Some sad news in the modding community came about recently, as “Exkodius,” who had been leading a team in creating a full conversion mod that recreates the original Nintendo Entertainment Classic The Legend of Zelda in the PC classic Doom, has determined that the project may never be fully realized under their hands. As such, the project files for “The Legend of Zelda: Total Conversion” have been released to the public in the hopes that someone else may be able to see their idea through to its logical conclusion.
You can get an idea of how it works in the following video. Note that in this version, the enemies have no interest in staying on their own squares of the map — or out of caves!
What’s interesting is that this project effectively attempts to achieve a vision that The Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has never realized himself.
When developing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64, for instance, a First-Person Shooter (FPS) perspective was one that the famed creator had hoped to include. “I thought that the FPS system would be the best way of enabling players to take in the vast terrain of the Hyrule Field,” he explained in a 2008 Iwata Asks interview (via bit-gamer about Link’s Crossbow Training for the Wii, which did feature some FPS-styled sequences. “Besides, by not having the player’s character on the screen, we can spend more time and machine power on creating enemies and the environments.”
The downside, it turned out, was that the shift from a young child Link to a grown adult Link would have been less apparent to the player, and so that idea was scrapped.
Perhaps even more relevant, though, are these early shots from the original Legend of Zelda — the one this very mod was made to recreate:
The two images above (left from Hyrule Historia, via @ZeldaPower; right from Iwata Asks, via Polygon) illustrate a possible first-person perspective envisioned by the creators for the NES original that started it all.
It’s enough to make one wonder what might have been, and hopefully encourage someone to pick up this project so we can experience it fully for ourselves someday.
Source: This is What Zelda and Doom Look Like When Mashed Together in a Mod at USGamer (Full disclosure: My wife wrote that.)
