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 Power 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 2 missions: Getting the old manga translated as well as 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. 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 artbooks, those tasks are becoming more obsolete.