Dark Horse on how its Nintendo partnership came to be, Hyrule Historia sales, Zelda timeline

Nintendo Life caught up with Dark Horse editor Patrick Thorpe for a discussion about the publisher’s Zelda books. Thorpe spoke about how the partnership with Nintendo started, revealed that Hyrule Historia has sold nearly one million copies, and talked about the Zelda timeline.

We have these excerpts from the interview below. You can read the full discussion here.

On how the partnership with Nintendo came to be…

… So in 2011, I tracked down Nintendo’s booth at San Diego Comic Con and met Seth McMahill. We exchanged cards and he put me in contact with Cammy Budd who was Nintendo’s senior third-party marketing manager. She asked me what a partnership with Nintendo might look like. I knew that the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda was coming up, so I pitched her on a book that would be a retrospective look at the whole series. Initially, she told me that she wasn’t sure that they’d have the resources available to support such an endeavor, which is totally reasonable, these are incredibly time intensive to make.

A month or so later, she contacted me again saying that she had talked to NCL and that they were in talks with another company, which I later learned was Shogakukan, who was developing a book very similar to that in Japan. They obviously weren’t going to do two books, but asked if we were interested in doing a localisation of that book. After bringing in Dark Horse’s licensing guru Nick McWhorter, we worked out the details and were off and running. Hyrule Historia hit my desk shortly after that.

On how many copies of Hyrule Historia have been sold…

I don’t know the exact number of how many copies Hyrule Historia has sold to date, but I believe it’s around 900,000 copies at this point.

On how the books are the first place Nintendo had officially confirmed the Zelda split timeline theory as canon, and how that came about…

The timeline was provided to us, so I do not know the inside story of its development and finalization. But, boy, that was the most hotly anticipated and debated portions of Hyrule Historia. People still debate aspects of it. I love talking to fans about the timeline. There are some really, really brilliant fan theories out there that connect certain aspects of the game. Here’s a teaser. The Encyclopedia leans into the timeline and elucidates portions of it. The order of at least one of the video games has moved as well, based on some new information.