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The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Illusions of the Past

        The Zelda project commenced for the TI-83 during March/April of 1998. The first demo was released sometime in June of that year. The original was the product of hard work by Harper Maddox. Unfortunately, Harper lost the time and will to continue the project soon after that because Zelda is such a dauntingly large project to attempt. Trying to fit a game that megabytes of data on a system with kilobytes to spare is almost unthinkable. The game just sat on his computer untouched for nearly six months (July -> December)! Meanwhile, I (Sam Heald) was working on my own miscellaneous calculator projects for the TI-82, one of which was Picross, a port of Andreas Ess's paint-by- numbers puzzle game. In November, I contacted Harper because I wanted to use Zelda's beautiful 16x16 sprites as levels in Picross. Harper sent me the source code and told me to take whatever I wanted. A month passed...

        One of the biggest problems with the old demo was an ugly crashing bug. Priding myself in my ability to debug just about anything and seeing a challenge, I decided in sometime December to rid the old demo of the bug simply so I could keep it on my calculator without the worry of a memory reset. Within a few days, the bug was solved. I contacted Harper about releasing a fixed version of the game, and Harper informed me that he was through with the project entirely. It was mine to do with as I pleased. I had almost unintentionally inherited this goliath of a calculator project.

        I worked diligently on the project for about three months. Between January and March, I released three or four new demos, adding a shield, some new enemies, and other gameplay features. The project was well on its way, when the unthinkable happened. My computer became fried literally. The motherboard and hard drive were trashed, the computer totaled. I had the source code, but no means to do anything with it. Over the next six months, I never had a consistent source of a computer. Instead, I did some occasional work for the TI-85, and he wrote a simple game called "SubHunt" (which is quite popular for some reason). Again, the Zelda project was dead.

        Then, September '99 rolled around. With the school year starting again, I had no choice but to buy a new computer. However, six months had passed since I had worked with the source code and many of the changes that I been making were only half done, so understanding the code was a serious problem because much of it I didn't write anyway. Three more months passed making extremely minimal progress. Instead, I worked on Baseball II and Checkers 8X. Finally, I decided that I had enough with the old game. The methods used in the original programming were so one-dimensional in nature that serious improvements were almost impossible. So I decided to rewrite the entire game from scratch.

        About a month later in early December, I contacted Harper to see if he was interested in rejoining the effort. Afterall, he started the project. He agreed to help primarily with advice, graphics, and some occasional programming of routines (a message box, sprite flipping, etc.) Slow, but steady progress on the new game was made for about three months.

        The long-closing of the Void Productions website gave a opportunity for a unique occasion to release a sampling of the new project. The new improved Zelda project fixed most if not all of the complaints that people had with the old rendition. The collision detection was not quite so stingy. The sprites were changed to a smaller 12x12 design to accomodate more complex level design. Backgrounds became interactable and animated. The Zelda project was alive and well, 2 years after its initial conception.

        Unfortunately, Zelda still had much work left to be done, a solid year's worth at least. The amount of work became too much. Progress would be made for awhile, and then my faith that it could ever be completed would wane. Alex, our dedicated graphics artists, had to leave for personal reasons. Every time I hit a snag, I would become discouraged and break for a week or two. A month never passed without work on Zelda, but the work was truly little. I also managed to break several other computurs during the year 2000.

        Attention was devoted towards other projects, more promising to be finished such as Super Mario. Over the summer '01, members of Void Productions including me became preoccupied by paying z80 programming jobs (Thank you, Texas Instruments). There is only so much z80 time to go around. My free time was spent on an update to Mario.

        By November '01, I had completed work for Texas Instruments and was nearing completion on Mario. Then, my longtime laptop broke for good. The source code to Mario v2.0 was lost permanently as well as any other iffy projects. The only project unaffected was Zelda. Without much of an alternative, I recast myself into the project.

        With any luck at all, Zelda is finally coming to an end. Four years have passed. Most of the eager fans of '98 have long since forgotten, and I cannot apologize enough to them. Alas, finally my magnum opus is being released. Look for it April 22nd, 2002...