Fascinating post about traces of game history in the cartridge for Zelda on the GameBoy.

This is what happened with the 1998 Game Boy/Game Boy Color game “The Legend of Zelda – Link’s Awakening DX”. If you look at the image starting at 0×106000, you will find all kinds of interesting data, which will tell you a lot about the game’s development. Let’s call this “game development archeology”…

I love the term “game archaeology”. It is just right and describes wonderfully how you can pick up bits and pieces about the is development process – stuff that the developer would disregard and not believe important takes on a sense of mystery as you piece the information together. There is nothing ground breaking here and it is easy to find out the big picture (you could probably ask the developers themselves!), but as in “real” archaeology, it is the details and minutiae that are interesting.