The Minus World ofSuper Mario Bros.has been a well-known Easter egg for quite some time. It’s a bungled disaster of code the game’s developers used as a data dump that wound up being an unbeatable level that players were never intended to find. Now, YouTuber SKELUX has unlocked a similar world forTheLegend Of Zelda,though it takes far greater work to access.
SKELUX claims to have spent 6 hours breaking down the code that kept players out of the Minus World, so this probably isn’t an area that the average player will ever gain entry to.Zelda’smap on its own has a maximum value of 16x16, though the official map area is only 16x8, meaning the map size can effectively double if it wasn’t for limitations developers put in place.The Legend of Zelda’sMinus World resides in this secret second map, and it’s just a tad bit creepy.
This second area appears to be a buggy hellscape that was obviously never meant to be found. Most tiles shown in the video appear to be full of grave sites, which is creepy on its own. Beyond that, the old man from the starting cave can be found and attacked in a few different locations, though he seems to have evolved into an invulnerable demon-god capable of summoning letters out of nothing. However, some screens appear to be perfectly sound in their construction, which raises questions about what exactly corrupts the data of the others. If anything, the Minus World should be a good “what not to do” for any developers of therumored newZeldatitle.
It is great that there are gamers passionate enough about theZeldafranchise to spend so much time trying to crack it, or rebuild it in the case of the gamers working torebuildOcarina of Timein the Unreal Engine. With any luck, SKELUX will continue to find the Minus Worlds for other games. It would definitely be great to see what abominations exist for games likeSuper Metroid.
The Legend of Zeldahas been in the news quite a bit lately, and there’sa rumor of a Nintendo Direct happening next week. Who knows, maybe Nintendo will use the burst of interest to make a specialZelda-related announcement.
