There were few moments as iconic, during the birth phase of 3D gaming, as the first time Link stepped onto Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was 1998, and games like Virtua Racing, Doom, Descent, and Nintendo’s own Super Mario 64 had already made epochal strides in graphics technology and the possibilities of 3D space. But this was something else.

After completing the tutorial section of the game and navigating its first dungeon, Inside the Great Deku Tree, Link leaves the close, misty confines of Kokiri Forest, walks through a tunnel, and steps out the other side. The sudden, expansive flowering of the world of Hyrule around him is breathtaking. There’s a rolling plain, castle spires behind a wall, a hilltop farm, the brooding summit of Death Mountain. There are sightlines to destinations that may be dozens of hours of gameplay away.

Ocarina’s Hyrule Field — previewed so elegantly in the game’s quiet, elegiac menu screen — was not a technical first, and was achieved with a certain amount of smoke and mirrors. But it was perhaps the most powerfully persuasive translation yet of the coded iconography of a 2D game into the realism of a 3D one; it turned a map into a landscape. It hummed with promise, scale, and a romantic sense of adventure, and created a world that felt vast yet temptingly within reach.

That moment distilled the promise of what would eventually become the dominant form of both action-adventure and role-playing games in the 3D era: open-world games. Yet it would be almost 19 years before the Zelda series itself fully embraced open-world game design with Breath of the Wild. Despite Ocarina’s outsized influence on the next two decades of game design, the Zelda series........

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