The Truth About The Fire Temple Chant

[Twili]

I am presenting facts here, and nothing but the facts. First of all, the sequence file in question. The original with the chanting is 0xE70 bytes in size. The altered one is 0x1240 bytes. Insertion of the original sequence into the debugger's ROM will treat you to the Fire Temple theme completely devoid of a chant, or even the synth voice. The reason: the chant is comprised entirely of samples. Another N64 game, Cruis'n World, uses the very same samples in its "Cairo Cruis'n" tune:

 

 

But wait! There's more! Parasite Eve II for the Playstation uses one of them in "Ark" at 0:40 and again at 0:47:

 

 

And more than one of the samples numerous times in the "Love/Hate Chant" from Kakuto Chojin: Back Alley Brutal for the XBOX:

 

 

Now back to OoT. The build date of revision 1.2 is 98-11-12 18:17:03. This is prior to even the Japanese release of the game, November 21, 1998. So the Fire Temple theme was altered before the game was released, yet Japanese gamers and U.S. gamers who pre-ordered OoT got to hear the sampled chanting. Because OoT and Cruis'n World (but more importantly Parasite Eve II and Kakuto Chojin) used the samples, they had to come from a common sound bank. Kakuto Chojin was actually pulled from the shelves a year after its release because the Love/Hate Chant was the theme of Asad, a Muslim fighter, and the samples were found to resemble verses from the Qur'an. Whether or not they truly were remains unknown.

[Zeth Ryder]

Very interesting stuff there, never knew the chants were reused so much other then in OOT, Nice find!

Also even though the build of the release says in November, please take into consideration how long it takes to mass produce these games, box them, add manuals, etc then ship them out to the retailers around the world! The 1.0 Gold cart with the chants ingame, its build date is 98-10-21 04:56:31, predating the 1.2 build of course, but only a month before release. I haven't checked 1.1's build date yet either and how or where that fits in this. Still very nice find!

 

PS: it doesn't surprise me that they used wav samples ingame for the chants, they used it for Navi, and other character sound efx as well.