The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, released in Japan on November 21, 1991, as ゼルダの伝説 神々のトライフォース (Zeruda no Densetsu: Kamigami no Toraifōsu, literally The Legend of Zelda: Triforce of the Gods), and in North America and Europe in 1992, was the only game in the Zelda series released for the Super Famicom (in Japan) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (in North America and Europe).
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was originally planned for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since Nintendo had a lot of resources at the time, they decided to carry A Link to the Past over to the SNES instead. It introduced many of the features of gameplay that are still included in the series to this day, such as trading sequences, multi-level dungeons, a dynamic environment (light and dark worlds), and items such as the Master Sword and the hookshot.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was ported to Game Boy Advance by Capcom in 2002. The Game Boy Advance version was released in North America first, then Japan. Another game, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, a Zelda game specifically designed for multiplayer play on Nintendo GameCube, was introduced in 2004 that used 2D environments reminiscent of A Link to the Past. Players were able to play Four Swords by linking together multiple Game Boy Advances with the game.
Chronology
The chronology of The Legend of Zelda series of games is as of now officially unspecified. See the The Legend of Zelda series article for the most plausible chronology to date. According to the text on the back of the game's packaging A Link to the Past follows the adventures of Zelda's and Link's ancestors referring to the characters from the two NES games The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Thus A Link to the Past takes place before the events of the first two Zelda games. The story of the Triforce and the banishment of Ganon by the seven sages is a rough outline of the story of Ocarina of Time, thus placing A Link to the Past after Ocarina of Time in the Zelda timeline. Shigeru Miyamoto has yet to make an official statement about the true chronology of the Zelda series.
Meaning of the subtitle
The name A Link to the Past is a pun on the main character of the former Legend of Zelda games and also supports the above mentioned concept that the character of Link in A Link to the Past is not the same person as Link in the two former games, thus being the starting point of the Multiple Links Theory. Relating the title of the game to the story of A Link to the Past alone is misleading since Link does not travel through time in this game but merely jumps between two realms, namely the real world of Hyrule and the Golden Land, a light-filled and beautiful mirroring of the real Hyrule. The Golden Land was transformed into the Dark World, a grim and depressing mirroring of Hyrule, by Ganon with the help of the power of the Triforce. No time traveling took place in any of the Legend of Zelda games until the release of Ocarina of Time. A similar title pun appeared in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, where Link, well, awakes!
Music
The music was composed by Koji Kondo. The overworld theme of the original Legend of Zelda, or "Hyrule Overture" theme, was carried over to A Link to the Past and played in the Light World, redone in SPC700 style. It was also carried over to Super Smash Bros. in Nintendo 64 style and Super Smash Bros. Melee in orchestral style.
Possible Origin of Flute Boy's music
According to a contributor at the Desert Colossus fan site "Tonight on Turner Classic Movies, there was an old 1954 movie called Men of the Fighting Lady. I heard, note-for-note, the Zelda 3 flute boy music playing in the background at one point! Contributed by R.J. Smith"
The truth of this reference, if any, has yet to be verified.
Technical notes
At the time, most SNES game cartridges had 4 Mbit (512 KB) of memory. This game broke the trend in using 8 Mbit (1 MB), allowing the Nintendo development team to create a remarkably expansive world for Link to inhabit.
A Link to the Past features two fully-explorable worlds; Light World has four castles and Dark World has nine. Each castle has from three to eight floors, and each floor has quite a lot of rooms. Moreover, there are many places that expand to bigger maps (usually, through a door or a hole). In short, the game's world is amazingly intricate.
The game also premiered a simple graphic compression method on the SNES by limiting the color depth of many (but not all) tiles to 3 bit (8 colors) instead of the SNES's native 4 bit (16 colors) tiles. The tiles were decompressed at runtime by simply adding 0 for the one missing bit in the graphic loading routines. The clever way of programming found in the A Link to the Past has earned it the image of one of the most well programmed games in video gaming history as regarded by the console development community. It is a good example of Nintendo's high quality games that benefit from the fact that the software and hardware developers work under the same roof.
See also
