Well How-de-do there, PureZC, it's been a while! How've you been? How're the wives? Won any good wars recently? I've been good, just enjoying feeling reasonably happy in my own skin for the first time in my life, and so on and so forth, it's pretty awesome. Anyways, I just dug myself up out of this here cave in the ground to present you with this little game here. Nothing special, it's been done before, but I thought that since ZC has come so far since 1.90 and 1.92, I might as well do it to pass some time. And I'm super sorry, but my writing is going to get boring and dry from here on out. I was in semi-history-student-mode when I wrote it, so it reads like that. A lot of it is common knowledge around here, but I wanted to be reasonably thorough. So let's get to it.


This introduction is for those who are not too familiar with BS Zelda, and/or those who enjoy a bit of video game history every now and then. If you are not one of these people, feel free to skip straight to the TL;DR at the end.

In 1995, Nintendo released the Satellaview, a peripheral for the Super Famicom, in Japan. As the name implies, the add-on was used to pick up satellite broadcast software for the Super Famicom, similarly to things like the Sega Channel for the Sega Genesis. While the attachment was never released outside Japan, it did quite well in its homeland, even while customers were being charged huge fees for the service.

During the Satellaview's life-span, there were several games developed specially for the add-on, many of them part of very familiar franchises. There was an F-Zero game for it, a Fire Emblem game, Dragon Quest, Harvest Moon, hell, even Sim City. Among these though were two Zelda games, one of which was aptly titled “BS The Legend of Zelda” – “BS” being short for “Broadcast Satellite.” BS Zelda, as fans have taken to calling it, was for all intents and purposes a scaled back remake of the first game in the series, albeit with some twists: The game was broadcast over the course of four weeks, being broken up into four episodes with certain objectives to complete in a fifty-minute time limit. On top of that, the game featured full voice acting and music, which was broadcast alongside the game data itself, to help move along the plot and to push players in a direction necessary to beat the game in the given time frame. The game's story was also slightly altered, with players playing not as Link, but as the mascots of “BS-X: The Story of the Town Whose Name Was Stolen,” the game/application cartridge used alongside the Satellaview to load games into the console's memory.

BS Zelda, as far as Nintendo is concerned, never saw the light of day after service for the Satellaview ended. Of course, it wasn't long before a ROM of the game was leaked onto the Internet. In its original dumped state, however, the game was not very playable, partially due to a combination of emulation issues, the timed nature of the game, and flat-out corrupted data, among other problems.

A vibrant community of Zelda fans, hackers, and other such enthusiasts soon cropped up with the mission of restoring these games to a playable state, a goal which while at this point in time has long since been technically achieved, is being pushed further and further all the time. Even our very own Armageddon Games had a part in that: That Romview utility packaged with Zelda Classic? That program was written by Phantom Menace, the creator of Zelda Classic, specifically for BS Zelda, over fifteen years ago. Similarly, the BS Zelda Homepage, which can be considered the core of the BS Zelda community, has a reasonably sized section on BS Zelda content in Zelda Classic. One member of the ZC community several years ago, Vel, even remade the entirety of the game in ZC back in 2004, which is what provided the inspiration for this little project.

Even today, the impact of BS Zelda on the Zelda Classic community is not only undeniable, but absolutely inescapable. Anyone who's ever even opened ZQuest in the past decade has most likely come across the term “BS” in regards to the Zelda series. There are innumerable enemies, combo types, quest rules, and so on within Zquest that refer to BS Zelda. Beyond that, virtually all of the most popular tilesets – Pure and Dance of Remembrance, for example – contain a large amount of graphics from BS Zelda.

As such, I only find it fitting that after so many years, with so many new additions to Zelda Classic, that someone should go ahead and remake the game once more, to show how far ZC has come as a game engine since Vel's own remake of it in 2004.


As a sort of TL;DR, here's the basics: This is a remake of BS The Legend of Zelda in Zelda Classic, because BS Zelda is important to ZC and all that, and because it was done before but ZC has come a long gosh darn way since then. The biggest omission here is the voice acting, which was only ever recorded in Japanese. It has been circumvented, however, with a couple changes to in-game text, and good ol' reliance on the player to explore and experiment.

Ever played the Legend of Zelda? Yes. You have. I'm fairly certain of it. This is pretty much that. Except like you play as the BS-X mascots and not Link, but I put an option to play as Link in here, so don't you worry your poor little heart.

The game is broken up into four “weeks.” Each of these is fifty minutes long, starting at 0X:07, and ending at 0X:57 – This is how the game was broadcast.

Over the course of the game, gameplay will occasionally halt at certain specific points and something will happen. Sometimes an item will be powered up in some way. Sometimes a fairy will appear. Sometimes all enemies on screen will be killed.

The only times that the game will save is at the end of each week. Just as you couldn't stop a TV broadcast in the summer of 1995 and come back to it a few days later right where you left off, you can't just save the game in the middle of the thing here!

You can, however, press the “Ex1” key to skip straight to the end of the week.

The Map key, usually bound to the space bar, is used here for opening and closing your Objective Screen! This tells you what you should find by the end of the week. This is also the only way of pausing the clock, aside from pausing Zelda Classic as a whole.

Bringing up the normal subscreen will not stop time!

Wait, I need an actual tip and/or cheat listed here? Okay, here's one. At some point during the first week, a Heart Container will appear at the beach. You will only have about ten minutes to get it before it disappears.

Bayta – Quest Designer

Radien – New BS Tileset 3.1

Saffith - Ghost.zh

Mero - BS Aquamentus Script

Pokemonmaster64 – Bigger FFCs Script

Pkmnfrk – Lightning Script

Vel – Original ZC remake of BS Zelda, inspiration

MottZilla – Head of the MottZilla Project, my main BS Zelda reference ROM

DXTaco – Provider of my cartridge copy of the MottZilla Project which has been invaluable to me in this quest's creation.

The BS Zelda Homepage – http://bszelda.zeldalegends.net – Without this site, there would be no BS Zelda community to speak of, and precious little information on the games beyond just numbers and figures, and maybe a few screenshots here and there. It has been an absolutely crucial resource to me for this.