New beta screens for Zelda: Link’s Awakening!

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by monokoma In: UNSEEN NEWS

5 Oct 2008

MathUser has found 4 new screens from an early version of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, with some interesting differences in the levels layout.

We can notice that the doors in the lava-room are in the wrong place (or it’s just a different room?).

The bridge looks different from the “same” place on the final map and those “things” for the Hookshot were not in there yet. The background was changed too.

I cant find the same exact spot as this one with the ghosts: in the final game there is a woods full of ghosts but the details, like the trees and the “wall” in the bottom left, dont match..

This scene is only missing a few background details and a skull.

You can find a bigger version of these and more beta-screens in the Zelda: Link’s Awakening U64 Archive.

In the discussion about these screens, MathUser has even linked us to artemis251‘s website, where we can see a wonderfull collection of unused Link’s Awakening sprites that he has found in the game! Some of these are really interesting, like a removed “old man” and a weird “dog/lion head”. Big props to Artemis251!

In the meantime, thanks to VanishedOne (Robert Seddon) we have found out about a “beta” screen that was printed in the manual of the game, where we can see Marin’s text “unfortunately, it is empty“, a dialogue that is unused in the final game (but reading here, it seems that it can be seen somehow.. and more unused texts seem to be hidden in there).

Thanks to everyone for these informations! There could be even more “unseen” Link’s Awakening stuff that we dont know yet?

Do you want to add more info, screens or videos to this post? Click on the “Edit” link below! It’s just like Wikipedia (maybe).

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5 Responses to New beta screens for Zelda: Link’s Awakening!

Robert Seddon

October 5th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

At any rate, as far as we know that ‘it is empty’ text is unused. The awkward thing is that some text in LA is pretty easy to miss: try talking to the hippo in Schule’s house loads of times, or sprinkling Magic Powder on an electric Chu (at least, I think that’s what those enemies are) and then talking to it (four times). So it’s possible it’s just very, very well hidden.

monokoma

October 6th, 2008 at 12:04 am

You are right.. at least with the “it is empty” text we know from that screen that it should have been said by Marin in that exact place, so we could try to replay the game and talk to Marin everytime we can, trying different stuff (like using Magic Powder on her).. maybe she really say that somehow. Anyway, i dont understand why that text is not in the Gamefaqs Text Dump, even if it seems that we are able to read it in the game with that glitch.. is it possibile to make an “unfinished” text dump?

Robert Seddon

October 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

Since the text dump was made by extracting text from the ROM, it should have everything, unless something was just overlooked (or the game uses some weird special routine for e.g. debug text). I think there are 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the cartridge, but that’s a long shot… Well, if there’s any version that doesn’t have the text anywhere in the ROM, at least it’s definitely unseen.