The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time · Nintendo 64DD · Build: 1999–2000 · Discovered: 2002 · Cancelled Retail Product
A disk-based expansion that would have rebuilt Ocarina of Time's dungeons while the original cartridge sat plugged into the console above it. The 64DD died, and Ura Zelda became a bonus disc.
The Nintendo 64DD's magnetic disk drive sat beneath the N64 and could read a cartridge in the console above it — an architecture that enabled something unusual: an expansion disk that patched a game you already owned. Ura Zelda ("Another Zelda") was to be that for Ocarina of Time, remixing its dungeons into harder, rearranged versions and adding new content, with the retail Ocarina cartridge remaining in the slot as the base data. Development ran deep, reportedly close to finished, but the 64DD was a commercial catastrophe — released only in Japan, only through a subscription service, selling in the low tens of thousands. Nintendo cancelled Ura Zelda rather than ship a finished game onto a dead platform, then spent two years working out how to salvage it. The answer arrived in 2002 as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest, distributed on a GameCube bonus disc bundled with The Wind Waker. Whether Master Quest actually is Ura Zelda remains contested: rippers noted the ROM is the same size as standard Ocarina of Time, which sits awkwardly with the premise that the project existed to exceed a cartridge's capacity.
What Ura Zelda proposed in 1999 is now completely ordinary and was then almost unheard of: buy a game, then later buy an add-on that reaches into it and changes its content without replacing it. The 64DD's hardware made it technically natural — the drive sat under the console and could read the cartridge above — and Nintendo clearly saw the model's potential, since Ura Zelda was designed around it rather than merely ported to it.
The idea was sound and the platform was not. The 64DD launched in Japan only, in December 1999, through a subscription service, into a market already looking at the PlayStation and the coming Dreamcast. It sold catastrophically. Ura Zelda was a well-built expansion for a machine almost nobody owned, and no amount of finished code could fix that.
The salvage operation produced something real: Master Quest is a genuine remix of Ocarina of Time, with dungeons rebuilt to be considerably harder, and it reached far more players on a GameCube bonus disc than it ever would have on a 64DD disk. For most purposes, the story ends there — the content survived, the platform did not.
But the sceptics have a point that has never been fully answered. The entire rationale for building Ura Zelda on the 64DD was that a disk could hold more than a cartridge; yet Master Quest's ROM measures the same size as the original Ocarina of Time. If Ura Zelda was genuinely a content expansion, something is missing. If it was only ever a dungeon remix, then it did not need the 64DD at all. Nintendo has never resolved the discrepancy, which is why "what was Ura Zelda actually going to be" remains one of the more durable open questions in the series' history.