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GoNintendo Feature: Taking a closer look at Hand-Drawn Game Guides' Legend of Zelda booklet

Ridiculously gorgeous stuff
by rawmeatcowboy
30 June 2020
GN Version 5.0

So happy to share today's feature with you. I talked about it a bit on the podcast, but now you can get a much better look at what this guide has to offer. You'll have a chance to buy your own tomorrow! As always, thanks for reading.

Longtime fans of GoNintendo might recognize the name of Philip Summers, better known to us as Shamazool. Back in the day, GoNintendo teamed up with Shamoozal for a series of animated shorts that both paid tribute to and spoofed classic NES games. The series, known as Read Only Memory, is still one of things I've been most proud of to feature on GoNintendo. If you weren't around back in those days, you can catch up on the entire series here.

Phil's amazing talent with art and animation was instantly recognizable back then, and he's only been getting better since. One of the more recent ventures Phil has had success with is the Hand-Drawn Game Guides series. This series of guides aims to reproduce instruction booklets from the NES days, but with far more detail, both in artwork and information. The series has stunned fans so far with Ninja Gaiden and Contra entries, but Phil has really topped himself with the latest installment; The Legend of Zelda.

Hand-Drawn Game Guides' Legend of Zelda booklet includes 64 pages featuring everything you need to know about the original Legend of Zelda. First up, you'll get all the button prompts, enemy info, item details, and more that the original instruction booklet released. More importantly, the booklet embellishes things with absolutely gorgeous artwork showing Link on his journey, which is accompanied by a new narrative to tie the whole experience together. You can tell it's a real labor of love, and the end result is something to be truly proud of.

Not surprisingly, interest in this guide has been extremely high. The initial plan was to sell 100 physical copies for $25, and those were gobbled up roughly 2 minutes after sales went live. You can still buy the digital version for just a dollar, but there's even better news. Following the huge success so far, Hand-Drawn Game Guides is doing another physical run of 200 units. Those will go up for sale on July 1st, 2020 at 12 PM ET. They're definitely going to go just as quickly, so make sure you're ready to snag yours!

I want to share a special thanks with Phil for sending an early copy of his Legend of Zelda guide with me. It's been absolutely amazing to thumb through, and even more impressive to see just how successful the series has been. Every copy sold, and every bit of support the series sees is well deserved. Phil has been a longtime supporter of GoNintendo, and hugely talented faaaaaar longer than that. It's my honor to share his latest work with you, and I can only hope you find it as interesting as I do.