The Nintendo Museum's Zelda Art and Updates From the Past Few Months

First, real quick: I keep forgetting to update here but Bluesky, the gallery, and Archive.org have all been getting pretty frequent updates for the past few months. I've also done another podcast, a book with an interview with me and a bunch of my map scans came out, I helped contribute to another, I've been helping with some fan projects, and I've been doing a lot of searching and research to make sure lost publications can be scanned. I plan on making better posts about all of that in the future.

Anyway, this is old, but I never posted about it here and don't want to lose track of it. The Nintendo Museum opened a new exhibit that includes Zelda art. Here's my breakdown of the older stuff on the wall. I didn't see a need to do the OoT+ art because I figure more fans would know it all. I can if you guys want me to though.

Here's the link to my bluesky post about it. Here's the image I made. Ignore the top middle one I wasn't sure of, it's discussed below:

Here's the original image. It's not very big:

Photos aren't allowed in the exhibit space so that's why we haven't seen any yet.

Regardless, except for the cases, we can see what most of them are but 2 on the wall are "new." As in they haven't been published in a book, magazine, or on merch before. The one on the side is easily, visibly, identifiable as an illustration of Hyrule though because of the colors and shapes. Max Nichols first alerted me to all this and pointed out it was probably new . 

The one I couldn't identify at the top, I figured it was a Kotabe based on the color scheme, but this below was a huge surprise and opens up a lot of new thoughts on the art of the series:

Bombosmedalion on Bluesky saw the show in person and reported back on it.:
"Ok so the top mystery art at the museum is the original hand drawn w pencil and water colored version of this" ↓

BM also noted: "And the map was a hand drawn one that I've never seen before that said Hyrule fantasy on it"

Me: Incredible!! Thank you so much!! I hope I'm able to see it one day but I'm so thankful to just know. What was in the cases?

BM: "A lot of stuff including original map designs for Zelda 1 to TotK concept art. For reference the Nintendo museum vol 1 book contains the contents of what was in the case for the Mario display so there's a good chance vol 2 next year has the Zelda art." "Yeah this is all the stuff in one of the two Mario cases"

VGDensetsu noted this Kotabe interview:

VGD: "By the way, Kotabe mentioned working on Zelda II. He only talked about the characters AFAIK so I assumed Maeda or someone else did the box art at the time." "I drew a few pictures of the characters for "Link no bouken". www.famitsu.com/news/201810/...

Max Nichols of Hyrule Interviews noted:
"I believe he joined Nintendo in 1985, so he was definitely there early enough to have worked on Zelda 2 art"

I must note that Dom of VGD is an incredible video game art and artist researcher and historian and is one of the most knowledgeable people I've come across. And Max is one of the most knowledgeable people out there when it comes to Zelda development and dev knowledge and history.

Here is a drawing of Link in the Goddess Collection books and now I'm thinking it might be a Kotabe that was a sketch close to the watercolor BM saw on the wall. In fact, if you zoom into the art on the wall, knowing the shapes now, you can just barely make this out from the potato-pixels.

VGDensetsu:
"I'm not a graphologist, but I noticed that the '8' was written in a particular way on this sketch – you can see the connection at the top right, which is also visible in Kotabe's handwriting."

So, of note, here is some art I assume is Kotabe's. These all come from some of the Goddess Collection books (I don't remember which was in Art and Artifacts, Zelda Encyclopedia, and Hyrule Historia. Without checking I think these were from A&A and the ones below this set were from the tZE) 

I'm now thinking that maybe all the sketches like this, with the numbers, are Kotabe's as well. I wouldn't doubt they were passed off to another animator, because the style is a little different than his, but he was a very experienced animator so its not like he couldn't have done them too. Anyway, this is all speculation, but it's the kind of thing I'm tucking into my head as Very Likely. (To be clear the books rarely credit the artists in a specific way.)

So anyway, that's all incredibly interesting!

Okay, going back to the earlier posts: This is the museum book with Mario art that was mentioned. You were able to buy them on Otaku Pop Mall (Thanks Max!) but I think they're sold out now. I grabbed the Japanese one if anyone needs a photo of the text for more direct translations, just email me. Since they're new I wont be scanning them though. (I wait until something hasn't been in print for 10 years or is a special edition that wasn't sold as a stand-alone and is inaccessible.) I'm sure they wont be hard to find on Japanese auction sites. 

Then circling back around again, for fun, here's some guides in cases from the Museum that BombosMedallion also posted. (These are in a different area that allows photography.) I love how the stickers on the binging imply an internal library. Rad.

The ones that can't really be seen? The bindings are really sun-bleached but I know which they are so I grabbed them so you all could see what else was up there- they're these:

I am in the process of scanning all these guides. I just finished Zelda 1, there's not too many for Zelda 2, and then I'll be on to these, which are all for Zelda 3: LttP. So it wont be long before you'll have good scans of the insides of all of these.