From: <https://kotaku.com/that-time-a-player-tricked-everyone-into-thinking-you-c-1789847177>

That Time A Player Tricked Everyone Into Thinking You Could Get The
Triforce In Ocarina of Time

On February 4th, 1999, one of the greatest hoaxes in video game
history began. The Zelda fandom was shock by a player claiming to
have found the Triforce in Ocarina of Time. Ariana Almandoz, a gamer
from Colombia, had all the details, but she wasn’t quite ready to
share them with the world. Through vague hints and convincing
screenshots, she lead the fandom on a wild chase for Zelda’s
legendary treasure.

Hyrule: The Legend of Zelda (also called HTLOZ) was the website to
talk all things Zelda in the late 90s. It was where you went if you
wanted all the new information and rumors. Here, Almandoz first told
Zelda fans that she had somehow found the Triforce. For those not in
the know, the Triforce is a big deal in The Legend of Zelda. It is a legendary artifact of the gods that can grant wishes to anyone who
obtains it. The bad guys want it. The good guys want to protect it.
In Ocarina of Time, you never find it as an in-game collectible.

“I’ve found it,” Almandoz boasted in an email to the HTLOZ staff. “I found the Triforce about a week ago and I took the picture on Friday.”

The email Almandoz sent didn’t contain any images of her feat,
however. When pressed by HTLOZ staff to provide proof she’d found
the Triforce, Almandoz claimed that she forgot to send the
screenshot. A day later, she sent it.

The image ignited a wildfire of speculation. Some thought that it
was a picture from the game’s beta but many others were convinced it
was the real deal. No one had seen anything like this before. The
ultimate Zelda prize seem within reach, and readers wanted to know
what they had to do to find it too.

Almandoz wasn’t ready to share that process in full, however.
Instead, she only gave hints. The process involved the Temple of
Time. You also had to get a new song to play on your ocarina. Fans
were not pleased. If she knew how to get the Triforce, why wasn’t
she sharing how she did it?

“I didn’t invent anything,” she swore as doubt began to build. “But
I do want to be famous.”

Almandoz eventually got more specific with her information as the
rumor gathered more and more attention. She started to paint a
picture of how to acquire the legendary artifact. To get the
Triforce, you had to learn the Overture of Sages. It was an entirely
new song for your ocarina taught by the owl Kaepora Gaebora. But
Almandoz refused to explain the steps required to obtain it.

To back up her claim, she provided a new screenshot of Link playing
the song, along with another photo showing him entering the “Temple
of Light.” A new song? A new temple? It appeared that there were
entire sections of Ocarina of Time that were hidden from everyone
but the luckiest of players. But then fans something was amiss: Link
was wearing his sword on the other side of his back.

When pressed, Almandoz played coy and hinted that there was a
special reason for everything. Wait a little longer and she’d
totally reveal it. A forum user named Ryan Costello pored over the screenshots and pointed out other small problems. He matched the
screenshot of Link with his ocarina to the original image.

In response to the questioning, Almandoz disappeared. Then, in
March, she sent a final email explaining the hidden step:

People from all over the world try my story, they will swallow it
like candies no matter that the pictures are a total fake, the
mistakes I made in purpose were to show how silly can some people
be. Some idiots will show proofs against the pictures, will try to
show their knowledge in the usage of software like Photoshop and
will prove me that they know nothing, (none really discovered how I
made them) people will play play and play non stop and will not even
sleep,everything just for me, ja ja ja, I’m still receiving emails
!!!! I can’t believe this.

The whole affair, featuring Almandoz’s emails, has been archived in
full. You can judge for yourself if Almandoz was a daring mastermind
trying to point out weaknesses in the fandom or a bumbling troll
making it up as she went along.

In 2005, a forum poster named IceSage confessed to being Almondoz.
Is that true? Probably not; the message dropped on April Fool’s Day.
It is, however, the closest we’ve ever come to figuring out who
pulled off one of gaming’s greatest hoaxes.

Well played, ‘Ariana.’ You might not have found the Triforce, but
you did carve a strange place in gaming history.

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