Here's a YouTube video that shows how James Dowdell reprogrammed the ending of The Legend of Zelda to propose to his girlfriend Natalie Martin.
View this video on YouTube
According to this Imgur post, James and Natalie like to spend time playing video games together. And so, when the two chose to play The Legend of Zelda on the original NES hardware, he used the opportunity to propose.
"A highlight of our lives is getting together on the couch for play throughs of video games," writes James on Imgur. "The Legend of Zelda for NES is my all time favorite game."
After setting a date to play the game, he fiddled around with the graphics to make Princess Zelda appear like Natalie.
James then hacked into the game's code, which according to James, was a lot harder than anticipated.
He writes in the Imgur post: "What I thought would be 'just a Saturday' of work turned into week after increasingly intense week of nights and weekends poking into 6502 assembly, the NES architecture, and the ins and outs of this rom in particular - especially squeezing whatever I could into such a tiny bit of space."
He then loaded the hacked game into an Everdrive cartridge to play it on the NES.
After playing the game to the very end (which took six hours), Natalie came across this screen:
Her response: “Of course I will marry you, stupid!”
