A fan has remade The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon

News
By published

The classic Zelda adventures were made in 1993 by CD-i.

An image from a remastered version of 1993 CD-i game Link: The Faces of Evil
(Image credit: Animation Magic)

Sometimes people forget about things that happened, and sometimes other people delve into the depths of time so that we can remember those things. One of those things was the Philips CD-i, a commercially failed attempt to get a CD-driven game console into everyone's hands before the PS1-led fifth console generations really kicked off. Due to a byzantine arrangement, Philips got the rights to give third-party developers Animation Magic the rights to make games using Nintendo IP on their new system. Thus were born classic Legend of Zelda series, actually, sorry "Link" games Link: The Faces of Evil and Link: The Wand of Gamelon—classic in the sense of age and in no other sense, mind you. 

Anyways, a beautiful person by the pseudonym Dopply has re-imagined and remade those two lost Zelda games for Windows and Linux. "They are remakes using original assets," he said, "available for free download." The remake of the games was a decision on Dopply's part to help him learn game-making. "I developed these over the course of 4 years in Game Maker as an exercise to teach myself game development and fulfill an in-joke between friends," he said, "As an amateur effort, the programming got a little rough, but hey, it works."

Here are a couple links to download it yourself. You can otherwise read the whole story on @thedopster's Twitter. 

If you're interested I'd download sooner rather than later, because Nintendo is notoriously litigious. On the other hand, I've got no idea if Nintendo even owns the rights to these games. Nintendo likely doesn't know if they own the rights to these games. I'm not sure anyone knows who owns the rights to these games. As it should be. 

Jonathan Bolding
Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.