Girl power is kicking 8-bit video game butt this month, as another homemade hack has turned the once-fair maiden into the new leading lady.

When game developer Mike Mika hacked the classic Donkey Kong Nintendo game to allow his daughter to play as damsel-in-distress Pauline, he didn’t expect to spark a feminist debate. But he probably also didn’t count on inspiring a generation of women to do the same.

“I read about that awesome dad who edited Donkey Kong to let his daughter play as the Princess,” Kenna W wrote in a blog post(Opens in a new window). “I wished I had someone who could have done that for me. Then I remembered. I’m an adult now. If he could work it out, I could too.”

An animator by hobby, Kenna spent three days last week turning The Legend of Zelda into a game more fitting of its title. With a little help from her video game programmer boyfriend, and an Internet full of tutorials, Kenna got to work swapping green-capped Link for the game’s title character. She began on Wednesday, tracking her progress in a series of blog posts, first chronicling the editing process with Tile Layer Pro, then fussing over the difficulties of changing the color information.

“It’s weird,” she wrote. “There’s such a huge rom-hacking community out there, but I think I might be the first to switch Zelda and Link.”

By Thursday, the swap was complete. Kenna boasted a positive, yet still difficult, play-through, and posted screenshots of her gaming hack, along with a link to the patch. Copyright issues prevent her from handing over the edited ROM, so instead, she offered a step-by-step process to using her downloadable hack on any unedited Legend of Zelda NES ROM.

While a simple request from his 3-year-old daughter launched Mika’s quest for a gender-role cure, nostalgia seemed to fuel Kenna’s mission.

“I played my first Zelda game when I was pretty young, and at the time, I thought the game did star Princess Zelda,” she wrote on the blog. “I figured I’d get to play as a magical battle princess that saved her kingdom. The game was fun, but I was bummed out that I never got to play as Zelda. But like I said, I’m an adult now. There’s no one to stop me from eating candy before bed and there’s nothing standing in the way of me creating the games I want to play.”

And after three days of hard work, she did create the game she wanted to play.

“It feels really good to play as Zelda,” she said, admitting that she feels more connected to the female heroine, and “it makes me feel like a big damn hero.”

This isn’t the first Zelda hack, however. In Nov. 2012, Mike Hoye changed the text(Opens in a new window) in the game for his 3-year-old daughter so that “he” read as “she” and “my lad” showed up as “milady,” and so forth.

Watch Zelda save Link in Kenna’s highlight reel below.