Featuring a pair of actions “triggered by voice commands”
- by Liam Doolan
Whenever Nintendo introduces a new console, it is usually accompanied by various peripherals, and during the N64 era, one of the most notable additions was a microphone, also known as the Nintendo 64 Voice Recognition Unit.
Although only a few titles utilized this technology at that time (one being Hey You, Pikachu!), one of the other games considered for it was The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Modder ‘Skawo’ has chosen to focus on this code once again after examining the Majora’s Mask decompilation.
It’s worth mentioning that this goal was initially “discovered and documented by Zoinkity“. You can check out the original videos posted six years ago on YouTube. The video from Skawo (above) illustrates the five voice commands, but here’s some additional context in the modder’s own words:
Buried within the code of Majora’s Mask is support for the VRS (Nintendo 64’s Voice Recognition System). Upon startup, the game searches for connected VRS units in any of the controller ports, and there are five actions that can be triggered using voice.
The support for the VRS remains intact in all versions of the game – however, they all refer to the Japanese version of the unit (NUS-020 JPN), relying on Japanese phrases to activate the specified actions. Unfortunately, the mechanism ultimately gets disabled, as the game checks for 0x801D8E3C (in US 1.0) to equal 3 before the voice commands are activated, and it never reaches that value.
This was likely meant to be implemented in a feature that was removed in the final release… I actually noticed this while browsing through the recently completed Majora’s Mask decompilation, but it was originally identified and documented by @Zoinkity
As previously mentioned, this functionality was never made available in the “final release”, but as you can see, you would have been able to use the microphone to take selfies, request milk from cows, warn when the moon is about to crash down, wake a sleeping Deku Scrub, and give Epona carrots to speed up.
There was also allegedly a sixth voice command known as “sit” that was never utilized. It’s speculated that it was intended for the dogs within the game. These same command ideas may also have been