This game is, however, also notorious for one of the most famous glitches in all of video games: The Screen Warp Glitch. I have had lots of fun with this glitch over the years, drawing out good, bad, and just plain weird effects from the game.

     This page is certainly not the first place on the Internet where literature of this glitch and its subglitches has been posted. This page, however, I believe is the first attempt to pool everything there is to know in one place. Most of the literature you will see is from my own experiences with the glitch, however I may make references to Youtube or some other media through which I learned something about the glitch that I haven't learned on my own. It is my hope that this page will be a rough guide on how to get the best bang for the buck when using the glitch through use of literature and eventually some maps. But this is NOT the "Foolproof Guide to Where it Is and Isn't Safe to Use the Link's Awakening Screen Warp Glitch" and so therefore I take NO responsibility for any damage caused by the glitch to save files, cartridges, and consoles.

     Do note, however, that this glitch only works in the Black and White version of the game (the original one), and even some Black and White cartridges has this glitch fixed. It won't work at all in the DX version, but even in the DX version there is a trick you can do that replicates one of the consequences of the Screen Warp; more on this in page 3.

     But then I realized that, when in caves, I could use the glitch to get onto the caves' walls. Being the curious 10-year-old kid as I was, I did try doing it in caves to get onto the walls, and scrolled beyond them to see what would happen. I first tried it in the cave in the Mysterious Woods that you use to get to the Mushroom you need to give to the witch to make magic powder. My jaw dropped in awe when I discovered that I had warped to another cave in a totally different part of Koholint! Continued experimentation showed that indeed many of the caves were all put next to each other. It wasn't until a few years ago when I was old enough to understand the guts of video games that I learned why doing this is effecient in the programming sense. But there are many weird things in all this that really doesn't make any sense at all progammingly.

     One day, I was wandering around in the cave area that I first started doing the glitch in (I shall call this Cave World 1), and eventually I found myself in a room that looks exactly like the northwest room of the first floor of Eagle's Tower. Continued exploration showed that there were many, MANY copies of this room around! In the room there is a chest; the corresponding chest in the actual Eagle's Tower yields a Secret Seashell (or 20 rupees if you have already collected the Level 2 sword). The chest in this repeating room however contains the Power Bracelet! If you already have the Power Bracelet; you get the Level 2 Power Bracelet, and if you already have the Level 2 Power Bracelet, you get another one! That doesn't affect the game in any way, however. The remarkable thing is though that if you exit one of these repeating rooms and come back, the chest "resets" itself and in that way you can get infinitely many Power Bracelets! And every one of these "repeating rooms" has one of these "magic" Power Bracelet chests. Anyway, I contiued roaming around, and after passing the repeating room what seemed like hundreds of times, I ended up in Eagle's Tower itself, but with cave graphics and music. It was quite weird, enemies were garbled, and in the room where the floor tiles attack, they attacked super slow! By using the screen warp in this "glitched" Eagle's Tower you can get back into the caves. This is where you need to be careful however. If you go into a staircase or fall down a hole, you'll end up in the "real" Eagle's tower, from which you cannot escape back into the caves; more on that in page 2. This is where you'll want to save your game so you can restart from the cave you entered Cave World 1 from; if you exit Eagle's Tower via its normal entrance (or heaven forbid actually complete the dungeon and get its instrument) in hopes of escaping that way, and you haven't opened Eagle's Tower normally using the Bird Key, you will be stuck "inside" the entrance and if you save here you'll be forced to erase you game data in whatever slot you were playing in.

     By the way, a glitched version of the lair where you fight the Evil Eagle is also somewhere in Cave World 1; if you visit it before defeating the Evil Eagle normally (in the actual Eagle's Tower), you can fight a glitched version of the Evil Eagle and earn its Heart Container. There is a portal in here that will take you into the real Eagle's Tower with "no-clipping mode" (more on that on page 2) activated; from there you can get the Organ of Evening Calm. I have never done this, but there's a video of it on Youtube.

    One of the caves in Cave World 1 is the cave where you would normally get the Magnifying Lens. If you haven't gotten the Mermaid's Scale yet, in the space where you would normally see the Magnifying Lens you will see the item you currently have in the trading sequence (or if you haven't started the trading sequence yet, the Yoshi Doll will be there). Do not pick this item up! If you do, the Magnifying Lens won't appear there when you go to get it normally. I don't know if you can get the Lens by continuing in this glitch manner; try it if you want but be sure to save your game before experimenting. Most importantly, DO NOT exit this cave before opening it the normal way with the Mermaid Scale, otherwise you will be stuck inside the mermaid statue.

    Now Cave World 1 doesn't have all the caves of Koholint, nor does it have the houses, telephone booths, shops, and things like that. That brought me to start using the Screen Warp Glitch to go beyond the walls of houses to see what "world" they were in. The first house I did this in was the two-screen house in the northwest corner of the Animal Village. And after several false starts (getting stuck, etc.) I discovered that the world this house is in (which I shall call House World) is absolutely HUGE (probably larger then Cave World 1). After a few weeks of wandering around, I discovered that House World contains all of the Houses of Koholint (Animal Village Houses, Mabe Village Houses, House by the Bay, Mr. Write's House, Richard's Villa, the Chicken House, and others), all the telephone booths, the Mabe Village Shop, the Trendy Game, the Witch's Hut, Crazy Tracy's Shop, the area where you go fishing in Mabe Village, the area where the fisherman gets the Mermaid's Necklace, the Raft Shop, and more. Also there is the Dream Shrine, the Moblin Cave (where you rescue BowWow), Kanalet Castle, and the Southern Face Shrine; I discovered a "secret" room to the east of Kanalet Castle which appears was originally going to be part of the Castle but the programmers removed before releasing the game. In addition, all the caves from Cave World 1 are in House World, but in a different order, and although left-and-right scrolling behaves as if you were in the normal cave/Cave World 1, up-and-down scrolling does not; you don't end up where you'd expect. Some of the one-room caves not found in Cave World 1 are in House World. And if all that weren't enough, Eagle's Tower, Turtle Rock, the Wind Fish's Egg, and plenty of copies of that "repeating room" that is also in Cave World 1 (and once again, going down a staircase "unglitches" the level); once again, the rooms are in the wrong order, at least when it comes to up-and-down scrolling.

     As it turns out, Cave World 1 is a 64-screen variation on the 256-screen House World, containing certain caves and the Eagle's Tower, with the rooms in the "right" order.

    It is in House World where making the wrong move can make your game do interesting things. One of the caves in House World is the cave where Mamu the Frog lives, that you normally reach by completing the signpost maze. For some reason, the game goes crazy when you enter it via House World. If you enter it from the top or bottom, the game won't freeze, but the graphics will get extremely buggy and there will be a weird black line under Link that follows him around even after exiting Mamu's Cave via the staircase into the Signpost Maze. It goes away if you save and quit and restart, however. If you enter it from the left or right, the game usually freezes. However, one time it didn't freeze, but rather went haywire. The room started flashing (as happens when you first visit Mamu normally and learn the Frog's Song of Soul) and my rupee counter started decreasing (as if I had talked to Mamu and agreed to pay the 300 rupees to learn his song) but all this happened without any conversation with the frog. It was all very slow however, as the graphics were buggy and slowdown was rampant, and I was stuck on a crack (and so kept falling down a pit). I couldn't move and nothing really worked so for all intents and purposes the game froze. There is another room in House World that also always causes the game to freeze if you try to enter it, regardless of which direction you enter it from.

    As I alluded to before, the Wind Fish's Egg is contained in House World, but there's only one copy of each of the rooms, including the room where you would normally have to follow a certain route to get to the next room. Here, going in any direction takes you to a different place; up takes you to the room where the pit is that you would normally jump down to fight the final bosses. You can do that here and you'll go to the final bosses and fight them as you normally would (assuming you have the proper equipment to do so!). But if you screen warp to the next room north, you'll enter the final boss' lair the "wrong" way and the game will glitch. Usually, it will freeze (you'll trigger the "text appearing while scrolling" crash). But apparently there's a way (there's a video of it on Youtube) to make it so the game doesn't freeze and instead you'll have an *EXTREMELY* glitchy fight against the final bosses, where some of the shadows don't appear at all and others don't "function" the way they normally do. The very final boss, DethI, apparently self-destructs, and that triggers the staircase to appear and if you climb it you get the ending as if you completed the game correctly. I read on GameFAQs that one person saved his game during this glitch battle and it nearly destroyed his cartridge, so BE CAREFUL.

    Another video shows the game going haywire and freezing when entering what I believe is Manbo's Cave via House World, but that had never happened to me prior to viewing the video. Further experimentation shows that entering Manbo's Cave via House World before you learn his song triggers the "text appearing while scrolling" crash; more on that later.

    House World is equivalent to the "secret world" known as "Fisherman's Land" that you may have read about elsewhere on the Internet. If you screen warp south of where the fisherman is in Mabe Village, you might make him appear to be fishing in the tree on the screen south of the pond. If you talk to him there and agree to fish, you'll appear in a glitched version of the place where you would normally go to fish, and you'll be able to walk around in it. If you explore around you'll see that you have entered House World, but with "no clipping mode" activated. I'll talk more about that on page 2, but essentially what this means is that walls act as either water or grass and so you can go through them. Since some of the walls have turned into water, you'll want to have the flippers so you don't get stuck. Saving in this glitch world is unadvisable. I've never done it, and from what I've read doing so usually won't cause any data corruption, but one person has "cursed his game file" by doing so, so play it safe and don't save.

I am currently working on a "map" of House World, which really won't be a map but will contain screenshots of all its 256 "rooms", and they will be coded so that you'll be able to tell the all the rooms are connected. I will also include a text file showing what's in each of the rooms.

Next: what's beyond the levels' walls...Page 2.htm.