First time ever: A high resolution full set of the rare Zelda 1 artwork by Macross artist Haruhiko Mikimoto

 

I love this art so much. I had so many of Haruhiko Mikimoto's wall scrolls and posters all over my dorm. He's such a pinnacle of retro anime. I am so glad I was able to collect the source material and get good scans online so it could be preserved.

The full color pieces are from the June 1986 issue of Newtype magazine and I scanned them at at 2400dpi (because the print quality is so good it made sense to do so.) I will scan the whole spread when I get a better large format scanner. (Newtype has giant pages.) I learned about this art being in that issue thanks to Blacotaku1's tumblr post ages ago, as did most of us who have seen the small versions before. (Which I cleaned up and got into the community so they ended up on Zelda wiki etc)

The line work pieces are from Mikimoto's 1989 "Cellu Works" artbook, and I scanned the whole thing at 1200dpi here: https://archive.org/details/artbook_haruhiko_mikimoto_celluworks_1989 I didn't do it at 2400 because honestly the print quality in that book didn't warrant it. I learned about this art being in that artbook when doing auction searches and found a twitter thread with it by animarchive

Other Keywords: The Legend of Zelda, The Hyrule Fantasy, Artbook, ゼルダの伝説, 美樹本 晴彦 , 美樹本晴彦 セル・ワークス, LoZ, tLoZ, ppi, RAW, RAWS, scan, scans, high res, high rez, high resolution, Link, Princess Zelda, Hyrule, Nintendo, NES, Famicom, Family Computer, book, videogame, artbook, art book, cell work, cel work, cel works, Publisher: Tokuma Shoten 徳間書店, ISBN4-19-669607-4, Date Published: February 2, 1989

Archival Scans of the Link to the Past Nintendo Player's Guide

Scans for this aren't new, but this is the best quality you'll find online. I scanned this at 1200dpi and you can find both the cleaned up images and pure raw scans on my archive.com page, here

It was published by Nintendo of America in conjunction with Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co. 1992

If you've never flipped through this, do so! It doubles as a story book & production art book- which was so rare

ZeldaLegends.net still has the original downloads released by Nintendo. The images are small but they have great color. Find those here

Other Keywords: The Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past, Strategy Guide, Nintendo Power, Zelda, tLoZ, LoZ, aLttP, Lttp, A Link to the Past, The Legend of Zelda, SNES, 600ppi, 1200ppi, RAW, RAWS, scan, scans, high res, high rez, high resolution, Link, Ganon, Princess Zelda, Hyrule, Nintendo, book, videogame, Nintendo Power, Strategy Guide, Game Guide, Player's Guide, Katsuya Terada,

Archival and Rare Guide Scans for Zelda 1, The Hyrule Fantasy (Updated!)

Edit: Here is a list of guides I know about with links to scans and information. It's a rush job right now but the list will be continuously updated as I have time to work on it. Do feel free to save me some time and email me if you know of others (and their scans) to add links too though! meloraworld@gmail.com

Mases of Zelda Dungeon has been scanning his guide collection, starting with the first game, so I really wanted to add a link to what he has already uploaded over on his great wiki. He's doing this not just for archival reasons but to extract the amazing and amazingly rare art that can be found in them: and I can't thank him enough. (I'm helping when I can.) His wiki displays it all beautifully if you want to check it out.

Here's his guide wiki (and here's a visual one) that has a master list

And here are the Hyrule Fantasy guides he has more complete scans of as of November 3, 2021

• Akita Shoten The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• Dawn Publications The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• Kadokawa Shoten The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• Keibunsha The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide (1994)
• Million Publications The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• Soft Bank Beep The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• 11/19: Futabasha The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide (1986)
• 11/19: Futami The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide (May 10th 1986)
• 11/19: Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• 11/19: Keibunsha The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide (1987)
• 11/24: Shinsei Publishing The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide

Since this is a huge mutual interest of both of us, I've helped with some scanning. Here's a link to the scans I've uploaded on archive.org:

• Million Publications The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide
• Futami The Legend of Zelda Strategy Guide (1987)
• 11/19: Legend of Zelda manga guide by Masaru Kobayashi

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

Gallery Update: Ocarina of Time Gallery mostly complete!

I've been bad about updating here and I'm making an effort to change that starting now since I'm seeing how much the backlog piles up. Lots up updates are getting posted today. 

Oot! This is, by far, the most complete & highest-rez official art gallery for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ever online. I spent so much time tracking down the highest quality images & cleaning up saves and scans. Find it here! I have a few maps from the Versus guide left to add, and I will 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, sage symbols, and I may redo some of the Hyrule Histora images. Most of all: Let me know if I'm missing anything.

A note: While most of the official art gallery borrows heavily from the incredible work people have done archiving things on Wiki's, they can still be quite hard to navigate and the sections aren't always interconnected. Like Impa art may only be under a small sub directory of Impa, not in the gallery for the character or a game. It can still be pretty hard to track down an image on them even when you know what you are looking for. Some of these images don't even come up on reverse searches even though they've been uploaded for ages. I also do as much work as I can myself, (and many of these same wiki's have used hundreds of my guide and book scans for the past 20 years, I really do try not to take from places that haven't benefited from my work as well) but we all have access to different things so it really is a joint project, preserving this stuff for people to find and people look for things in different ways. Wikis are incredible for information and holding on to art anyone can add but the point of the gallery on History of Hyrule site is a little different. It's purely easy-access image archival, so people can have quick viewing access to find what they need for their project and to learn what is out there. I am also trying to encourage back traffic back to the wikis if people want transparent PNGs.