Back in 2005 I played a game again on my PC which I used to love very much when I was a child: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This time I wanted to explore every little corner of the world, so I had the idea to create a complete map by means of combining an awful lot of screenshots.
For those of you who do not know this game here’s a brief description:
- The player controls Link and can move around freely in the big world called Hyrule.
- Link meets good persons who help him and evil characters who (mostly) must be defeated.
- After about one half of the game the evil wizard Agahnim transforms the world into the Dark World, which mostly mirrors the previous Light World, only with minor differences.
Map
In this world Hyrule it is difficult to find one’s way. This is due to the size of the world (compared to what you see on one screen) and due to many obstacles such as mountains, trees or rivers.
When I played again this game in 2005, I wanted to create a map of the whole world that I could print out in poster size that would always show me the way.
Since I was playing Zelda on my PC (with Snes9x) it was relatively easy to make screenshots and put them together to form a complete map.
Here you can see the result:
Difficulties
Some problems occurred during creation of the map:
- I could not access some areas of the map, therefore I could make no screenshots there. You can see this as white spots on my map.
- In some areas (e.g. in the Lost Woods or on the top of Death Mountain) the game uses a second layer displaying fog or clouds, which scrolls differently to the ground. With that effect the graphics get additional depth and 3-dimensionality. For taking screenshots I had to disable this layer, otherwise I would not have been able to stitch together the separate screenshots. In case of the clouds I had to stitch them together separately and place them behind the ground.
- When you look at the full map, you can see horizontal white lines. These are due to a bug in Zelda (or Snes9x?) which never shows the top and bottom pixel line of these world tiles. The only way to solve this would have been to manually fill in these pixel lines from other parts of the image.
Result
The map I created is not finished yet. Furthermore, I did not even start creating a map of the Dark World.
When googling to see if somebody did something similar, I found a website that had it all done completely (see below). Unfortunately, I can’t remember what that website was, I would have been happy to link it here. For my project this meant the end: Although I found my map more accurate (and the colors were correcter) I did not find the motivation any more to complete it.
For completeness I’m also showing the maps from the other guy (thanks man for that great piece of work!). Please note this is not my work, the copyright resides with the original owner!
