In the early 1990s, a quirk of licensing gave Dutch electronics company Philips the rights to make three games based on Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series for its CD-i interactive CD-ROM format. The CD-i wasn’t really a game machine and Philips wasn’t really a game developer. The results were, predictably, appalling – one of many cautionary tales in Nintendo’s history that helped the company protect its IP so fiercely.
Now the third of those games, 1994’s Zelda’s Adventure – widely regarded as the worst of the bunch – has been remade by indie developer John Lay for the Game Boy, in the style of its contemporary, the vastly superior Link’s awakening. You can play Lay’s version in-browser on itch-ioor download a ROM to play in an emulator or on original Game Boy hardware.
If nothing else, it’s a bit more pleasing to the eye than the famously ugly original, which appeared to be cobbled together from grubby clipart and unintentionally hilarious full-motion video cutscenes. The first two CD-i Zelda games were side-scrolling platformers in the style of Zelda 2: Link’s adventureand features hand-drawn sprites and animated cutscenes, but Zelda’s Adventure – the second CD-i game with Princess Zelda herself as the playable protagonist – mixed the series’ traditional top-down view with its own, quite gruesome, aesthetic shift.
“The game sticks to the aesthetics of Link’s awakeningbut also contains some functions of Oracle of the Ages And Oracle of Seasonswrites Lay in his description of the port, noting that he had developed it in GB Studio’s game maker.
lay Kotaku told me that game boy Zelda’s Adventure took him about 14 months to develop. Zelda’s Adventure is little more than a curious footnote in Zelda history – but if you’re looking for that playable princess fix before Tears of the Kingdom either dashes or fulfilling your dreams, it’s the perfect place to start.