The "most hated Zelda games of all time," as one retrospective's headline calls them, weren't made by Nintendo at all. They came out of a hardware deal that fell apart. Nintendo had planned a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo, first with Sony and then with Philips, and walked away from both. As Time Extension's history of the games puts it, "as a way of softening the exit, Nintendo gave Philips the rights to produce games based on Nintendo characters for its CD-i system."
Nintendo Life described the same deal in slightly different terms: Philips acquired the rights to use Nintendo characters "in the process of negotiating the cancellation of the SNES add-on deal." Either way, the result was the same. Three Zelda-licensed games arrived on a machine Nintendo didn't make: Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Zelda's Adventure.
That origin is what sets these games apart from the rest of the series. The licence came out of the unwinding of a hardware deal, and Time Extension sets the episode against Nintendo's "current stranglehold on its intellectual property." The choice of characters, as one of the developers remembered it, wasn't even Nintendo's.
The team that built them
The first two games were made by Animation Magic, a small company founded by Dale DeSharone. Most of what we know about how they were built comes from a series of conversations DeSharone had in 2005 with journalist John Szczepaniak, which Time Extension (in a feature by Damien McFerran, first published by Nintendo Life in 2014) republished in part. What follows is DeSharone's recollection, and it's worth reading as that.
DeSharone had been a teacher before moving into games, and had worked on Philips' CD-i at Boston-based Spinnaker Software. His account of the hardware explains a lot. He recalled that Philips planned to launch the machine in 1988 and that the date slipped to "closer to 1991." The CD-i kept the original 68000 processor from its 1987 specification, had no hardware sprites, limited scrolling, a single-speed CD drive and an infrared controller he called "extremely slow and unresponsive."
He also described a company that didn't really want a games machine. "Philips was actually very clear in telling us that they didn't believe the market for this device was games," he said, adding that this "all changed after the launch of the CD-i platform because the only titles that actually sold were the game titles."
When the Nintendo licence arrived, DeSharone's new studio pitched separate Link and Zelda games to American Interactive Media, Philips' CD-i publishing arm. "As I understood the arrangement, it wasn't a license of five games, but five characters," he said, and he thought American Interactive Media "chose to go with the biggest names that Nintendo had at the time." He recalled budgets of "perhaps around $600,000 each," and that the team proposed pooling them to build one engine for both games. The team, in his telling, was three programmers besides himself, one audio engineer and composer, four artists, a producer and a single freelance writer.
The animation came from an unexpected direction. A mutual friend introduced DeSharone to Igor Razboff, who wanted to build a company in St. Petersburg serving US clients. Razboff, DeSharone said, "found about six people who had some experience with 2D animation," who spent six months working in the US. They drew on paper, scanned the work, cleaned it up and moved it to the CD-i.
Nintendo's role, by DeSharone's account, was light. "Nintendo's only input was we ran the design document and character sketches past them for their approval," he said. For reference, the team had the two earlier Nintendo games plus box and booklet art. The side-on view came from Philips' priorities rather than Nintendo's: DeSharone believed Philips would never have approved a top-down game because it "looked old," and said the team "definitely pushed for the side view." Each game ended up with about ten minutes of animated cinema, voiced by local union actors.
Time Extension says both games were made in just over a year, developed side by side.
From shelf to meme
GamesRadar notes that The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon were released on the same day in 1993. The third game, Zelda's Adventure, was made by a different studio, Viridis, according to Time Extension.
Accounts of how the first two landed differ. GamesRadar says they were widely panned at release. Time Extension says the mainstream gaming press largely ignored them, that CD-i owners short of big releases were more positive, and that the harsh criticism built in the years afterwards. Both agree on where they ended up: GamesRadar calls the cutscenes "infamous memes," and Time Extension points to YouTube as the place where the whole world got to join in mocking them.
DeSharone knew how the games were seen. "I can understand that people were disappointed," he told Szczepaniak. "It could have been better, of course; [but] it wasn't Nintendo." He died of leukaemia in 2008, according to Time Extension.
Nintendo, for its part, has kept its distance. Nintendo Life reported in 2013 that the games didn't even get a mention in the Hyrule Historia book, and that series producer Eiji Aonuma, asked about them by MTV Multiplayer, said: "I don't know that those really fit in the 'Zelda' franchise."
The fans didn't let go so easily. In 2020, Kotaku reported that a developer called Dopply had rebuilt both games from scratch in GameMaker over four years of part-time work, with new controls and a smoother framerate. Not long after, Dopply pulled the files from download and set the videos to private.
That developer, Seth "Dopply" Fulkerson, then went further. GamesRadar reported in January 2024 that he'd made the remakes to teach himself game development, and that he was building Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, a spiritual successor with the 2D action, hand-drawn backgrounds and absurd animation of the originals. "I didn't make this game as a joke," Fulkerson said in an interview GamesRadar cited from Nintendo Life.
Mason's take: Judge these games by DeSharone's own numbers rather than by the memes, and they look less like a disgrace than like roughly what that deal could buy. I'd go further: they're overdue a proper, preserved re-release more than another round of mockery, because Fulkerson's remakes and Arzette show there's an audience curious enough to want the real thing. Given Aonuma's line, though, I wouldn't expect Nintendo to be the one to do it.
Reporting notes
