Completed Link’s Awakening “Beta Mod” Adapts A Link to the Past in 8-Bit
Posted on January 28 2025 by Jared Eubanks
Did you know that The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening originally started life as a passion project by a small group of Nintendo developers — which included Director Takeshi Tezuka and Programmer Kazuaki Morita — to try and port the Super Nintendo hit A Link to the Past over to the Game Boy? As the project took shape and eventually became blessed by Nintendo’s management to be an official game, it evolved away from a straight de-make of A Link to the Past and into an original adventure with its own quirks and nuances.
While the eventual release of Link’s Awakening is broadly loved by a majority of the fanbase, some Zelda fans have wondered what the ported version of A Link to the Past looked like before the pivot to the eventual game took place. It just so happens that, in 2020, a massive data leak from Nintendo’s archives (sometimes known as the “Gigaleak”) found its way onto the internet and provided those fans the opportunity to see unused assets and screenshots from that unreleased Game Boy de-make.
A member of the modding community known as Plainlazy has taken up the challenge to bring this 8-bit port of A Link to the Past to life by integrating the leaked information into a modded version of Link’s Awakening. Last year, the YouTube channel Hard4Games covered a demo version of the mod, which has revised the map to reflect the version found in the leak with places like Link’s house, Hyrule Castle, Death Mountain, and Kakariko Village. The map in the leak was not fully fleshed out and included blank areas, which have been carried over into the mod for an interesting twist of fidelity.
The project, titled “Legend of Zelda – Dreaming Island,” is now complete, as covered in Hard4Games’ updated video. It is available for download at Romhack Plaza, which is a site dedicated to the legal modification of retro games through ROM hacks. Those looking to try the mod out for themselves will need to provide their own legally sourced ROM of Link’s Awakening.
Rumor has it that a DX version of the mod (i.e., for the Game Boy Color) is forthcoming. According to the mod’s FAQ section, this effort “is about 50% complete but is currently on hold.”
Do you enjoy playing modded versions of Zelda classics? Does this beta version of Link’s Awakening make you curious as to what could have been? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Plainlazy (via Hard4Games)
Jared Eubanks is a staff writer at Zelda Dungeon, and he is also a husband, father, and engineer. He is originally from the Atlanta, GA area and still lives there. He graduated from Georgia Tech and is a proud Yellow Jacket. He loves to play boardgames, build Lego, and read books with his family. He’s been gaming since childhood with the original NES and GameBoy, and he enjoys retro gaming, collecting, and modding consoles and handhelds. His favorite Zelda game is Breath of the Wild but is also fond of the older classic titles.
