Ancient Stone Tablets is effectively a pseudo-sequel to A Link to the Past, using the same engine, gameplay, overworld, and characters, but featuring an original storyline and dungeons, and unique sidequests and minigames. The game is timed and can only be played over the course of 60 minutes, with in-game events occurring at set time intervals. Various actions in the game reward the player with points, and the aim is to acquire as many points as possible within the time period. Players who achieved high scores were able to submit them to Nintendo in exchange for real-life prizes.
The player character is not Link, who is absent from the game, but in fact the avatars of the player's ID for the BS-X Broadcasting System, drawn into Hyrule and who come to be known as the Hero of Light.
The same avatars are also the protagonists of BS The Legend of Zelda. The characters can be either male or female, with the male avatar wearing a backwards-facing baseball cap, and the female avatar having distinctive long red hair. Both avatars wear a tunic similar to the one that Link wears.
Unlike other titles for the service, Ancient Stone Tablets was only playable once a week during a very limited broadcast window. As the service has since been discontinued, the game in its original form is no longer commercially available. A restoration of the game can still be played through emulation, with most content having been restored using dumped materials from memory packs containing the game's data. The voice acting was held in the system's RAM, and thus has not been able to be preserved with the rest of the data.
