The upcoming Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake sent shockwaves through the world when its trailer revealed the addition of a technological advancement straight from the arcade generation: a dedicated jump button. That's right, instead of just walking up to a ledge and trusting the honor system to prompt Link to automatically jump over to the appropriate platform, the Ocarina of Time remake will allow you to hit a specific button to jump. Technical achievement aside, it turns out this was actually a feature in the original N64 Ocarina of Time when it was early in development, but it was removed before release for whatever reason.
This was first revealed in an old Iwata Asks article from 2011 featuring a conversation between Nintendo veteran and Ocarina of Time designer Yoshiaki Koizumi and late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Resurfaced by the Kit & Krysta YouTube channel, the back-and-forth touches on how Mario and Zelda games back then used to be "made as a pair," and it's here that Koizumi reveals this little-known fact about Ocarina of Time's early development.
"I do think they are often made in pairs," Koizumi says. "They both fell into the category of '3D open-world action games.' I didn't really see the difference between them."
Iwata responds: "If you were to state the difference, it would be how The Legend of Zelda is the one you don't press a button to jump in."
Koizumi counters. "Even when it comes to that, you had to press a button to jump when we first started making The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," he says.
Finally, Iwata confirms, "at first, it didn't have autojump."
The exact reason for the switch to an auto-jump mechanic is never made explicitly clear, but Koizumi says the dev team was thinking about Ocarina of Time "the whole time" it was making Super Mario 64, which made them start "talking about decreasing the action element in The Legend of Zelda and increasing the puzzle elements."
My read on that is, during Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time's development, Nintendo felt like jumping better suited action gameplay and they wanted to tilt the balance a little more toward puzzle-solving, so they switched Link over to an auto-jump system to emphasize that side of things more. Clearly they've changed their minds in the intervening years, as, thank goodness, come November 5 you'll be able to jump to your heart's content in the remake.
