Behind the scenes: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
the gist
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was built for the Nintendo 64 by Nintendo's EAD division and was the studio's largest game at the time, with a staff of more than 200. Development moved from the 64DD to cartridge because of the data needed to stream hundreds of motion-captured animations. Miyamoto used several directors, each handling a different part of the game. The towns were inspired by medieval Europe, and the combat drew on samurai sword films. Miyamoto had first planned a first-person view, but it was abandoned when Link became a child. The real-time cutscenes avoided prerendered video, letting the team change the story late. Navi began as a targeting marker that the team turned into a fairy, and the music was built around an ocarina with five notes.
so what
Ocarina of Time helped define 3D action adventure design, from its camera and targeting to its music-driven gameplay. Its development shows how a team invented new conventions when no one had solved them yet.
fun fact
Navi, the fairy companion, started as a targeting marker that the team redesigned to look less robotic.
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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