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The screenshots above come from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Link is holding a Deku Stick in both of them, and if you look closely, you might notice that the designs on those sticks are different. This wasn’t actually a design decision by Nintendo, but instead, a bug that they never caught during development.

Darkeye144 on Twitter caught the bug and did a detailed breakdown of why it happens. Long story short, the two games pull data from different places in order to texture the stick, but a bug results in two different textures behind used between games. The first game mixes the stick texture with the texture for Link’s hair. In Majora’s Mask, the bug results in the stick texture being combined with child Link holding the Hylian Shield.

If you’d like a much more technically detailed explanation of what’s going on, you can read through Darkeye’s Twitter thread below.

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Comments (1)

the_crimson_lure

1+ y ago

Kind of bold for that person to assume "Nintendo never caught it," when they also admit "it looks better than it would look if the bug was fixed."

Even if it wasn't intentional at first, it's entirely possible Nintendo intentionally kept it that way.

Well, if anything it's a bit of fun hearing how some games work under the hood.