Master Quest" edition of the game. This version was only compiled as a 60Hz version, but released in Europe and PAL territories taking use of the Europeian GameCube's PAL60 capabilities. It has some significant differences due to the reason that the game code being emulated, but some of the game itself is also changed. Most notably, the moon-star based Gerudo symbol has been replaced with the symbol used by the Gerudo-equivalent pirate tribe of Majora's Mask. Some colourization of different buttons has also been redone in order to match the GameCube controller, and the copyright date has been altered to include 2003.

The GCN version is considered the same as the Wii Virtual Console verision, but the colourization of the buttons has changed back to how they were in the N64 versions. There has been little research on these versions, so it's difficult to state other differences.

Virtual Console(Wii)

Based on v1.2, Ocarina of Time was released on the Wii console as a downloadable appliation. It could be played with a Classic Controller, or a Gamecube controller.