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The Zelda series isn't alien to the concept of co-operative play – see Four Swords and Tri Force Heroes – but the original 1986 title has remained a resolutely single-player affair, until now.
Developer Deric Miller has just released Z for 2, a hack which turns The Legend of Zelda into a "two-player simultaneous cooperative multiplayer game."
Player one controls Link as normal, while the second player is in charge of Link’s Shadow.
"Either player can pick up and use any item, and each player can select their active item independently of the other," says the developer. "Players share resources and health. Each player’s Select button switches their active item without the need to pull up the inventory screen."
There's only one review on ROMhacking.net so far, but it's a glowing one. Sintra4 says:
"My wife and I have been playing for about an hour and found no issues. The gameplay is incredibly fun.
It plays exactly how you’d want it to: both players are equally capable of interacting with the world without disrupting each other too much. If Player 2 picks up a special item, it’ll still go to Player 1, no matter how far away they are, which can lead to amusing moments like P2 picking up a Triforce piece just for P1 to triumphantly hoist it above their head.
Health is shared, and not everyone likes that, but I think it works here. When you’re at full health, you feel unstoppable, firing twice as many sword beams as the game was originally designed around, but the fact that there are now 2 Links on screen means that enemies are twice as likely to damage you.
I expect the game to get easier for us as we accumulate more resources and options, but LoZ is no pushover for most people, so I don’t yet know for sure what the overall difficulty will be."
The review ends with Sintra4 offering "compliments and sincerest thanks" to Deric Miller. "This is an incredible gift to just casually drop like this. If the quality we’ve been experiencing with this hack so far is maintained throughout the rest of the game, this will very likely be a treasure that we’ll go back to for the rest of our lives."
This isn't the first time such a mod has been created for the game, as you can see from this video, but it's perhaps the most polished so far.