Every time Nintendo releases a system it's normally followed up with all sorts of peripherals and during the N64 era, one of the more surprising ones was a microphone, otherwise known as the Nintendo 64 Voice Recognition Unit.

Although only a few games used this technology at the time (one of them was Hey You, Pikachu!), one of the other titles that was in consideration was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Modder 'Skawo' has decided to highlight this code (again) after sifting through the Majora's Mask decompilation.

It's worth mentioning how this function was originally "discovered and documented by Zoinkity". You can see the original videos uploaded six years ago on YouTube. The video from Skawo (above) demonstrates the five voice commands, but here's a bit more detail in the modder's own words:

Hidden in Majora's Mask's code is support for the VRS (Nintendo 64's Voice Recognition System). On boot, the game looks for connected VRSes in any of the controller ports and there are five actions that can be triggered by using voice.

The support for the VRS is left intact in all versions of the game - but they all expect the Japanese version of the unit (NUS-020 JPN), and they all expect Japanese words to trigger the given actions. Unfortunately, the functionality ultimately ends up being disabled, because the game is looking for 0x801D8E3C (in US 1.0) to be 3 before the voice commands are activated, and it never is set to that value.

It was likely meant to be set in a function which has been blanked in the final release...I have noticed this while scrolling through the recently completed Majora's Mask decomp, but it has originally been discovered and documented by ‪@Zoinkity‬

As mentioned, this function was never made accessible in the "final release", but as you can see, you can use the microphone to take pictures, request milk from cows, find out the remaining time before the moon comes crashing down, wake up a sleeping Deku Scrub, and give Epona carrots to speed up.

There was also apparently a sixth voice function known as "sit" that was never used. It's believed to have been a command for the dogs in the game. This same voice function features have also previously been highlighted by the YouTube channel 'DidYouKnowGaming' in an obscure facts round up.

What do you think of these unused voice commands? Would you like to see more games use voice functionality like this? Let us know in the comments.

[source youtu.be, via gonintendo.com]