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About History of Hyrule
A brief rundown would be that I
started this site in 2002 because there was
some Zelda art that I had been looking for
since childhood that I couldn't find. (It was
The Link to the Past
Nintendo Player's Guide and the Terada art.) When I
finally got my hands on it again I decided to
start a site to get it online. I also wanted
to have something dedicated to the first 4
games, the "History of Hyrule," since websites
for them were extremely rare. It wasn't hard
to find resources for Ocarina of Time, but
Adventure of Link or Link's Awakening were
almost non-existent. The small handful of
Zelda game sites that were out there were
great at focusing on things like walkthroughs
so, since I'm a visual person, I decided to
fill the small gap that was left when it came
to art. That soon expanded to manga and other
publications as well as translations thanks to
KitsunePixie, Anastasia, and Beno. The original HoH did
have game help but it was almost set up more
like basic reference information for fan
artists. (Maybe I should add that the original
site was a fairly big fanartist hub.)
But let's flash forward to
today. I've scaled back to 3 missions:
- Archiving work, so that publications aren't lost to time.
- Getting the old manga and books translated.
- Finishing the official art gallery.
I'm currently reworking the gallery,
going through the art game by game, trying to
put together the most complete and highest
resolution resource for every piece of Zelda
art out there. (That was actually the original
goal but I expanded into too many interests
and kind of left it in limbo.) This means all
the official and semi-official art images in
one place so they don't get lost to the ages.
(It's amazing what actually does disappear
from the web.) This is an ongoing process
since new material is always turning up, even
for the old games, and I'm always having to
replace old images. It's also why you'll see
duplicates in the gallery. While some of them
are due to a need for house cleaning, most are
because one will be a crisper version that's
smaller, (usually a digital one,) while
there's also a high resolution version- but
maybe it has too many printing dots for me to
want to get rid of the smaller one, etc.
Please keep in mind I have not
gotten to all the games yet but I do have art
for them saved. It can take a week to two
months, of 12 hour days, to complete one
game's art section in the gallery. It's a lot
of scanning, hunting, comparing, double
checking, organizing, and repair work.
I used to be the one who had
scanned and uploaded an extremely large
portion of the Zelda art you saw on the net. I
used to have to buy and import a lot of
Japanese guides to get good images of things
-and thankfully that's not really necessary
any more for the newer games. I also did, and do, a ton of work to
repair images, splicing two good ones together
to repair damaged parts, or doing repaints
when needed, and you'll see a good portion of
that in the gallery. (If I can't stay true to
the original, because it was too overlayed
with another image or text, I try to include
both.) Thankfully though, because Nintendo is
supporting the production of more art books,
those tasks are becoming more obsolete.
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