Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, released in 1991, was the only game in the Zelda series released for the Super Famicom (in Japan) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (in North America and Europe.) It was originally planned for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since Nintendo had a lot resources at the time, they decided to carry Link to the Past over to the SNES instead. It introduced many of the features of gameplay that are still included in the series to this day, such as trading sequences, multi-level dungeons, a dynamic environment (light and dark worlds), and items such as the Master Sword, the boomerang, and the hookshot. As of now, according to the official word from Nintendo, "A Link to the Past" is chronologically set last in the Legend of Zelda series. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time comes first in this order.

The music was composed by Koji Kondo. The overworld theme of the original Legend of Zelda, or Hyrule Overture theme, was carried over to A Link to the Past and played in the Light World, redone in SPC700 style. It was also carried over to Super Smash Bros in Nintendo 64 style and Super Smash Bros. Melee in orchestral style.

Technical notes

For the time being, most of SNES games cartridges had 4 Mbit (512 KB) of memory. This game jumped to 8 Mbit (1 MB), which may seem ridiculous since now games require at least 1 CD-ROM (600 MB, approximately). But the most incredible part is how development team squeezed that megabyte. Following text is an intuitive explanation of the wondeful work made.

"A Link to the Past" features 2 fully-explorable worlds; Light World has 4 castles and Dark World has 9. Each castle has from 3 to 8 floors, and each floor has quite a lot of rooms. Moreover, there's lots of places that expand to bigger maps (usually, through a door or a hole). In short, Zelda's world is amazingly intrincated.

The graphics system displays the world from a top view, so the screen can be made up of tiles. There are many types of scenarios: desert, forest, caves, villages... Each one has its characteristic tiles. In the same way, each character has a tile (sprite) for every frame of every animation, replicated for the 4 different directions it can be facing. A gross estimation of the number of tiles/sprites would be 2000 tiles (probably there are much more). Let's say each tile needs 64 bytes. That's 128 KB only for the basic elements of the graphics.

And now you need a way to specify which tiles shall be displayed in each stage. We can think of each stage as a grid in which each cell has a tile associated. We have estimated 2000 tiles, so we need 11 bits to index them. Having into account the huge extension of Zelda's worlds, we can think of roughly 100000 cells (and again, it's very probable there are more). 100000 x 11= 1,100,000 bits = 135 KB, only for scenario settings

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was ported to Gameboy Advance by Capcom in 2002. The Gameboy Advance version was released in North America first and Japan last. "Four Swords", a multi-player specific game, was included with the game. The end motion capture voice effect was added on Link, such as when attacking. (to be continued...)