How a '90s Zelda PC port became a fangame factory, turning one legend into a thousand

Have you ever heard of whale falls? The skinny is that when whales die, their carcasses are so packed with nutrients they essentially become miniature ecosystems when they hit the sea floor. Species of all sorts show up from near and far to make good of the leftovers. It's even thought that there are underwater species with specialized "equipment" to better take advantage of a whale fall. A worm called the bone-eating snot flower, for instance, might find the extent of its entire world bottled within a single rack of whale bones, fueling its every last wormy thought in a paradise we'd be tempted to call lifeless if we ever saw it.

If it had arms and a bigger brain and a taste for noscopes, I think the bone-eating snot flower would be a PC gamer. Although games are often considered disposable pop culture, we have a tendency to make incredible and enduring use of the bones—modding, private servers, custom games, and so on. Warcraft 3 was so nutrient-rich modders digested it and spit out DotA and hundreds of other new ideas.

In 1999 a hobby programmer called Phantom Menace began work on a custom replica of the NES's The Legend of Zelda for PC. What started as a makeshift take on one of the most celebrated games of all time eventually became a whale fall among whale falls, as the unlicensed port-of-sorts became the ultimate Zelda fangame engine and a superlatively accessible tool for amateur gamedev in its own right. Over 26 years later, ZQuest Classic's custom "quest editor" has kept generation after generation of Zelda fan creators fed.

Make somethin' will ya!

Renamed from Zelda Classic to distance the project from the big, litigious elephant in the room, the open source engine's development is currently shepherded by volunteers Connor Clark and Emily Venezia, who are in turn assisted by community contributors and testers. They both cultivated an interest in the project as kids after discovering the Zelda PC port practically had no barrier to entry.

"It is a very simple and classic style. You go to other game engines, like, sure, Godot is nice and easy to use. But you're not moving your character around the screen without writing your own character controller script," Venezia said. "ZQuest? You enter. You go. You maybe toggle some check boxes to change how some settings work, maybe tweak a couple numbers, but for the most part you don't need any coding knowledge yourself. You can just go."

Venezia reckons ZQuest belongs on a tier of its own between simple level editors or game-tools like Mario Maker and off-the-shelf game engines. While it's been used to make everything from a facsimile of Tetris to a Mega Man-inspired platformer, it's mostly easy to use because it's specialized for making a very particular kind of game: what you might affectionately call "clones" of 2D Zeldas.

"If you just want to make a Zelda game, as far as I know, this has been the simplest way to try to get something on the screen as fast as possible. I don't know if it's always been the best, or if it is the best these days, but it's definitely been something that anyone, even a 12-year-old kid, could boot up and click a few buttons and get someone else playing a game that they made," Clark said.

The same way you might play Dragon Quest and rush to assemble a tribute in RPG Maker, players have been making their own old-school adventures in ZQuest for decades. The results range from the quaint to the damn near authentic, and the cream of the crop is collected on a database-slash-forum called PureZC. It's a visually lean, community-driven treasure trove the likes of which I didn't think existed on the internet anymore. Custom games, all of which are called "quests" and disseminated as .qst files to be plugged into ZQuest, are split up into a few genres: Metroidvania, NES-style, dungeon romper, randomizer, and so on.

Like Venezia and Clark said, you can go a long way without writing so much as a line of code (though the option is there, should you opt to push the engine beyond its normal scope using the ZScript language). A fan favorite metroidvania quest from 2024, The Deep, features puzzles that incorporate shadows and fog, conveyor belts, a hookshot like you might remember from A Link to the Past, and all sorts of other novelties.

It's easy to see how it took home the gold in a community contest, but all the more intriguing when you learn it did so in a "non-scripted bracket" and was built in just over three weeks. Bigger, multi-year endeavors like Lost Isle and The Hero of Dreams are lengthy and fully-featured games in their own right—projects that, if you squint, look and feel remarkably like unreleased Game Boy Advance games. While the quests are diverse, numbering over a thousand, reverence for the 40-year-old Nintendo series is the one thing that makes it all cohere.

Quest of the Best

Check out some prominent custom creations, from NES love letters to the gleefully anachronistic.

Quest developer Eddy Oliveira, for instance, discovered the engine at just 10 years old. He published his first adventure in 2009, fueled by a desire to translate dungeons he'd drawn on paper into something playable. While "they started out kind of shoddy," he went on to become, as engine developer Clark reckons, the most prolific developer in the entire community with over 20 quests to his name. That Mega Man tribute I mentioned earlier? That's Eddy's doing.

"I certainly made a ton during my school and university days. The only person I know of that could compete with that is my brother," Oliveira said, though he added "it was never really a goal" to make so many; he was urged on by positive reactions to his projects, emboldened by a sense of belonging he found in the community.

"They are very much driven by passion," he said. "They all have the one common interest of being Zelda fans and I think that's what makes the community a very strong one, even if it isn't too big. Very lovely people, extremely helpful, and it absolutely feels like my primary internet home."

A link to tomorrow

Venezia and Clark have a yin-yangish relationship that keeps development moving at a steady pace. Clark is, as Velenzia described, "the glue holding everything together" and has helped the project stick to its ambition that any .qst file be able to run on the newest version of ZQuest. Since joining the project in 2022 he's led a massive rewrite of the engine, helped bring it to Mac and Linux, and added a "replay system" that lets the team preview the impact of changes on old quests without having to check them all manually. It "lets us be serious about compatibility," he said.

Venezia, on the other hand, is a self-described "mad scientist" who wakes up with new, wild ambitions for the engine on any given morning—when Clark is ready to start winding down on new features and get a patch ready to ship, Venezia is eager to bump the sprite limit or maximum number of items just that little bit more. She's been on ZQuest twice as long as Clark, having taught herself how it all works in college after picking up the project from an "MIA" former lead; if she hadn't, she thinks there's "a very high likelihood this program would have probably died."

The current incarnation, 2.55, has been out since September 2024, and the two main developers have their heads down as they prepare to deliver a sizable 3.0 overhaul. The patch will add "scrolling regions," allowing for larger interconnected play areas (a pet project of Clark's that took two-and-a-half years to build), a built-in ZScript debugger, and a laundry list of fixes and stability improvements. Beyond that, they have ambitions to implement a new original tileset so developers have swathes of copyright-free pixel art to assemble their creations with. It's an addition that further helps the project stand on its own.

As for what keeps them committed to so much legwork all these years later, Venezia had an answer that reminded me of Oliveira's response to the very same question.

"Watching other people go, 'Oh my God, look at this cool thing I did!' That's the fuel. That is absolutely the fuel," Venezia said. "When I see people go out and use all those cool new features I added to do super cool puzzles and stuff, it's like, aw man. That's all I need."