Coder John Lay has created a charming Game Boy port of Zelda’s Adventure – generally regarded as one of the worst Zelda games ever made.
Back in 1990, Philips released the CD-i, an early CD-based console that was mostly focused around edutainment titles. Bizarrely, Philips managed to secure the rights from Nintendo to produce three Zelda titles for the system. The first two, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon were released in 1993, with Zelda’s Adventure arriving a year later in 1994.
All of them are notoriously poor, and have been the subject of various memes and jokes over the years. But they still inspire curiosity for fans of the series, and now, thanks to coder John Lay, you can experience what it would have been like to play Zelda’s Adventure on the Game Boy.
Zelda’s Adventure is a top-down RPG in which you control Zelda herself, and John has recreated it in the graphical style of the classic Game Boy title The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. He created the Game Boy demake using the development tool GB Studio, and began work on the port during the Covid lockdowns of 2020. The entire game is available on John’s Itch page, and can be played through a browser or downloaded, or you can simply watch a playthrough on YouTube.
Be quick about it though. Judging by Nintendo’s history of taking down fan ports, like AM2R, the fan remake of Metroid II, this charming Game Boy version of Zelda’s Adventure might not be available for long.
If you’re after other demakes, meanwhile, you could also check out the marvellous PS1-style de-master of Dead Space (that’d be Dead Space Remake), or Low Mem Sky, a 2D take on No Man’s Sky crammed onto the fantasy console, PICO-8.
Read more: 10 things from Zelda games past that Tears of the Kingdom could revive
