It was led by five directors, including Eiji Aonuma and Yoshiaki Koizumi, produced by series co-creator Shigeru Miyamoto, and written by Kensuke Tanabe.

The player controls Link in the realm of Hyrule on a quest to stop the evil king Ganondorf by traveling through time and navigating dungeons and an overworld.

[6]: 22–25  The control scheme introduced techniques such as context-sensitive actions and a targeting system called "Z-targeting",[7][b] which allows the player to have Link focus on enemies or objects.

Link gains abilities by collecting items and weapons found in dungeons or in the overworld, including several optional side quests and minor objectives.

Players control Link, a young boy living in the Kokiri Forest, at the outskirts of Hyrule, guarded by the ill-fated Great Deku Tree.

Aside from Saria, Darunia, and Ruto, Link encounters Rauru, Zelda's caretaker Impa, Gerudo's new leader Nabooru, and Ganondorf's servant Twinrova.

[6]: 6  At the Hyrule Castle garden, Link meets Princess Zelda, who believes Ganondorf, the evil Gerudo king, is seeking the Triforce, a holy relic that gives its holder godlike power.

Link returns to Hyrule Castle, where he sees Ganondorf pursue Zelda and her caretaker Impa on horseback, like in his nightmare, and unsuccessfully attempts to stop him.

After they escape the collapsing castle, Ganondorf emerges from the rubble and transforms into a boar-like beast named Ganon using the Triforce of Power.

Navi departs and young Link meets Zelda in the castle garden once more, where he retains knowledge of Hyrule's fate, preventing its decline.

[21] Development was migrated from the 64DD disk drive peripheral[22][23] to cartridge due to the high data throughput of streaming 500 motion-captured character animations throughout gameplay.

[27] An idea that arose from this stage of development, a battle with a doppelganger of Ganondorf that rides through paintings, was used as the boss of the Forest Temple dungeon.

[33] When creating Hyrule Castle's market, Miyamoto traveled to Germany for inspiration of its half-timbered architecture in Lower Franconia, spending a few weeks in northern Bavaria.

[36] Miyamoto initially intended Ocarina of Time to be played in a first-person perspective[37] to enable players to take in the vast terrain of Hyrule Field better and let the team focus more on developing enemies and environments.

[40] To promote this instantaneous continuity of cinematic gameplay, the cutscenes in Ocarina of Time are completely generated with real-time computing on the Nintendo 64 and do not use prerendered full-motion video.

[28] Miyamoto's vision required this real-time architecture for the total of more than 90 minutes of cutscenes, regardless of whether the console had a vast medium like CD-ROM on which to store prerendered versions.

[28] A storytelling shopkeep character named "Hobbit" that was initially to be cut was eventually repurposed as the Deku Scrubs later in development.

[22][23] Issues regarding performance of the 64DD peripheral led to development being moved from disk to cartridge media,[24] and thus the game would miss its scheduled 1997 holiday season release and was delayed into 1998.

[60] Miyamoto additionally attributed the delay to Nintendo prioritizing development efforts to Yoshi's Story after that game missed its planned second quarter release slot.

[63] Chairman Howard Lincoln insisted at E3 1998 that Zelda ship on time and become Nintendo's reinvigorating blockbuster, akin to a hit Hollywood movie.

[61] Customers in North America who pre-ordered the Ocarina of Time received a limited-edition box with a golden plastic card reading "Collector's Edition".

[65] Several versions of Ocarina of Time were produced, with later revisions featuring minor changes such as glitch repairs, the recoloring of Ganondorf's blood from crimson to green, and the alteration of the music heard in the Fire Temple dungeon to remove a sample of an Islamic prayer chant.

Although popularly believed to have been changed due to public outcry, the chanting was removed after Nintendo discovered it violated policy of avoiding religious material,[67] and the altered versions of Ocarina of Time were made prior to the original release.

[66] Zachary Lewis of RPGamer praised the revised puzzles, which require precise timing and find new uses for the Ocarina items, but wrote that players would be enthralled or frustrated by the increased difficulty.

[53] Although excelling in the use of color and the visibility and detail of the environment, reviewers noted that some graphical elements of Ocarina of Time did not perform as well as Banjo-Kazooie,[53][99] a game released for the same platform earlier that year.

[103] GameRevolution called the sound "good for the Nintendo, but not great in the larger scheme of things" and noted that the cartridge format necessitated "MIDI tunes that range from fair to terrible".

[116] In 1998, 2.5 million copies were sold, although it was released only 39 days before the end of the year; it earned $150,000,000 (equivalent to $280,000,000 in 2023) in U.S. revenues, higher than any Hollywood film in the last six weeks of 1998.

[165] Reception for the Master Quest and Virtual Console rereleases was positive; while some considered aspects of the graphics and audio to be outdated,[93][166] most thought that the game had aged well.

[169] In 2007, former GameSpot editor Jeff Gerstmann gave the Virtual Console port 8.9 out of 10: "Even after nine years, Ocarina of Time holds up surprisingly well, offering a lengthy and often-amazing adventure".

[170] In March 2022, a group called "Harbour Masters"[171] publicly released a PC port under the name "Ship of Harkinian", which includes widescreen support and an increased framerate, among other features.