What were the Satellaview Zelda games?

Between 1995 and 1997, Japan had Zelda games that were never sold in a box. They were broadcast to the Satellaview, a satellite modem for the Super Famicom launched by Nintendo and the broadcaster St.GIGA on April 23, 1995, and they arrived in weekly one hour episodes that could only be played as they aired.

The first, BS Zelda no Densetsu, ran across four weeks in August 1995: a 16 bit remake of the original Zelda with a new layout, in which the hero is not Link but the player's own BS-X avatar. It was the first SoundLink game, with live voice acting and an orchestrated soundtrack streamed alongside the play, a format Nintendo billed as the world's first integrated radio game, and the first spoken dialogue in the series. A second map, MAP2, followed at the end of 1995.

Ancient Stone Tablets, broadcast from March 30, 1997 in four episodes, built on A Link to the Past and set six years after it. A plain port of A Link to the Past also aired on the service, without SoundLink.

None of these games has ever been re released in any form. The broadcasts are lost media in their original shape: the code partially survives, but the live voices that carried the story were heard once, at the appointed hour, and not again.