12 Things You Didn't Know About The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time
3. The Fishing Game Came From Slacking Off
What do Yakuza, Zelda and Warframe all have in common? Fishing. You can’t seem to avoid it these days, appearing in all kinds of titles and Ocarina Of Time is no exception. Link’s Awakening was the first series entry to feature it but according to development stories, Ocarina’s minigame was never planned to be implemented.
Confirmed in one of the 3DS port interviews, fishing was brought in by Kazuaki Morita, Ocarina’s boss designer. Whilst working on Water Temple boss Morpha, Morita began thinking “Hey, what if there were fish in that pond?” and started working on a prototype fishing game.
What Morita didn’t do however was inform his superiors and soon enough, it became clear he wasn’t working on Morpha. Rather than discard his work, the team quickly took to Morita’s efforts and started pitching in ideas to flesh it out.
Becoming the fully-fledged minigame we later saw, its one of those rare instances where it paid to slack off the job.