Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (CD-i) Playthrough

A playthough of Philips' 1993 action-adventure game for the Philips CD-i, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.

This CD-i exclusive, released on the same day as its companion game Link: The Faces of Evil (   • Link: The Faces of Evil (CD-i) Playth...  ) is one of the four games for the system that were officially licensed by Nintendo. The pair was later followed up by Hotel Mario (1994,    • Hotel Mario (CD-i) Playthrough  ) and Zelda's Adventure (1995,    • Zelda's Adventure (CD-i) Playthrough  ).

You might be asking yourself how these games exist at all, let alone in an official capacity. Nintendo has always been fiercely protective of their IPs, so what happened here?

It's all to do with a contract that once existed between Nintendo and Philips. After being royal douches to Sony and breaking a deal with them to produce the SNES CD-ROM add-on, Nintendo struck a deal with Philips - one that was far more heavily skewed towards Nintendo's interests than the agreement with Sony was. No CD drives came to be under the partnership, but the terms of the agreement gave Philips a window of time in which they could create their own games based on Nintendo's material. There's a lot to that story. If you're interested, you should research it a bit. It makes for an interesting read.

So, here's Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, the mother of so many memes.

It's essentially a platformer with a few light adventure elements, but it sure doesn't feel anything like Nintendo's games. It strives for a style similar to The Adventure of Link's, but as you plainly can see from the video, it fell short. The controls are spotty and slow to respond, the hit detection is all over the place, enemies swarm relentlessly, and it's often difficult to tell what surfaces you can walk on. It's frustrating and difficult to play.

But what gave the game so much notoriety is also what makes Zelda: Wand of Gamelon worth giving a try. It's a beautiful trainwreck of a fever dream awkwardly masquerading as an official Zelda game, and that makes for an oddly compelling experience.

Those cutscenes are... something else. They look like something a twelve year old kid created for a class project - a dedicated but not terribly gifted twelve year old.

You have to give credit where it's due, though. Given the crippling hardware limitations of the CD-i, a machine that was never intended to be a game console, the gameplay is fairly reasonable, the in-game graphics are very nice for 1993 (the painted backgrounds remind me of Beyond Shadowgate's), and the soundtrack is great. It sounds nothing like a Zelda game, but the dance tracks are pretty catchy.

From a gameplay perspective, I wouldn't recommend any of the CD-i's Zelda games, but for anyone that wants to try them, I'd suggest Zelda: Wand of Gamelon. It's easily the most playable of the three.

*I had a playthrough of this one up before, but its video quality was looking a bit rough, so I'm replacing it with this 4K60 encode of a brand new playthrough. Hope you enjoy it!
___________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!