The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition

~ the eulogy ~

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition went up on DSiWare on 28 September 2011 with no price on it, and came down on 20 February 2012 with no price on it either. Nintendo never sold this game. It was the giveaway arm of the Zelda 25th anniversary campaign, and when the campaign closed the listing was removed rather than switched over to paid.

The thing being given away was a port of a 2002 curiosity. Four Swords shipped on the same Game Boy Advance cartridge as A Link to the Past and was the first multiplayer Zelda, which in 2002 meant every player needed their own console, their own copy and a link cable to the next person. Grezzo's DSiWare version added the mode the original had refused to have: a single-player campaign where you control two Links and swap between them to work the puzzles. Two extra areas came with it, the Realm of Memories built out of stages from older Zelda games, and the harder Hero's Trial.

The window was four and a half months wide and it needed a DSi or a 3DS in your hands while it was open. Mine were PC years. The 2002 original was even further out of reach from here: four consoles and three link cables in one room, each console carrying its own copy, priced in Turkish lira, was not a game so much as a group purchase nobody was making.

~ the dossier ~

~ what made it odd ~

Almost every delisted game has a price history. This one has none, so there is no "it used to cost X" sentence to write and no secondary market to point at. A free promotional download is a strange object in a store catalog, because the store has nothing left to do with it once the promotion is over.

The other oddity is what Grezzo was asked to do. The reason Four Swords stayed obscure for nine years was that it demanded a room full of hardware. The anniversary port solved that by building the exact mode the design had been constructed to avoid, and that version is the one most people have actually played.

~ the encore ~

It came back once. From the end of January 2014 to 2 February 2014, Nintendo offered it free again on the eShop in North America, as a promotion tied to A Link Between Worlds. Four days, one region. Add that to the 2011 window and you have the complete availability history of the game.

~ what you cannot get now ~

The DSi Shop closed on 31 March 2017. The Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShop stopped taking purchases on 27 March 2023. Both routes to the download are gone, and because the game was never for sale there is no price anybody could pay to fix that.

Nintendo has re-released most of the Zelda catalog several times over by now, in collections and on subscription services. The one Zelda it has never re-released is the one it once handed out for nothing.

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