Kotaku Shows Off a New A Link to the Past Randomizer Hack

Stop the presses, a new classic game hack exists. Alright, so that’s not necessarily ground breaking stuff, but this particular hack is bringing all new life into A Link to the Past, 25 years later. Kotaku recently wrote up an absolutely stellar piece that goes into great detail about both the hack and the folks behind it, who generally preside in the speed-running realm. I highly implore you go give

that article a read, as it contains some highly interesting stuff. I’ll just cover the basics here and a few situations as examples, but needless to say this new hack is quite challenging.

So the hack, titled alttprandomizer (original, right?), takes every item in the game and randomizes it. So, every chest you open, every npc that would give you items, it’s now entirely random. That means that first chest in your Uncle’s house may contain power gloves or just a simple heart piece instead of the traditional boomerang. What makes this randomizer extra special is that it contains fail-safes to prevent you from getting permanently stuck. With items handed out at random, it’s easy to see how you may be able to skip to something, but never go any further. The randomizer takes that into account and will either save you (IE, you get stuck in the Dark World because you gained early access and can’t get back, so it boots you back to the light world) or it will force a situation where a certain item has to be spawn-able before other parts of the game.

This hack is masterful in that players are saying that it almost makes the game feel entirely new. You can literally end up skipping large portions of the game because of it, but what it also encourages all players to do is try to 100% the game – as every single chest, every NPC with items, could give you that ever crucial piece to move onward. Here’s a look at the hack in action:

When he got the Ether Medallion and it actually worked, I was totally amazed. This opens up entirely new gameplay possibilities. The hack itself is created by Timothy Billard, Axel Hellstrom, and David Carroll. You can download the hack for yourself right here, though you will need a SNES emulator to use it.

Source: Kotaku