Research Report: "Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Maps"

By Amanda Phillips, The Critical GeoWiki Experiment Team

Abstract

Ian Albert’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past game maps are high-resolution images of the environments in the game.  Unlike traditional maps, these images do not result from a redrawing of physical locations; rather, they are instantiations of the original visual data from the game’s code.  This data, retrieved from the ROM of a game cartridge and accessed on a PC by means of a ROM editor, represents the original virtual environment of the game, captured directly from within a virtual setting.

Description

Ian Albert's video game “maps” are frozen instantiations of the game world captured in bitmap format, more akin to satellite imagery than a redrawn atlas of these locations.  His collection of maps is small but thorough, showcasing a variety of techniques for turning a living virtual environment into a still image.

To create the LTP maps, Albert used a ROM editor supplemented by screenshots from an emulator.  The ROM cartridge is the software medium for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that contains the data necessary for a particular game.  This data includes all images, sprites (standalone figures, such as bushes or creatures, integrated into the background of the scene), scripts, music data, and other components necessary for the console hardware to correctly output the game world.  While this proprietary medium is intended for access only by its corresponding console, the ROM data can be hacked and stored on a PC, played with the aid of console emulation software, or implemented in an editor for the creation of custom games.

Albert's use of ROM data to construct his maps means that the resulting images are a step closer to the virtual world encoded on the cartridge than taking screenshots filtered through an emulator or DVD recording of the world.  As a result, the maps are "pixel-perfect representations" of the environments in the game.  His set of maps covers every environment in the game, from the exterior overworld (in both light and dark incarnations) to the interiors of caves, houses, and dungeons.

The LTP overworld map features jarring overlaps and geographical inconsistencies that do not correspond to the psychologically coherent experience of the world that the gamer experiences during play.  These may at first appear to be errors in the map creation, but tracing Albert’s stitched-up images reveals no mistakes on his part.  In fact, the linear borders of the overlaps reveal a bit about the game’s environmental mechanics: the world is itself a grid through which the gamer moves.  The squares of the grid are larger than the gamer’s field of vision, so moving within each square results in a smooth panning motion.  However, the gamer’s field of vision stops moving at the border between two squares, and crossing from one square into another triggers a shifting of the map that slides Link into the appropriate position on the screen in relation to the new square (for example, he moves from the bottom of the screen to the top when crossing from an upper square into a lower).

Another notable feature of the LTP collection of maps is the non-geographical data that it contains.  Using data from the ROM, Albert marked the locations of items, starting positions of character sprites, and hidden passageways on the maps.  On the overworld map, he also documented corresponding entrances to passageways and labeled areas that have separate interior maps in the database.

Commentary

Albert’s mapmaking technique provides several advantages for the project.  While the very existence of these maps is a boon to the Critical GeoWiki experiment, his included labels greatly ease the burden of inputting these types of data into the map, which will speed setup tremendously. Because the images are of such high resolution, interfacing them with the GeoWiki results in a map that users can easily navigate at a wide range of zoom levels.  For larger maps such as the Hyrule overworld used for this demo, patterns in the data plots may only be evident from a distance, whereas individual spots on the map are easier to pinpoint up close.  Having such flexibility in map manipulation will only benefit a GeoWiki project.

The inclusion of starting character sprite locations and hidden items gives GeoWiki users a view of how the game exists prior to the gamer’s interference in the world.  This “natural state” of the game is a view that does not exist during play, since the moment Link crosses into a map square, the behaviors of the character sprites activate, causing them to move around according to their respective programs.  Similarly, the glitchy overlapping of the world’s squares are an important revelation of Albert’s map, since these inconsistent borders are outside of the gamer’s field of vision when map shifting occurs.  While such information may not seem immediately useful for an analysis, the method behind the Critical GeoWiki Experiment seeks a mass of data organized in one location to facilitate drawing connections using information that may not otherwise occur to a scholar during play. 

Unfortunately, Albert’s maps also reveal that the Critical GeoWiki, in its current form, may have limited usefulness for other games.  LTP’s world layout seems to have unique features that make it especially useful for the worldKit GeoWiki software, such as a perfectly rectangular shape and top-down view built into the game.  Though Albert has methods for mapping top-down views from the data of games that do not originally offer that perspective, his software is a custom construction that is currently proprietary.  Mapping video games at such high resolution is an art that Albert seems to have perfected – a time consuming hobby that may not be practical for larger and more complex games that may have twisted or dynamic landscapes.

Moreover, an interesting quirk of using Albert’s map to set up a Critical GeoWiki of LTP is the absence of the hero’s avatar from the game environment.  Virtually every detail of the game appears in the map except for Link himself.  This is not a limitation per se, but rather a fascinating point of discussion about the map itself.  All sprites and items that Albert places on the map are bound in some way to their respective locations, making the gamer/Link an irrelevant feature vis-à-vis the landscape.  Fusco’s arguments about eliminating personal experience via map abstraction will certainly offer some useful insight here.  However, in terms of a tool for analyzing the game itself, neglecting to take the hero into account seems like a grave omission.

Further Research

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Maps

Coco Fusco: "Questioning the Frame: Thoughts about Maps and Spatial Logic in the Global Present."

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