> That's because the minus world was never intended for players — it was an area where code could be tested before being implemented into the playable game.
I don't see any evidence of the above quoted claim either.
Yeah. I've read before about how much effort went in squeezing as much map data as possible into the limited memory available. It doesn't seem reasonable that they'd leave a bunch of unused test data in like this.
This doesn't feel like some special debugging area. If you really want another "area" try the second quest by putting your name as ZELDA.
"This quest was created due to the programmers using only half of the space allocated for map data, so it was decided to use the other half as another quest."