Very obvious fake. I remember that whole thing, it was ridiculous that people actually thought there was any chance it was real. That guy just was desperate for his website to get attention, nothing more.
That's right. Never existed. Atleast not as far as we know. Nintendo was pretty good at not letting things leak. Remember we still don't even have Super Mario World betas with the Raccoon Tail atleast as far as I know. You could probably program up your own fake Zelda 3 NES "beta" if you wanted to. Problem is people could always look at the code and probably make the guess that none of Nintendo's own coders would have programmed it the way you did.
I love how this rumor just refuses to die. Yeah, the guy that pulled the hoax, his website isn't even around anymore. Oh, and:
