Nintendo 64 ad: Ye snooze, ye lose

This is an ad promoting a limited edition release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, now in a gold cartridge. The game was released in 1998, and a few selected retailers had a stock of gold carts that were available for purchase, and the ‘Ye snooze, ye lose’ ad was made to promote them.

Much ado about Zelda and golden carts

Nintendo had a tradition going of making their Zelda games come in gold cartridges on the NES until they stopped with the release of Links Awakening, and even then they kept the label golden. A Link to the Past also had a grey cartridge and a golden label, but Ocarina of time was the first one since the days of the 8 bit system. Sure, it was just a limited edition release, but still paved the way for a 100% golden cart release of Majora’s mask.

They kept things golden even into the CD era with Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but not with Skyward Sword. Breath of the Wild also decided to back to a standard black Switch cartridge. The entire lineup of portable games were just the standard colour, even though they were perfectly capable of making different coloured carts, like they did with Pokémon.

About the ‘Ye snooze, Ye lose’ ad

It’s kind of funny how they decided to go with the ‘ye olde English’ style of writing throughout the ad. Maybe the people who wrote the ad thought that the game was a fantasy game, so everyone speaks like that.

It is true that the Great Deku Tree talks like that in the game, but that’s just one character at the very beginning of the game. Even the Deku Tree Sprout talks like everybody else (albeit much more enthusiastically). Could this mean that it’s the Deku Tree who is telling us to buy a limited edition Zelda: Ocarina of Time cartridge? Well, I’m glad he did.