Updated: Play the original Legend of Zelda in 3D in your browser

Zelda 30 Year Tribute

Update: That age of darkness I mention in the paragraph below has come to pass: Nintendo has killed a clever tribute to one of its best-loved games. Sadly, Zelda30Tribute is no longer playable.

Original: What trickery is this? You can now play the original Legend of Zelda in your browser in 3D thanks to the magic of Javascript. For Zelda's 30th anniversary, Scott Lininger and Mike Magee have rendered the first three dungeons of the NES classic in voxels. You can have a go here, at least until Nintendo's legal team unleashes an age of darkness.

Zelda 30 Year Tribute 2

The remaining dungeons and the accompanying overworld are to follow, in addition to major bugfixes. Boomerangs, for example, are completely broken, while that chippy warning bleep you get when on your last half-heart of health never turns off. As the devs put it, "This is not the greatest game in the world, no; This is just a tribute."

They're not the first team to experiment with voxels in your browser—there's a functional NES emulator that extrapolates 3D models from sprites in any ROM you care to feed it.

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