How a '90s Zelda PC port became a fangame factory, turning one legend into a thousand

Have you ever heard of whale falls? The skinny is that when whales die, their carcasses are so packed with nutrients they essentially become miniature ecosystems when they hit the sea floor. Species of all sorts show up from near and far to make good of the leftovers. It's even thought that there are underwater species with specialized "equipment" to better take advantage of a whale fall. A worm called the bone-eating snot flower, for instance, might find the extent of its entire world bottled within a single rack of whale bones, fueling its every last wormy thought in a paradise we'd be tempted to call lifeless if we ever saw it.

If it had arms and a bigger brain and a taste for noscopes, I think the bone-eating snot flower would be a PC gamer. Although games are often considered disposable pop culture, we have a tendency to make incredible and enduring use of the bones—modding, private servers, custom games, and so on. Warcraft 3 was so nutrient-rich modders digested it and spit out DotA and hundreds of other new ideas.

In 1999 a hobby programmer called Phantom Menace began wor...