A Link to the Past Celebrates its 19th Birthday, Goes to College

19 years ago today, A Link to the Past finally broke out into the SNES market in America, and the world fell in love. Since we’re still in the series’ silver year, we’re gonna be giving A Link to the Past the same treatment we gave The Wind Waker last month, with a major site content overhaul, some spotlight for our extensive article archive, new retrospective pieces, as well as a brand-spanking new in-depth walkthrough. Our A Link to the Past homepage has been updated with new links to guide content and a backlog of all the articles we’ve ever released that focus on the game. And it’s got a lot to offer, including a transcript of the game’s prologue and an awesome storyline guide for the hardcore fan.

A Link to the Past is one of those games that holds a very special place in the Zelda canon, particularly given its key relationship to the overall series mythos as well as the fact that so many fans view it as the pinnacle of the series. As such, we’ve written quite a bit about it over the years.

Our oldest Link to the Past article was penned by yours truly, and broke down the controversial Imprisoning War. Is it literally connected to Ocarina of Time‘s ending as originally intended, or have later sequels such as Wind Waker and Twilight Princess fractured that connection? Bear in mind that a lot has changed in the last three-and-a-half years, and by my standards today this article is almost facepalmingly bad – still, it shows a lot about how far this site has come! I’ll be retreating this subject soon, so look out for the remake!

I also cranked out a pair of similar articles: “The Ancient Line of Sages” and “The Unknown Wars,” both part of my “Mysteries in Hyrulean History” series. The latter of the two got a recent redux for the “Hyrulean History Revisited” retrospective series that treated possible implications for Skyward Sword. In the non-theory department, A Link to the Past also got its own entry in the “Themes in Motion” series, entitled “Legacy: A Link to the Past,” that dealt with the prominent trope of connections to an ancient legendary history.

From our other writers, we have “The Nature of the Dark Realm,” written by retired ZI veteran Keenen Truby (a.k.a. MoonMan). As the title

implies

outright states, it dealt with the Dark World, how it came to be, and what its existence means for the rest of the series. This theory article was closely followed up by “The Nature of the Triforce,” a similar examination of the history of the all-powerful relic undertaken by Bombers legend Ben Lamoreux. Ben would later go on to retreat Keenen’s Dark Realm analysis with his own “A New Perspective: The Nature of the Dark Realm,” as well as the Sacred Realm at large in “The Story of the Sacred Realm.” They may seem somewhat redundant, but the progression of articles here represents a progression of theorists’ thinking on the subject, and as such gives some interesting insight into the history of the fanbase as well as of the realms themselves.

We plan on adding a bunch of new entries relating to A Link to the Past to our database in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for some retrospective pieces, theories, and top-quality site content!