Zelda's Adventure - Fast Facts

The following are a bunch of miscellaneous facts relating to Zelda's Adventure that are not noteworthy enough to get their own page. Consider this page (as well as its siblings) a crash course of useless CD-i Nintendo information!

Fact Links:

Echo & the Bunnymen -- Enforced Gannon Misspelling -- The Fake MIDIs -- Hal Smith's Last Role Was In This Game -- Nintendo's Involvement In This Title

Echo & the Bunnymen

The people at Viridis had huge ambitions for their in-progress Zelda title. According to this interview with special effects artist Jason Bakutis, the studio were planning to have the rock band Echo & the Bunnymen compose the music for Zelda's Adventure.

Unfortunately, this never went through, likely due to a lack of budget and how Zelda's Adventure plays music to begin with. The final composer of the game would be Mark Andrade... and a good majority of the music he made for the game wouldn't actually make it on the disc, according to this interview.

Damn.

Enforced Gannon Misspelling

An infamous aspect of Zelda's Adventure is that it uses the older spelling of Ganon's name, "Gannon", both in-game and in its manual. This is despite the fact that when it was released, Ganon's English name had already been finalized in both the mainline series and the other two CD-i Zelda titles. This wasn't always the case.

In the v1.10 prototype of Zelda's Adventure, dated August 5th, 1994, Ganon's name is in its correct form.

Why was this changed? Did Philips lose the rights to use Ganon's proper name by that point, and had to improvise? Was it changed to make the game more consistent with the earlier titles in the franchise? Who knows.

The Fake MIDIs

One of the most well-known facts about Zelda's Adventure are three MIDI files commonly associated with it - zcdiovr3.mid, zcdidung.mid, and zcdiboss.mid. You can click on this link to listen to them. If you've actually played the game, you'll know that they never appear in-game - instead, its soundtrack is much more ambient. They aren't in the game files or either of the Animation Magic titles for that matter. So where did these faker MIDIs come from?

It's still an ongoing mystery. The earliest known archive of these MIDIs is this MIDI-hosting site from October 28th, 2001, which contains zcdidung.mid and zcdiboss.mid alongside some long-forgotten and also fake town/overworld/title music. The overworld theme we all know and love wouldn't appear until a January 2002 achive of the MIDI section of Ganon's Tower, a defunct Zelda fansite.

I remember coming across a Tweet that linked to an archive of the original source; another defunct Zelda fansite with a horrible neon yellow/green background, which had the original MIDIs under their proper names. They had nothing to do with any CD-i Zelda title. If you know what site it was, please let me know!

Hal Smith's Last Role Was In This Game

Hal Smith was an actor best-known for playing Otis, the town drunk on The Andy Griffith Show, as well as being one of the voice actors of Owl and Winnie the Pooh from the Winnie the Pooh series. His final (posthumous) credit was being the voice actor of Gaspra, the astronomer from Zelda's Adventure.

He wasn't credited in the game's credits, and his involvement only revealed through a 2014 blog post by Viridis musician (and Gaspra cutscene actor) Mark Andrade.

Nintendo's Involvement In This Title

A fact often stated about the CD-i Nintendo games is that Nintendo themselves had little to no involvement in their creation, and that the developers were more or less given free reign to do weird things with the franchises. There also happen to be interviews with people who worked on the four released titles (plus an unreleased one), with at least one of the questions focusing on Nintendo's involvement. So I wonder... for this game, how true is that statement?

For Zelda's Adventure: There's this interview with the special effects artist for the game, Jason Bakutis. It's noted that at one point during the development of the game, several "high-ranking execs" from Japan visited Viridis and were impressed by the models Jason had made. Apart from that, it's unknown what exact involvement Nintendo had with the game, or what else transpired during that visit.