In September, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker, a Wii U game that lets players design and share their own Super Mario levels. Now that it’s in the hands of over a million players, it has created a bottomless well of new levels inspired by hallucinogens, rare Mario levels, and many more weird experiments only possible by giving the masses access to a user-friendly set of game making tools.
It’s a brilliant idea, but could the same formula work with other classic Nintendo games?
Videos by VICE
Zelda Maker, an editor tool made by Justin Sink that lets you similarly create your own The Legend of Zelda levels, certainly makes a strong case for giving the adventure series starring Link the Maker treatment. Both games are two-dimensional, and are designed with a relatively simple tile grid. Both games also use a game design language that Zelda fans speak fluently by now—bombs work on cracks in the wall, big keys open big chests, and so on.
Zelda Maker is still in a very early alpha state right now, but you can download it for free here. After playing with it for a bit, it’s not hard to imagine players creating many interesting dungeons, just as players have created Super Mario levels.
Zelda Maker is also 100 percent not an official Nintendo project, and Nintendo is usually pretty quick to shut down these kinds of projects by threatening legal action, so download it while you can.
