The Legend of Zelda turned 30 this year, and fans across the world are celebrating, some in more elaborate ways than others. To wit, Scott Lininger and Mike Magee have not only remade the first three dungeons of the original game in 3D with voxels, they’ve made it playable in any browser.
It’s an impressive feat both in the look, which keeps the classic pixels while refreshing the original game, and in how it plays. Thanks to JavaScript, everything is incredibly smooth, even when rendering text. There are a bunch of bugs, naturally; the boomerang basically doesn’t work, and there are some busted sound effects. So it’s not going to be the game you play if you finally decide to finish some business with Ganondorf, but it’s pretty fun to play in a browser instead of working.
Nintendo’s legal team falling on this like a squad of Darknuts is probably only a matter of time, but Nintendo should take a close look at what Lininger and Magee have done. Lately the best Zelda games have been the ones that offer new takes on classics in the series. Adding a third dimension really gives this game a fresh feel despite being thirty years old, and a voxel-powered take on Link’s dungeons is worth a more in-depth look.
(Via Zelda30Tribute and PC Gamer)