Despite the title, the game series Legend of Zelda has lacked much in the way of Zelda. Inspired by a hack in which a father switched Mario with Pauline in Donkey Kong, Kenna W. of Kenna Draws Stuff set out to switch the Zelda and Link sprites in The Legend of Zelda so the princess can get out of the castle and do a little of her own adventuring.

As with Mike Mika’s role-swapped Donkey Kong, Kenna W. used Tile Layer Pro to swap the tile palettes so that the Link sprite would be replaced with Zelda and vice versa. Kenna W. experienced some difficulties as she tweaked—if she edited them, the tiles would revert to their original alignments when she tried to scroll, and some of the lesser-used sprites were scattered in different places throughout the game file. “Link's ‘Large-Shield walk cycle’ appears in two completely different parts of the code and Zelda's 'Standing' and 'arms raised' animations are on two different lines,” Kenna W. wrote in a blog post (hat tip to Kotaku for highlighting her work).

The ROM editor is not able to swap the coloring of the tiles—Link would be red and Zelda would be green—so Kenna W.'s boyfriend stepped in with a Python script that would keep princessified Link in his trademark green and put Zelda back in red. The two also used a Legend of Zelda ROM map that explained what each piece of code within the game does.

The gender swap harkens back to the work of Mike Hoye, who used a hex editor to swap all the gendered pronouns in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so his young daughter could play as a female character.

Kenna W. does not provide her full version of the game due to copyright concerns, but she encourages would-be Zelda players get their own version of the ROM and download her patch to implement the role-switch.