Nintendo’s recent reveal that it’s remaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (again) was met with jubilation by many, but there was at least one person for whom the news had crushing implications. That, as IGN spotted, would be developer and YouTuber CryZENx, who for the last ten years has been remaking the classic Zelda title in the Unreal Engine, and is now abandoning the project.
As per a post made to CryZENx’s Patreon page, the amateur developer informed readers, “I would like to tell you that Ocarina of Time Project is officially stopped.” Explaining that they now intend to move on to multiple simultaneous projects, and will be polling tens of thousands of backers as to which games they’d like to see recreated in modern tech next, it seems the decade of work that went into OoT is now entirely abandoned.
The creator had been documenting the project on YouTube, and had even released a PC demo for the OoT remake, with hours of in-game footage still available:
In an earlier post, CryZENx (for whom English is not a first language) had celebrated the news that Nintendo is creating an official modern remake, and said “I dont really want to step nintendo on their way,” adding, “The best move would be now to move forward [from] the project because im sure nintendo will do it this time the right way.”
However, in a reply to a commenter, the creator also acknowledges the more brutal reality of the situation, saying “its better to just stop the project for now or i would been dissapeared… because of nintendo ninjas.”
If anything, it’s quite remarkable the project got as far as it did without Nintendo’s lawyers descending on it to shut it down, but as CryZENx implies, it seems inevitable that they would show up soon as the official version comes closer to release. (Nintendo has previously blocked some YouTube videos on their channel.)
There’s obviously an added level of irony in the fact that so many responded to June 9’s reveal of the Switch 2 remaster by suggesting Nintendo was “entering its ‘Hire this man’ era,” given how much the brief footage shown of Link looked similar to what we might see in an Unreal-made fan trailer showing off how a modern remake of a Nintendo classic might look.
However, CryZENx isn’t moving on from copyright-infringing remakes, thank goodness. Among the projects for which backers can vote are Zelda titles Twilight Princess and Minish Cap, along with classics like Diddy Kong Racing and Metroid Prime Hunters. Outside of Nintendo releases, CryZENx is also considering the Turok series, and most interestingly, MDK and its BioWare-made sequel.