Link's Awakening: The Zelda That Began as an After-Hours Experiment

A whole Zelda adventure on the little green screen.

Of all the games that proved the Game Boy was more than a toy, few make the case as completely as The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. A full, sprawling adventure, with dungeons and secrets and a world to lose yourself in, somehow poured onto the little green screen. What makes it remarkable is not just that it exists, but how it came to be: not as a grand plan, but as an experiment a few Nintendo staff tinkered with after work, which grew quietly into one of the strangest and most beloved games the company ever made.

An after-hours experiment

Link's Awakening started life as an unofficial side project. Some of the team began, in their own time, trying to squeeze the Super Nintendo classic A Link to the Past onto the far weaker Game Boy, almost to see whether it could be done at all. That experiment took on a life of its own, and instead of a straight port it became an original game under the direction of Takashi Tezuka, with the story and script shaped by Yoshiaki Koizumi and Kensuke Tanabe. After about a year and a half of work it was released in Japan in June 1993 and around the world later that year.

That informal origin matters, because it shows in every corner of the finished game. This was the first Legend of Zelda made for a handheld, and the first built from the ground up rather than for a television, and its loose, playful development gave it a freedom the mainline console games never quite had. Nobody, it seems, was watching too closely, and the result is gloriously off-model.

A Zelda without Zelda

The setup is a sharp break from tradition. Link is shipwrecked and washes up not in Hyrule but on Koholint Island, a small, dreamlike place watched over by a slumbering, whale-like deity called the Wind Fish. To leave, he must find eight musical instruments scattered across the island and use them to wake the sleeping giant. There is no Triforce quest in the usual sense, and, unusually for the series, neither Princess Zelda nor Ganon actually appears. It is one of the very few Zelda games where the two names on the marquee are both absent, though the final foe does briefly borrow Ganon's shape among a parade of nightmares.

No Zelda, no Ganon, a few Goombas, and an ending that stays with you.

The crossover nobody approved

Here is where that after-hours freedom really shows. Koholint Island is quietly full of characters who have wandered in from entirely different Nintendo games, cameos that were essentially unofficial. Explore for a while and you will trample Goombas straight out of Super Mario Bros., dodge Piranha Plants, meet a chained-up creature called Bow-Wow that is unmistakably a Chain Chomp, and run into Boos, Piranha Plants and even Wart, a boss borrowed from Super Mario Bros. 2. A treasured Yoshi Doll sits at the heart of one of the island's trading quests, a picture of Princess Peach turns up along the way, and the friendly farmer Tarin looks suspiciously like Mario with a moustache. Nintendo's other great mascot gets a nod too, in enemies modelled on Kirby.

The dreamy island of Koholint

In any other Zelda this crowd of gatecrashers would feel like a mistake. On Koholint it feels exactly right, because the whole island has the logic of a dream, where half-remembered faces from other stories drift in without explanation. The unrestrained development did not just tolerate that strangeness, it made it the point.

The dream you have to end

It is worth pausing here, because this next part gives away the ending of a thirty-year-old game.

What lifts Link's Awakening above a charming curiosity is its story, which is quietly devastating. As you play, it dawns on you that Koholint Island is not real at all. It is the dream of the sleeping Wind Fish, and every villager you have helped, every friend you have made, exists only for as long as the great beast sleeps. To escape, Link must wake it, and waking it means the island and everyone on it will simply cease to be. The game asks you to finish something knowing that completing it will erase the very world you fell in love with. For a handheld often dismissed as a machine for quick fun, that is an astonishingly bittersweet note to end on, and it is the reason players still talk about the game decades later.

In this collection

Link's Awakening was a system-seller, and this collection holds it in a fitting form: the rare, German-only Super Star Set, a console bundle that paired the Game Boy with two of its biggest titles at once: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land 2. Nintendo built plenty of bundles around its heavy-hitting first-party games, but because this one was limited to a single market, complete examples are genuinely scarce today, which makes it one of the more special ways to own a piece of Koholint.

The Game Boy Super Start Set - Mario and Zelda joining forces

The little adventure that started after hours went on to become a classic, later recoloured for the Game Boy Color and rebuilt entirely for a modern console, but the original monochrome version is where the dream began. To see this bundle and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.