In a stunning display of perseverance and dedication, a programmer learning how to make games has created HD remasters of the two worst The Legend of Zelda games ever: the Philips CD-i's notorious Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Alongside Hotel Mario and Zelda's Adventure, these games were part of a contractual agreement with Nintendo that gave Philips rights to use Nintendo's franchises when its planned CD add-on for the Super Nintendo failed to materialize.
Nintendo struck a similar deal with Sony but backed out in order to team with Philips in the end, a move that famously created the PlayStation. Not only did Nintendo create a powerful market rival for themselves, but they had to see two of their premier franchises suffer games of highly dubious quality. While some are quick to defend some aspects of all four of the Philips CD-i Nintendo games, most see them as joke games, especially thanks to the incredibly surreal cutscenes and poor voice acting on display. While the games were easy to ignore because of their release on an also-ran console back in the 1990s, the Internet brought them back to fame in the form of memes and easy fodders for gaming YouTubers like Angry Video Game Nerd.
Revealed by amateur developer Dopply via Twitter and a now-removed trailer, the remastered editions of both The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon are available for free download. The games are not remakes, but instead painstaking recreations that took the developer four years of free time to create. He has ported the game to widescreen resolutions, altered the enemy placement, updated the movement, and made other changes. However, he was also dedicated to mimicking the originals as closely as possible while also making a game that was as fun to play as possible.
Over the course of development, Dopply found that the games, while still bad, had redeeming qualities that make them worth a second look. In an FAQ he posted about the downloads, he said that he was never tired of each game's soundtrack and cutscenes, although the latter made him laugh. He also said that the games were fixable with an updated control scheme, suggesting that the CD-i hardware was partially to blame for their reputation as some of the worst games ever to feature Nintendo characters.
Game preservation comes in many forms, and fun projects like this one to revive two of the worst Zelda adventures are some of the purest. Philips is no longer a video game company, and Nintendo would likely rather players play almost any other game from their catalog rather than the games bearing their IP from the CD-i. This may work in developer Dopply's favor in fact, because Nintendo taking down these games would mean admitting that they exist and are worthy of protection. From Nintendo's perspective, it might be best to just leave the games up rather than associate themselves with a sore spot in their history.
Source: Dopply