It's a secret to everybody.

February 23, 2011 6:29 PM

BS Zelda Retrospective (SLYT). In honor of Zelda's 25th anniversary this month, this is an interesting look at the live-broadcast Satellaview games in the Zelda series, which had some compelling and strange tweaks to the Zelda formula. The beginning is an introduction to the service, and the fun bit begins at 8:50.
posted by BlackLeotardFront (13 comments total)

I never realized that there was a sequel to Link to the Past. That's amazing. I might have to find a ROM of it.
posted by codacorolla at 6:47 PM on February 23, 2011

Holy shit. This was a crazy idea for a video game....

"As a programming project, BS Zelda was considered by students to be exceptionally difficult due to the strict quality control imposed by Nintendo. The game was to have no interactive lag and no programming bugs of any kind."

Every program contains at least one bug and one extraneous line of code.

(and by induction, every program can be reduced to a single line of code, which contains a bug. this reduced form is probably written in perl.)
posted by kaibutsu at 7:06 PM on February 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

Brilliant. I have been wanting to know about this game for a long time.
posted by phenylphenol at 7:22 PM on February 23, 2011

BTW, the youtube links are from Clan of the Grey Wolf's 16-bit Gems series, which are an amazingly nerdy and satisfying walk through some of classic games of the Super Nintendo.
posted by Panjandrum at 7:24 PM on February 23, 2011

When you get down to it, kaibutsu, aren't all programs, and all humans, just part of the same single line of universal assembly code?
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:04 PM on February 23, 2011

Codacorolla: There was another direct sequel to Link to the Past which stars the same incarnation of the main character. It's called Link's Awakening.
posted by sandswipe at 9:03 PM on February 23, 2011

There are a lot of bugs crawling around, come to think of it...
posted by kaibutsu at 10:05 PM on February 23, 2011

For some reason, I kept waiting for this to be a spoof. The level of technological innovation, cost, and particular nature of the changes made to the original quest just seemed too over-the-top obsessive to be real.

It wasn't until I was halfway through the video that I realized it wasn't a set-up. Is this what the internet has done to me?
posted by Graygorey at 10:05 PM on February 23, 2011

Amazing. Thanks for posting this.
posted by 2bucksplus at 11:08 PM on February 23, 2011

I enjoyed his rotating cast of shirts.
posted by The Whelk at 5:15 AM on February 24, 2011

This was really interesting. I'd heard of the Satellaview, but until now I had no idea how it actually worked. It's kind of neat how the games were only broadcast a few times each day and you would be playing alongside hundreds of other people you couldn't see.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 7:16 AM on February 24, 2011

Except for the foreign language switches I really loved it. Really, I would almost have preferred the messed up Japanese. Although I don't think it would have been too hard to get some phonetic spelling in there and just said it right either.
posted by theichibun at 7:36 AM on February 24, 2011

That was a great little video, and nice piece of Zelda/Gaming history. Cheers.
posted by Fizz at 10:09 AM on February 24, 2011