Nintendo released Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 in Japan
On 21 November 1998 Nintendo launched The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Japan, a 3D adventure later ranked among the best games ever.
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Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Japan on 21 November 1998 for the Nintendo 64 console. North American and European releases followed within weeks. It was the first 3D entry in the Zelda series and was produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the series creator, with a large internal development team.
The game followed a young hero, Link, travelling between two time periods to stop the villain Ganondorf. It introduced Z-targeting, a lock-on system that made 3D combat manageable, and context-sensitive buttons that simplified actions. Its open field, dungeons and use of music to solve puzzles became widely imitated design ideas.
Critics responded with near-universal praise, and review aggregators recorded some of the highest scores ever given to a game. It also sold strongly, helping the Nintendo 64 through a competitive period against Sony's PlayStation. Ocarina of Time has since been re-released and remade several times, and it remains a standard against which later 3D adventure games are measured, which is why new versions draw close comparison with the original.
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