Publication's List: Help me make it accurate for all of us!

I've been needing to update the info and works that are still missing from the publication's section of the site. Problem is: there's a lot to add. So I'm making albums on flickr to more quickly organize the information. I'm also doing this so it's easier for all of you to help me figure out this mass of information. These will contain everything I know about:

• Zelda Manga Flickr Album
• Zelda 4koma Manga Flickr Album
• Zelda Non-Japanese Comics: Coming Soon
• Zelda Books Flickr Album
• Zelda Sticker/Coloring/How-To-Draw Books: Coming Soon
• Zelda Strategy Guides Flickr Album
• Zelda Manuals and Booklets: Coming Soon
• Zelda US Magazines: Coming Soon
• Zelda Japan Magazines: Coming Soon
• Zelda Other International Magazines: Coming Soon

Good news is that Mases of Zelda dungeon is doing most of the work on the guides. He's making scans of his whole collection and is working on at least adding covers and info until he can get to everything that massive task entails. 

• Here's a link list of his currently added guides, by title
• Here's a visual list of his current added guides, by game

So what can I use help with? Any one of you can probably help with something here:

• The thing I need the most help with is, if you know Japanese, help me make sure I have the correct titles, author's and illustrator's names, publishers, etc, in both Japanese and English characters.
• Double check my info against what's written in the volumes (I'm dyslexic, I make a lot of type-based mistakes)
• Help me find links to the best scans and info online*
• Help me find auction links to things I'm missing. If it's guides or merch I can get them to my friends who collect that and will get us scans. If it's manga, Japanese books, or artbooks, I'll probably buy them.
  
• (More to come, I'm out of time today to keep writing)

*An FYI: I'm not going to publicly post links to free downloads of anything still in print, (just links to sales pages.) If you can't afford to purchase the volumes, etc, I totally understand, this isn't judgement on that. But, the way I use this platform, is for promoting purchasing any still available & only the scans for things that are not. Especially for manga; I really want a BotW series and good sales make that more likely.

I'm doing this, in large part, because my end goal is to try to have every piece of official and semi-official Zelda art online. But it's too hard to do if you don't check things off a list as you go and if you're dealing with bad scans only to get good scans after you've already done a ton of editing work. So this is the leg work to creating an awesome gallery. The added benefit is, obviously, we should have a great resource and merchandise catalog when we're done that also helps up properly credit the people behind the series we love.

1992 Link meets 2022 Link

I posted this on Twitter and it really took off so I figured I might as well catalog it here. This great little illustration comes from the Futabasha Fantasy Novel Series: Legend of Zelda, Count of the Black Shadow 1992, by Akio Higuchi. The cover illustration is accredited to Fujiwara Kamui but I don't know if they did the inside illustrations as well because there is no one specifically credited for them. ISBN4-575-23096-0 It's a 254 page novel with about 14 incredible illustrations. I'll scan the whole thing soon but for now you can find the old illustration scans and info here and the nicer illustration scans are in the LttP art gallery, here. 

Someone wondered if this was real and it was neat to be able to point out it was on my site all the way back in 2004. The reason people haven't seen much of this stuff, even though it's been online for around 17 years, (I somewhat sarcastically, then sincerely, spoke about this in one of my last posts,) is that I had problems where larger sites and forums wouldn't link to my site because supplemental material at the time, at least that wasn't mass consumed in the US like the Valiant Comics, wasn't considered "real Zelda content." People would get chased off if they wanted to post/talk about even just for fun. Which was just so strange to me! Because I can assure you: you can still enjoy the core games without being angry that other stuff was created for the series. It's so much more fun if everyone is just enjoying what inspires them to love the series even more! It honestly helps give it life in the years between games.

One of my friends, linksliltri4ce, also reminded me that A Link to the Past also had the concept of floating islands with temples on them. (Not in game, but in the backstory and manual art.) Which I knew but it never really clicked when it came to how much fun it is to play around with the idea of connecting Breath of the Wild 2 with aLttP. Some of the ruins with pillars on hills in BotW are around the same type of ancient Greek-pillar as Ganon's Tower in LttP, which is in the Sacred Realm too. Anyway, that's all super loose but it's fun thoughts for fan artists and people who like to play with ideas!

Why did Link have Hot Pink Hair in A Link to the Past?

The world may never know. ...Unless we look at several years of monthly manga magazine covers from just a 3 years earlier, from early 1986 until late 1988. I don't know though, I've never heard of game developers who also like comics... and certainly not ones about the game they made. It's not like Miyamoto was trying to be a manga artist before he joined Nintendo or anything ...and I really doubt any of them would like one of the best comics ever made for the series. And thus it will forever remain a mystery ♡

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, in One Pack Comics, by Ran Maru

ゼルダの伝説, わんぱっくコミックス,  乱丸

Find the English translation for the Hyrule Fantasy, the first volume this story starts in, here.

And here are the English translations for Adventure of Link volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3.

There's also some other other magazine art that's kind of fun. The first 2 are a hot pink haired female Link from Shonen Captain (Monthly Magazine) May 18, 1986. 3rd image unknown but it comes from this video. EDIT: I have found, and made, 2400dpi scans of this art of her.

Anyway, just a guess. Maybe we could agree that hot pink is just a great color too. #plink

Edit: There was a giant fanart challenge thanks to @Aeyga_X based on my scans and she was dubbed "Linka" by fans

Also, I saw this said a lot: "16-bit" is about the processor, it doesn't mean 16 colors. Though, yes! Some of the modes for the SNES topped out at 16 colors per sprite/tile, and LttP is an example of the use of one of those, so I could see how people could get confused. Source 1. Source 2. But, no, it wasn't pink because the bunny was pink and it "needed to be the same color for technical reasons" ...because, even if (?) that were true for some reason, the rabbit's color of pink wasn't even the same as his hair. (Thank you to whomever made this graphic, I couldn't find the source to credit) 

Update: Just to keep all of the Pink Haired Link images in one place, here's a cool feature from a Famitsu issue from 1992

I've had that manga online for ages, on the old main site, (the better scans on archive.org are new,) but so many fans and other sites in the early days would blow off the manga (and my scanning work and site*) as "not real Zelda content" -so it's just been overlooked for 35 years when this question would get asked. Which is a huge shame. Wanpakku, Naughty Comics, sometimes translated as One Pack, was a  division of Tokuma Shoten: the publisher Nintendo always officially used back then. And Wanpakku did the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics that Nintendo translated and released officially in the US

Edit 2: Okay, guys, turns out pink haired female Link from 1986 (May 25, 1986 and May 18, 1986) is as official as the Itoh art from Tips and Tactics because she IS in the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics. This kind of changes the way I'm thinking about her, I no longer thing she was just a mistake made by a comic magazine's walkthrough artist like I originally did.

Tips and Tactics was released by Nintendo of America in 1987 and calls itself the "US edition" "Translation of HISSYOU HINTBON Originally published in 1986 by Tokuma Shoten"

Both publishing companies, Wanpakku (the maker of this guide) and Shonen Captain, where she appeared, were owned by the publisher Tokuma Shoten: and Nintendo worked with them a LOT back then.

Here are the 2 manga pages with pink-haired Link and a fairy that were left out, along with some of the Itoh art, of the US edition: 

Edit 3: Slightly different but here's a cute pink-haired Princess Zelda from a Famicom magazine "ファミコン決定版(1986-07-20)"

The Dopest Link Art I Have Ever Personally Seen

 

So majestic. It's from a tips and tactics guide and I hope you can forgive me for that title but I could not help myself. There are endless things I could say about this newly discovered piece of Zelda art... wow, just wow... lol. PBAndAwesome found this in his grandmother's attic and posted it to twitter and then Chris Fergason realized he had it too and DM'd me images of the cover and pages, below, featuring the Zelda coverage. Thanks guys, you absolutely made my day. I'll get them added to the gallery and publications section in the near future.

In the meantime, another piece of... glorious... Zelda history, saved yet again!

New High Res Scans: Link's Awakening Dreamer Artbook

The out of print 2019 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening had a 120 page bonus artbook that I've finally fully scanned in high resolution at 600dpi. It mainly contains some really adorable concept art with my favorite piece being the Oracle style character sheet and sketches of Link. I believe the US version is hardback, pictured here, but I purchased and scanned the Japanese version because it's a lot cheaper to obtain and, being softcover, I felt less guilty about removing the pages to get perfectly flat images. 

You can find all of the pages at the flickr gallery here.

Also, apologies, I realized that my scanner is scanning slightly crooked. It doesn't affect the images quality it just means that the pages aren't perfectly horizontal. Looks like I need a new scanner. 

The Skyward Sword Official Art Gallery Collection is Massive- And Still Growing!

The official art gallery for Skyward Sword isn't even finished but it's already massive. Please check it out over on flickr! I'm pretty proud of it so far. I still have a ton left to do though before the re-release: I'm currently scanning and editing maps to add as well as being nearly done locating and organizing item renders and the art for the game sprites.

In it you'll find the official game release illustrations, posters, hundreds of pieces of concept art, renders and rips that will help with character reference, and let me know if you want me to add level renders or anything else. 

Years ago I made scans of the artbooks and lightly cleaned up a lot of the images. Those are the ones you'll most likely find on wiki galleries and reposted on pages. I just re-did all of that with clearer and more vibrant versions and they're in the gallery now: so they're really worth seeing and using. once again I worked on taking the distracting text off of most of them too so they're really nice to look at and study and even better to use for illustrating articles.

Backstory: If you don't know, I'm currently working on creating the most extensive and complete official art collection for every Legend of Zelda game and am trying hard to make and track down the best versions of every piece of art out there. Exactly 19 years ago tomorrow is when the site first launched and keeping official art from being hard to locate, or disappearing completely, is why I started History of Hyrule. I'm excited to be working towards this goal again... and it's even more fun knowing the task will never end. There will always be something new or left to find.

Breath of the Wild art is coming next

I'm getting closer to finishing up the bulk of the Skyward Sword section of the official art gallery, so out of curiosity I did some test cleaning for the Breath of the Wild artbook, Creating a Champion. It turned out pretty well. Looking forward to adding nice concept sketches to the gallery. Here are some examples with very minimal manual cleaning (basically I mean none of the original art was altered or lost)

 

Insanely High-Rez Old-School Link Art

This has always been one of my favorite pieces of Link art and thanks to the incredible collector, Art of Nintendo Power on Twitter, we have a high resolution scan of the actual cel. That's right: it's a cel, he owns it now, he scanned it at 1200dpi, and since it's a painting there's no pixilation. It's incredible and I am in heaven. I did a rough clean up job on it and have it uploaded at the flickr gallery in its all its 17,680 x 9900 glory, here.

You could originally see this in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda Tips and Tactics guide, and I use to be responsible for the best image of it online, which is a joke compared to this one. I'm super happy to pass that torch because, seriously, nothing beats this!

Gallery Update: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons mostly done!

Super excited about this one because it's really cute and harder than it should have been, mainly because so much of the sprite art seemed impossible to track down! Anyway, I can easily say, this is the most complete Oracles art gallery online, nothing was even close to being in one place. And a head's up: many of the scenes are animated gifs, if you download them you'll be able to see them.

Check it out on Flickr!

No Clip: Amazing resource for screen captures, textures, and art reference.

I'm late to the party and am mostly just posting this here so I don't forget about it again- because it's too amazing. If you need to see a level, or reference a texture, from any of the earlier 3D zelda games, check out noclip.website. It really is a museum. So far it has Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, Windwaker, Majora's Mask 3D, Ocarina of Time 3D, and Ocarina of Time N64. Thank you so much for creating this, Jasper! I needed to remember a detail on a level in Skyward Sword, a game I can't play because the motion controls cause nerve damage in my arms, and it allowed me to get right to it!

Whole levels

Direct texture download

Screenshot from inside Zelda's room

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Remake) -Dreamer Artbook

I have a copy of this ordered and on the way so I can get images for it into the gallery but if you know of a digital download, please let me know. Scans are great for linework and sketches, but digital downloads are better for the scene pictures, which often scan pretty dark.

These were posted by the amazing account, Videogame Art And Tidbits and can be found here and here

I found those thanks to this page on Zelda wiki, thank you for crediting sources, GrandmaYahoo!

Gallery Update: Official Art for Majora's Mask mostly complete!

Here's the most complete The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask character, poster, and concept art gallery ever online. Find it here! I just have item art left to do and I will also probably come back and add a single render for each character and enemy, for reference, as well as a few more pieces of Himekawa art, 4koma art, and I may redo some of the Hyrule Histora images. Most of all: Let me know if I'm missing anything.

I also did some re-draws over these characters, that had other characters overlaid on them, so that people could have them as single images for character sheets and the like. I need to redo Romani's hair though. It was 1am when I did that and I'm not happy with it. You'll find high resolution images for them in the gallery