The Legend of Zelda and Doom are both legendary, genre-defining titles from decades ago, but with vastly different gameplay, technical makeup and release platforms it’s hard to find too many similarities between them. That is until late 2021, when solo indie developer DeTwelve released a Doom mod set in the original NES version of Hyrule called The Legend of Doom. It’s a stunning mash-up that’s well worth playing, as Digital Foundry’s John Linneman and My Life in Gaming‘s Marc ‘Try4ce’ Duddleson discovered when they synced up to play version 1.1.0 of the mod alongside the original Legend of Zelda on original NES hardware.
That video is embedded below, but what really struck me watching the playthrough was how well the combined game really works – and how completely the Hyrule environments and gameplay from The Legend of Zelda have been transplanted into the world of Doom.
The original sprites work surprisingly well in a 3D environment, with only minor changes to some room layouts or the colour palette (which may be influenced by the RGB mod Marc is using with his hardware). You get a lovely sense of scale compared to the top-down perspective found in the original game, and being a first-person shooter it’s perhaps a bit easier to side-step enemy attacks. Of course, having infinite arrows helps a lot too.
