he Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is arguably the greatest game of all time,the game is a masterpiece in its own right, Ocarina of Time has many innovations that have become staples of the video game industry.

1 The Pre-Order and the Pre-Order Bonus

Nintendo knew that it had one of the biggest games ever on its hands and it wanted to make sure that hype was going to turn into profit. To ensure that they did something no video game had done before, allow you to buy the game before it even came out. But how do you convince someone (and more importantly, someone’s parents) to buy a game before you are able to play it? Give them something extra for buying early. In this case, reserving the game before its release date not only made sure that you would get the biggest game of the year, but you would get a shiny golden cartridge as well. The gold carts sold out, and the business of pre-orders was born.

2 The Day-Night Cycle

Ocarina of Time is, as you can imagine, a game that deals heavily with the flow of time. One of the best ways OOT showed the passage of time was by actually showing the transition of day and night, and then have certain events happen at certain times of the day. While technically this was first done in Castlevainia 2 on the NES, after it was done in Zelda many games followed with a day/night transition. A good example of this is minecraft, the monsters will only appear at night.

3 The Easter Egg Hunt

Gamers have seen this over and over again in countless games, weather it be pigeons in Grand Theft Auto to flags and feathers in Assassin’s Creed, it seems like every game these days has you exploring every inch of explorable space to collect some random item. You can thank Ocarina of Time for that, as it was the first game to offer this fetch quest. Player’s were asked to help a cursed family by killing 100 Gold Skulltulas, and then retrieving the token that they drop. While most games today don’t offer much of anything for compleating the quest (some just give you an achievement and nothing else), Zelda gave you substantial rewards as you progressed through your quest, making going out of your way to get them much more beneficial.

4 The Lock-On System

Prior Ocarina of Time, the idea of locking-on to something was restricted to games involving some kind of vehicle or a missile launcher, anything that could be “homed-in.” The great thing about the z-targeting system is that it made fighting in a 3rd person action game feel a lot smoother, and made sure that the player and his intended enemy was on screen at the same time, at all times. The system worked so well that there are not many 3rd person action games that don’t us a similar system.

5 The Contex-Sensitive Button

Ocarina of Time allowed Link to do a lot of things, talk, jump, roll, open chests, drop down from a ladder, and attack all with the press of a single button. As its name implies, the action of the context sensitive button changes depending on what you are doing and what is nearby. The idea worked so well that it’s difficult to think of any action game these days that does not use some sort of context sensitive button.