Zelda's Adventure

Lore & Background

Zelda's Adventure was created by Viridis, an entirely different company from the developers of the first two CD-i Zelda games, and was not influenced by them. The game's backgrounds were created from videos of scenery near Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles, footage of Hawaii taken from a helicopter, and the developers' vacation photos. This decision consumed much of the system's RAM, causing slow scrolling and frustration among developers. All human characters were portrayed by in-office staff, with character sprite walking animations done by having actors walk on a motorized treadmill. The game's music composer, Mark Andrade, physically portrayed the astrologer Gaspra in cutscenes, while his voice was dubbed by Hal Smith in his final acting role. Zelda was played by office receptionist Diane Burns in the opening cutscene and by Annie Ward in other cutscenes and in-game. Non-human characters were created using clay models and stop-motion animation by model artist Jason Bakutis, who had worked on films such as Critters 3 and Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Houses and interiors for cutscenes were built as scale models. The game spent two years in testing, longer than it took to develop, and much more music was composed than was used. There were plans at one point to hire Echo & the Bunnymen to do the music. Development initially aimed for 600 screens and 160 NPCs, with Viridis president Lee Barnes suggesting a playthrough time of up to 300 hours, but the final product had only a handful of NPCs and a playthrough time placed by one commentator at 12 hours. The majority of programming was done by Randy Casey, with additional programming for the inventory system by Gavin James. There is conflicting information about the game's budget: one developer claims there was 'no budget at all,' while Bakutis claims (likely erroneously) it had 'at the time, the biggest budget ever for a video game.'

Reader's Guide

Zelda's Adventure is widely regarded as one of the worst video games ever made. Critics panned its graphics as 'blurry and digitized,' with Wired magazine calling them some of the worst ever encountered. The acting was criticized as unprofessional, and the game could not produce both sound effects and music at the same time. Scott Sharkey of 1UP.com called the box art one of the 15 worst ever made. Despite some critics giving more nuanced reviews to the first two CD-i Zelda games, Zelda's Adventure received uniformly negative reception. Danny Cowan from 1UP.com and John Szczepaniak from Retro Gamer were very critical of the game, with Szczepaniak claiming it has 'the most arbitrary and illogical' design. The game was released around the time the Philips CD-i was being discontinued and has become very rare; authentic copies typically sell for over US$100. Its legacy is that of a notorious footnote in the Zelda franchise, remembered for its technical limitations, unusual development process, and status as the only Zelda game to use live-action video.

Did You Know?

• Zelda's Adventure is the only Legend of Zelda game to feature live-action full-motion video sequences.
• All human characters were portrayed by in-office staff, with Zelda played by receptionist Diane Burns in the opening cutscene.