We Asked Nintendo of America's Nate Bihldorff About Localizing Ocarina of Time's Most Obscure Secrets

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is filled with little pieces of dialogue tucked away in secret moments. You can trigger them by talking to a character at a very specific point in time, getting an item out of order and seeing how characters react, and various other ways. There are dozens of interactions that are really easy to miss: I’m on my third playthrough of the remake and am still stumbling into lines of dialogue I didn’t see the first two times around. During a launch event at Nintendo’s New York retail store, I spoke with Nate Bihldorff, Senior Vice President of Product Development and Publishing at Nintendo of America, and asked about how the localization team approaches these small moments.

“My group handles the localization of these games," Bihldorff said. "And I can tell you that the localization team, absolutely, puts the most importance on those single lines that are really, really hard to find. And you know, of course, they are murder on testing teams because finding that specific line and making sure that it appears correctly in the game is super important… But there was always something special about localizing those lines and knowing that only a few people were going to read it, that it took a specific course of action to get there, whether it's in a Zelda game like this or you’re sequence breaking in a Metroid game.

"Knowing that the person who's experiencing that line did something special to get it and wanting to make sure that it had that little extra oomph, I guarantee you the localization team would love to hear you say exactly that… You feel like you're connecting with the developers in those moments. It's a direct line where they're kind of winking at you.”

With so many secrets that exist just for the joy of being secrets, I can’t help but wonder if there are things in Ocarina of Time that no one has found yet. While Bihldorff is quick to point out that he can’t speak on behalf of the developers, he personally likes to think there’s still something hiding in Ocarina of Time that’s a secret to everybody.

“I like to believe that there are. Of course, that's a question for the developers. They probably would be very cagey in the way that they answered it. But I also feel like Nintendo games in general have a wondrous way of having something that you just don't discover forever.”

Part of the reason Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma wanted to develop a remake of Ocarina of Time was so younger developers at Nintendo could familiarize themselves with one of the company’s most influential games. Developers with different levels of experience with the original Ocarina of Time came together to create its Switch 2 remake. Across the Pacific Ocean, the localization team at Nintendo of America had a similar experience.

“As someone who was also around for the original, I feel like it was almost doubly meaningful because you really feel the opportunity to not only be a part of something that was so meaningful for a previous generation of fans, but also be there at the moment that a new generation who had never played it before are going to experience it in really this unbelievably beautiful and well thought-out state.”

Internally at Nintendo of America, Bihldorff said that mix of generations led to different perspectives during localization: “You get to talk to somebody who maybe worked on the original game, and the IP has a specific meaning for [them], and then, a younger staff who's maybe coming in right out of school in their early 20s who, of course they've heard of it, but I'm seeing them experiencing these things for the first time… That sort of estuary water mix I think is something that's really, really important for the creative process, and it keeps this company vibrant. It's certainly something that I feed off of.”

The sense of anticipation was obvious as Nintendo employees prepared for the midnight launch while fans lined up outside. Nintendo of America is a very secretive place, and I’m always curious to learn what the process is like when they first get word of what the developers in Japan are working on years before a public event like this.

“I think it's not me pulling the curtain too far back to be able to say that every single one of these games is met with tremendous enthusiasm the second we hear about them. It’s a tough job sometimes, being behind the scenes when you can't talk to anybody. We don't talk to our spouses and stuff like that about it. It's a lot of secret stuff. And yet we're also passionate about the work and, of course, making sure that we bring the developers’ visions to market in a way that makes it proud. Everybody takes it very seriously, but they're also huge fans. So yeah, I can say, absolute excitement when we heard about this.”

After years of working in secrecy, Nintendo now hands Ocarina of Time off to the fans. One such fan at the launch event was Grammy, Oscar, and Emmy-winning musician Jon Batiste, who spoke to me about how The Legend of Zelda’s music influenced him from a young age, starting with Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy.

“When I was a kid and my sister, who was really my hero, she had a Game Boy and we would play. Every day, we rode up and down the street and she would play first, and then when the battery was almost out, she would give it to me and I would play until the battery ran completely out," Batiste said. "And I realized at that point, okay, I'm pretty much going to be doing this for the rest of my life.

“And then when I started to play Nintendo 64, that's when I started with Ocarina of Time and the music captured me. And I started to actually play those scores on instruments. And I played tons of scores from Nintendo games on the piano. My cousin and I actually, we have a video of us as a band when we first started playing, and our repertoire was probably 50% Nintendo franchise themes. So then we started to research who were the composers of the scores and we started to really pick favorites, like Koji Kondo. The sound of those melodies, I would say, was an early compositional influence.”

For more on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, check out my interview with producers Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi. And, read about the launch event on the other coast, where Ryan McCaffrey spoke to Nintendo of America’s Bill Trinen.