The Legend of Zelda franchise has a secret—one that Nintendo refuses to acknowledge even to this day. This dark spot in the long-running franchise’s history comes in the form of the Philips CD-i games, namely Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.
Just because the pair of games received so much negative reviews from the fanbase doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve forgotten them either. In fact, the two titles have an infamous status in the community. Even today, there are still fan-made projects and other creative content inspired by these two bizarre games.
Last year, an amateur developer worked on creating enhanced, re-imagined versions of both Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. It was definitely an incredible fan-made project that took about four years to complete. Fans who were quick enough were able to download and play the enhanced versions, with some saying that it played significantly better than the original titles. Unfortunately, the developer has since removed the download links for the two games.
This time around, however, 3D artist Hoolopee shared their own entry, featuring one of the most notorious and memorable characters within the world of Link: The Faces of Evil. The 3D artist’s previous works revolved around creating haunting and disturbing 3D models, and this recent Legend of Zelda-inspired one is just as grotesque.
This most recent fan art inspired by the Philips CD-i games features Morshu, who had the role of a merchant in Link: The Faces of Evil. Now, Hoolopee recreated the character’s design using Blender, and even animated and replicated his exact animations from the game.
The result is an incredible yet disturbing addition to the artist’s list of equally horrifying 3D renders. What’s impressive is the fact that Hoolopee was able to accurately translate the 2D character into 3D—even the background. Every part of Morshu’s animation was perfectly brought to life in this recreation, from his movements to his facial expressions.
https://twitter.com/Hoolopee/status/1352950748997447680?s=20
The 3D recreation was done so well that Hoolopee even included a side-by-side comparison on his Twitter account, and it shows how the 3D version and the original 2D one match almost perfectly. It’s clear to see that the 3D artist put a lot of time and effort into this project, and we commend them for it—no matter how disturbing the project may be.
The CD-i Zelda games already had over-exaggerated animations to begin with, and it becomes even more over-the-top when recreated and animated with Blender. So, as we can only imagine, this piece of art probably reached the expectations that Hoolopee originally had before diving into this project.
Short clips like this fit right into the “cursed image” category that’s so popular on the internet, joining the ranks of the CD-i Zelda games’ meme-worthy scenes and animations. Despite how even more disturbing Morshu looks, though, this piece by Hoolopee is undoubtedly incredible and extremely well-done.
As such, we’re curious to see if they will work on recreating and animating other characters from the Zelda CD-i games, or if they will move on to other projects. Either way, we look forward to the next one!
