Never Knew it Existed! Cool Zelda Satellaview Story

Looper posted a pretty cool story about BS: The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, one of the Japan-only Super Famicom games released for the Satellaview service.

For those unfamiliar, Nintendo would broadcast video games for like an hour on certain days, in parts, over a couple of weeks. Some of these games could be saved to blank cartridges and played again later, but Ancient Stone Tablets was one of those games you HAD to play during one of the hours it was broadcast.

What made it unique was that, since Nintendo knew how long you could play the game for, they could make unexpected things happen at certain times in the episodes that provided additional challenges, or present players with optional sidequests they could complete while also searching for hidden stone tablets and a hidden character called "The Mole". It also enabled Nintendo to stream higher-quality music and even voice-acting during the broadcast.

I don't think I've ever read an article that goes into this depth about what Satellaview was like, and it's something that, as a Nintendo fan, I've always been sort of fascinated with since it was an interesting and wholly odd idea that only Nintendo could come up with.

Anyway, the article was a good little read. It would be cool if Nintendo would surprise everyone and come forward with fully playable versions of a lot of those Satellaview games, maybe for people with a Switch subscription? Though that will likely never happen.

There are a lot of pieces of game content that many of us will probably never get to play, that people actually put time into and worked on, just so they could be broadcast a few times and then never be seen again. But those who were lucky enough to experience it got unique remixes, mini-games and extra game content based off of popular Super Famicom titles.

That's pretty sweet. I never knew much about the service. I wish Nintendo would do a new one though with new games. I think would be pretty fun.

Nintendo Force did an article a few months back about the reasons why we won't likely ever see these games. Pretty good read.

I had never heard of this. The concept would be pretty cool in today's market. Short little episodic games that you can stream between this time and this time. A unique 2D Zelda dungeon, or a continuation of NES Remix.

I'm not entirely sure about how discussing ROMs when it comes to games that are basically lost in the air and impossible to play legally would break the rules; if that's the case, I'll take my one strike. But yeah, this game has been rebuilt as a ROM, with English voice over and all. Look it up.