Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrunners have discovered a way to spawn a hidden Star Fox Arwing in the game. While dataminers learned seemingly forever ago that the Arwing was buried in the game's code and others have caused it to appear through more conventional, less savvy means, the method required to spawn it into the vanilla game without external factors coming into a play remained a mystery - until now.
The Arwing has long been known to be inside the code of the Ocarina of Time. Since it released on November 21, 1998, the code has been buried deep within every single Nintendo 64 cartridge sold. In fact, the Arwing has been previously seen in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time mods many times thanks to a Game Shark cheat device. The new method, however, hinges on a concept called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The explanation for how this works is extremely complicated and might come across as gibberish to anyone outside the speedrunning community. In short, speedrunners have figured out that by executing a complicated series of perfectly-timed actions, they can warp to the end credits. This allowed Lozoots to beat the Legend of Zelda: OoT speedrunning record repeatedly, leaving it at shortly over 12 minutes in the most successful attempt. The speedrunning community then learned that they could do a lot more - placing items inside chests, moving objects around, and (of course) spawning Star Fox's Arwing into Legend of Zelda: OoT without a single cheat code needed.
Video was posted to Reddit showing the Arwing in action in Ocarina of Time. Young Link can be seen fighting two miniature versions of the Star Fox attack vehicle. The Arwings need no modifications - the complete code, including attack animations, is already in the game. This seems to be code left over from a test of Volvagia's actions, with sprites eventually swapped to create the boss fight. The same programming was also used in part of Star Fox 64. You can see the Arwing fight below, via Zfg1 on Twitch.
It took Zfg1 more than an hour to set up this impressive feat, which replaced all the doors with Arwings. Many have expressed shock. Others compare it to the well-known MISSINGNO glitch from the original Pokemon Red and Blue games, which would spawn a glitched Pokemon into the game. In any case, the presence of Arwings in Ocarina of Time gives gamers a glimpse into how some boss fights were built when the Nintendo 64 was the big gaming system.
The ability to spawn Star Fox 64 Arwings into the game may seem a simple task, but it eluded even the most dedicated in the gaming community for quite some time. This discovery will surely lead to other, more interesting tricks in the future. Now that the community has figured out this piece of the puzzle, it will be interesting to see what they do with the information as time goes on.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time originally released on the Nintendo 64.
Source: Reddit