The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past - Development

Development

In 1988, development of a new NES Zelda began, but one year later, the project was brought to Nintendo's next console; the Super Famicom in Japan, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in other regions. Due to the success of previous titles in the series, Nintendo was able to invest a large budget and ample development time and resources into the game's production.

At the time, most SNES game cartridges had 4 Mbit (512 KB) of storage space. This game broke the trend by using 8 Mbit (1 MB), allowing the Nintendo development team to create a remarkably expansive world for Link to inhabit. Like Super Mario World, this game used a simple graphic compression method on the SNES by limiting the colour depth of many tiles to eight colours instead of the SNES's native 16-colour tiles. The tiles were decompressed at runtime by adding a leading bit to each pixel's colour index. Storage space was also saved by eliminating duplication: The Light World and the Dark World are almost identical, and reverse engineering of the game's ROM contents has revealed that only the differences were saved; otherwise, they would have needed to wait for a 16 Mbit ROM.

The script of the game was written by series newcomer Kensuke Tanabe, while Yoshiaki Koizumi was responsible for the background story explained in the instruction manual. The English language localization included changes to the original Japanese game. The most common change was the removal of religious references to conform with Nintendo of America's content guidelines. The most obvious change was made to the subtitle of the game, which was renamed from Kamigami no Triforce (lit. "The Triforce of the Gods") to A Link to the Past. The font used to represent an unreadable language, Hylian, originally had designs of a vulture and an ankh. These designs were based on Egyptian hieroglyphs which carry religious meanings, and they were altered in the English version. The localization also changed plot details included in the instruction manual. The priest Agahnim became a wizard, and his background, which originally implied that he was sent by the gods, was altered to remove any celestial origin.