One of three Zelda games produced for the Philips CD-i under a licensing deal struck when Nintendo and Philips' partnership on a CD-ROM add-on collapsed. Nintendo licensed only character likenesses; it had no real hand in development.
Placement Reasoning
Verified against Nintendo Life's reproduction of Aonuma's 2013 MTV Multiplayer interview and Wikipedia's account of the licensing deal, confirming Nintendo's involvement was limited to approving character art.
Notable & Interesting
- Series producer Eiji Aonuma has stated on record that he doesn't think these games 'really fit in the Zelda franchise.'
- Infamous today largely for its unintentionally comedic animated cutscenes, since become a long-running internet meme.
Connections
- Parallel story with
Zelda: The Wand of GamelonDeveloped together, released the same day.
Also on the Non-Canon
Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon
The second CD-i title, and the only Zelda game in which Princess Zelda herself is the playable protagonist, searching for Link and fighting Ganon on the island of Gamelon.
Zelda's Adventure
The third and last Philips CD-i Zelda game, an overhead-view action-adventure closer in structure to the original NES Legend of Zelda, developed independently of Nintendo under the same character-licensing arrangement.