Sorry to break the news, but if you've been wildly speculating on the origins of a certain Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild demake that made rounds on Reddit and Twitter recently, the mystery has a far less juicy culprit.
"It seems an old ROM of a project I was working on with friends leaked online," creator Ermelber quote replied on Twitter in response to a GBATemp article. "It's so funny seeing people speculate about this as some sort of obscure piece of media by a mysterious Chinese dev, while it's simply just something we made several years ago. LMAO."
The demake in question sees a fully mapped out version of Hyrule, completely rebuilt for the Nintendo DS. It might be void of the towns, villages, and other building structures you'd find in the actual 2017 Nintendo Switch game, but the terrain itself is staggeringly accurate to the world map. Impressive as it is, though, it's the nature of how this ROM was discovered that led many Zelda fans on a wild goose chase of speculation and conspiracy theorizing.
Found on an old DS flashcard purchased on Chinese commerce platform AliExpress, the ROM file reimagines Breath of the Wild as a pixelated DS game. Reverse image searches revealed that clips of the demake were first published on Chinese DailyMotion-like site BilliBilli in 2019, though the poster of said videos (as well as the identity of the ROM creator themselves) was a total mystery. This layer of intrigue left plenty of room for self-proclaimed internet detectives to work their magic, coming up with a host of theories of varying levels of extravagance.
YouTuber JustJasen posted a detailed deep-dive into the demake, linked above, where he speculates the creator as being based in China. This could have made sense, given how both AliExpress and BilliBilli are Chinese-based companies and that BilliBilli is relatively unknown to Western audiences. When Ermelber, an Italian modder and game developer, claimed the ROM as his own person project made with friends, JustJasen's theory turned out to be false – though the two's friendly interactions on Twitter reassure me that there are no hard feelings here.
It's certainly been a wild ride for all involved in the speculation, though sadly, nothing super conspiracy theory-worthy after all. It doesn't take away from Ermelber's work in recreating a low-rez Hyrule being an impressive feat in itself, even if he didn't intend for the world to see it.
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