So the conclusion here is basically "they misplaced an enemy that just so happened to be the jankiest enemy in the game, and everything else is working as intended"
The fact that you reverse engineered a glitch is insane. I love how in the 90s stuff like this just became a mystery, as if there was some in game secret people had yet to figure out. Whereas today it would probably just get patched. Like the Mew under the truck, It seems like one of those things that was more fun before the internet.
There was nothing fun about mew under the truck. Thanks to the internet I was able to do what I always wanted to do and actually catch Mew with the real glitch. Not sure why you think kids getting tricked and missing out is better.
@@TailsClockI'm glad they actually did put something there in FRLG. There's a Lava Cookie under the truck, an item from Hoenn that normally can't be obtained in FRLG.
@RevyaAeinsett actually Mew WAS in the game all along, and it even WAS accessible pretty much only with a glitch! (Outside of the real life events) It just wasn’t under the truck and the actual glitch was way weirder than anyone expected lol
I have been playing A Link to the Past literally since the day it was released. It is my favorite of all the Zelda games. But this is the first time I've heard about "The Ghosts". And being a computer programmer old enough to have written in Assembly, the explanation was totally fascinating as well. Excellent video! Keep up the great work.
Always great to see people who know assembly! After all the research for this video I have even more respect for the old school programmers. They really had to get creative!
My guess is "Ancilla" is short for ancillary (an-sill-ary). Meaning subordinate, secondary, subsidiary, auxiliary, etc. It's a secondary state value that's tied to the time and/or the AI state, and used to determine vulnerability.
"ancilla" is a full word, its latin etymology means "maid" or a... creepier version of it but yes, in technical contexts it means auxiliary. You can also google "ancilla glitches" for ALttP and it seems used as a more generic synonym for "item". In computing there's also "ancilla bits" that are "used to implement irreversible logical operations". I don't know if back then it had an impact on efficiency (a single sibling value for logic) but it looks at least like a convention.
Schroedinger's Zora ! and its quantum fireball!!! (you might get this joke) .. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .... .... ( a fireball is a model of the Quantum HDD brand = it's an old hard disk drive joke!)
I legit never even knew these "ghosts" were a thing, somehow more than two decades went by without me stumbling on _anything_ talking about them. Cheers for the info, and for going so ham on investigating them!
wow, awesome video, after around 20 years, i knew there is something off with this game, i thought this is intentional, but from a game dev perspective this was even more interesting for me to find out, new game certainly won't run into issues like that, right? :D at least i couldn't think about running into this issue using modern engines like UE5 Blueprints :D
Man, these last few uploads are the exact kind of thing that got me in to Zelda lore in the first place. Little tidbits that have way more detail behind them than you'd expect. Thanks for the entertainment and the nostalgia, my man.
It's something I've been missing as well since everything shifted to the newer games, but I guess one of the benefits of TotK kind of dropping the ball on cohesive lore was that there was a need for this kind of content to resurface to avoid burnout 🤔
@@homerman76This is a cool video but what does it have to do with lore? He just explained that it was quirks/defects of the code that was causing the anomaly
was just thinking this, the lore of zelda is so rich and fans dive into every nook and cranny finding and sharing all they can. great video, great channel
I doubt they misplaced the enemies. It's more likely that someone changed the landscape after the enemies were placed, and whoever did that didn't realize that they were going to create a problem by removing deep water from certain locations, because maybe a tester complained "there's too much deep water in the swamp" and some executive gave the order to remove some. I recently had a similar problem in software development. If you resized the window of one of our applications, everything would break apart, but it worked fine before. What happened was that there was a box with three icons in it; those icons were not always visible, but they were always there. These icons made sure that the box had a minimum width. Above the box was a table, and since it looked weird if the table and the box had different widths, the table width was set to always be the same as the box width. It was decided to remove one of the icons, which caused the box to have a smaller min width. As a result, the table now had a smaller minimum width. However, if the table width went below a certain value, the drawing calculation would overflow, causing elements that should have been drawn into the table to be drawn all over the place in the window. Whoever removed the icon probably did not expect the table drawing code to break when the window was resized. Likewise, the guy who removed some deep water areas did not expect that this would become a problem for three of the placed enemies, as they would no longer have access to any deep water around them.
It was probably planned for the Ku to have a walking variant, but for whatever reason it didn't happen. After all, they exist in A Link Between Worlds.
yeah i can see one of the programmers thinking the walking varient and water varient were just the same thing and changed based on tile and didnt realize they were two seperate entities in the code and just never realized their mistake
As a programmer, this algorithm level breakdown is so entertaining to watch! Also, I wonder it could open up a whole new class of spooky enemies if the devs understand what was going on. Invisible enemies moving every frame, only defeatable with specific weapons is really an awesome idea.
You know you play way too many SNES games when you instantly see that and go "oh it's probably the Zora randomly finding a tile because triggers in SNES games are often just enemies in a trench coat." The way developers creatively made triggers in SNES games is honestly really inspiring. Something about limitations breeding creativity.
Very satisfying end to the video, with all the loose ends being tied up. After going into how everything worked, the erratic behavior made complete sense
So, as per the document mentioned at the start, Thoul/Tempest of Shadows first did the guide in 2001. There's an Updates section on the guide, and the one at the very end of it is marked "Version 1.0" and a date of 12/18/2001 (so mid December of that year), followed with a 1.1 on the same day.
Always cool to hear about fun stories from the older end of the series. I grew up with windwaker and twilight princess so stuff like this is totally new to me. Great to see these older titles still getting love all these years later
Multiple videos of yours start with a cool history lesson that I didn’t know some pieces about, and then you often go even further beyond and conduct your own additional research and present your findings, sometimes solving decades old mysteries through your efforts. It is genuinely impressive! Not only that, you know how to present it in an understandable way even to people who have no experience in the particular field you’re talking about, like explaining the Anchilla values and such. I’m just very impressed with not only your video making skills, but your research drive and skills too!
Thank you! Im glad to hear that I was able to convey the more technical parts in an understandable way. I was honstly a little worried about that... visualizing code and putting it into layman's terms can be a real challenge!
This may be my favorite thing about the Zelda fan base: they apply their puzzle-solving beyond the planned applications. Take a mystery, gather all available information, collate the data, test hypotheses and draw a conclusion. And once all that has been done grab a shovel and keep digging until you hit bedrock!
you know what I also love about this? it even answers why they're still there. we can't say for sure why they're there in the first place (but from comments, most likely someone later went back and altered how much deep water is there, not realizing they broke the zora) but they're still in later builds, clearly because nintendo doesn't realize they're there in the first place. and that one little mistake lead to such a fascinating story, and a perfect little puzzle for us to sink our teeth in for ages. if there's one thing to love about both the zelda games and the zelda community, it's this.
So Zelda team would have known that these “ghosts” were Zora, which makes me wonder if there was some inspiration from this ghost hunt that lead to a ghost being central to the zoras domain plot in Twilight Princess.
Love how this goes from Mew Under The Truck to a debugging session. I very much enjoyed the technical explanation. But I also like the unintended lore of invisible Zora ghosts haunting the swamp from their extradimensional whirlpools that even they cannot escape.
JFC the amount of time you went on and on about one of the tiniest. most innocuous things that really doesn't matter whatsoever is utterly ridiculous. ...Subbed.
I'd imagine it's a quirk of their level design process - it's possible there was deep water there originally when they placed the zora/ku but they later revised the map and forgot to move or remove them. The "ku" behave weirdly out of deep water so the Devs just never caught the remaining ones during play testing and probably moved on to other zones because of time crunch since it didn't affect gameplay.
I've known about the ghost (and what it actually is) for years, and even seek it out to mess with in my own playthroughs. However, you went the extra mile to explain WHY it behaves the way it does! A perfect combination that could have easily led it to being missed while in development. Absolutely loved the video and its deep dive!
What's funny is the swamp was my favorite area growing up. I loved killing the Worms with the medallions and I did pick up on this phenomenon. Considering I was 5 or so, I just chaulked it up to a worm that hadn't surfaced yet. 30 years later... its kinda cool to know why!
Amateur Mellitologist here: bees love and need water, but will only go for freshwater for nourishment. They don’t typically attack fish, but there are cases of this happening. Why? No idea 😅
@@MonsterMaze yes insect wings don’t do well with water on them. But they still need water to support the hive, which they do by carrying it in their legs iirc
@@KinCryosThat's interesting. Considering how unpopular Zelda II has generally been over the years, it's kinda funny how it ended up inspiring a lot of the lore in later games (like the towns' names being reused as the sages' names in Ocarina (even though within the timeline, the towns were clearly named after the sages instead of the way it happened for real 😆)).
This was really interesting! It's the first video I've seen in quite a while that actually taught me something new about the game (which has been one of my favorites since the early 90s).
I always thought there were swamp monsters that would hurt you in the water if you stood still too long and that's what it was. I'm guessing standing still in the swamp in of itself wont lead to you getting hurt.
SECRETS REVEALED! I remember discovering the more southern ghost myself back on the SNES because the pattern on the tree stump looked suss so I used the bombos medal 'just in case', and was puzzled something invisible died. I guessed glitched out enemy back then, but now I truly know. Thanks for the great video.
Awesome vid, can’t believe I never knew or even heard about this. I’ve fully completed the game probably at least a dozen times now since the 90s and ironically I’m playing through it again now (“prep” for echoes of wisdom) and just about to start the misery mire dungeon
How detailed you went in to this, earned you my sub to you. When I first heard of this, it was basically something like this I thought happen. So all my questions got answered, include my theories as well, so keep it up. I love when people breaks down games in to details, all from how coding, out of bounds and speedruns works.
After 30 something years, I finally have the answer to what caused my favorite bomb glitch! I found that if I went into the swamp and started wildly throwing sword beams everywhere that occasionally I'd get a random bomb drop. Used this spot to max out my bombs any time I got low for free with no idea how or why it worked.
I could've swore I'd remembered some other explanation a while back that it was the ultimately unimplemented cannon soldier. I was misremembering and conflating trivia. Very interesting breakdown.
I remember getting random kills in the swamp with the AoE magic back when this came out. Now I’m kicking myself for not being more curious. I just figured it was supposed to do that. It never occurred to me it might be a glitch. Nice to finally have an explanation after more than 30 years, though!
I love these kinds of analysis videos! Ones that go into the reasons why something happens they way it does, rather than just saying "yep thats all it is" and moving on.
These are the kinds of deep dives I love seeing with old games. One very strange bit of behavior explained through the game's code. Not only do we learn about the oddity itself, but we learn a bit about how the game works as well.
Great video. I love finding these unexplained, unexpected behaviors in video games. They always add an element of mystery and intrigue, and I'm always tempted to try to come up with some kind of in-game explanation for the phenomenon that makes sense, like the "ghost" hypothesis in this case. These strange behaviors always lead to so much intense interest, speculation, and rumor, and makes the experience of playing the game more interesting and more rewarding.
I remember stuff like these ghosts happening when I played back on the SNES as a kid. Never thought much about it then. Didn't investigate it to think it was more than a bug when something would happen, like the hookshot steps.
What is very interesting is that map data of Misery Mire found in the overdump of the Super Donkey proto showcases the water's shallow and deep sections are almost identical to the final retail, which makes the Ku spawn placement even more curious. The only possibility that makes sense to me is that earlier programming of the ku/zora allowed them to spawn on any water tile, however when they wanted the zora to walk in shallow water in the light world, they probably updated the programming to only spawn in deep water and forgot about the Misery mire spawn locations.
I had heard of this before but no one at the time covered it in the detail like we witnessed today. I always just assumed it was some common enemy on the wrong layer, but obviously it was much more complicated than that
Cool video. I also gained new appreciation for the devs of those old games. All the state they have to manage for what seems like very mundane interactions for the player, but there's actually a lot going on under the hood.
I wrote these off myself as a kid as game errors (SNES _Link to the Past_ ). Some years ago, I finally found out that they were just bugged Darkworld Zoras.
This was a really cool look into the game. Thanks! You did a great job making easy to follow for someone like me with minimal experience in programming or game design.
I grew up with this game and played it a lot with my older brother. Somehow I managed to beat it on my own without a guide but it took forever. I always loved the atmosphere and sense of mystery to it and still feel like the sprite work is top notch. Crazy that to this day I'm still learning new things about it!
I was wondering what this video was gonna be about cause we knew "WHAT" this thing was for awhile but this was great insight about how this glitch even happens. Cool stuff
Seeing old GameFaqs brings me back. I remember I wrote and drew maps for the “hidden worlds” in NES Metroid, I wonder if those ever get referenced or are still in tact.
Great job ! As an informatician, i strongly like this kind of video which explore, you know, behind the scene. I replayed ALTTP few weeks ago and i realized that river zora was a weird enemy, comparing to the other mob : they was cycling, spawning/despawing, i never though the secret of their function was this weird. i though a bit a lot, and even though i am a novice in video game optimisation, i think they went on the sync up timer/ancilla variable thing for optimisation, because this ennemy had a special function of cycling, they could just handle the immune/not immune variable with the frame count, syncing it with the animation frame count. t It is clever for optimisation than just putting an aditionnal function which would just go like "when timer = 0, change ancilla value", they just synced it. It run smoothly ingame, as long as u don't missplace the spawn placing though aha
I played Link to the Past hundreds of times over and I always thought I had discovered literally everything about the game, as one of the few games I had truly mastered. The others being Ratchet & Clank, Doom II, and the Genesis Sonic games. The fact that I'm still learning about things in this game is shocking.
