Zelda fans stunned as mystery open world game appears online

The Legend of Zelda fans have recently found themselves diving down rabbit holes in a desperate bid to find the source of a strange Nintendo DS demake of Breath of the Wild.

The hunt started back on the 14th of October after user robmeason posted a thread titled “Someone explain this please” to the r/Zelda subreddit, but only truly began to pick up steam after YouTuber JustJasen uploaded a video of them playing through a ROM of the game featured in the thread.

As detailed in the original thread, robmeason found the game by complete accident. They purchased a Nintendo DS flash cart from AliExpress that happened to have the mystery Zelda game pre-installed and sought help trying to track down its origin.

As you can see in JustJasen’s video, the map featured in the game seems to be an incredibly faithful recreation of the same map of Hyrule that you can explore in Breath of the Wild, which led some to assume that this mystery game was an official Nintendo project.

Some also believed that, given that the flash cart robmeason acquired was purchased through AliExpress, an unknown Chinese developer may have been responsible.

That’s not the case however, as a couple of the developers have since come forward to shed some light on the project - including Italian game dev Ermelber.

As Ermelber explained on Twitter, the project was something that they and a few friends were working on as a way to test their skills.

“It seems an old ROM of a project I was working on with friends leaked online,” Ermelber clarified, “it's so funny seeing people speculate about this as some sort of obscure piece of media by a mysterious Chinese dev, while it's simply just something we made several years ago. LMAO”

One of those friends seems to the user Gericom, as they explained on the GBATemp forum that they were the one responsible transplanting Breath of the Wild’s map into the game.

There’s also a few other unnamed developers who helped out with the project, but they seemingly wish to go uncredited for the time being.

The developers also stated that the build that found it’s way online was a much older version, but that they don’t plan to continue working on the game or release any further updates for the time being.

Shame really, because what they’ve managed to produce here is extremely impressive for what was essentially just a test build.

They undoubtedly don’t want to draw the ire of Nintendo though, who are very notorious for sending out legal threats to anyone who even thinks about infringing on their intellectual properties.