The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time · Nintendo Power · 1998 · Nintendo of America
A 128-page companion to the most acclaimed game ever made, opening with a signed preface from Shigeru Miyamoto and closing with a fold-out map of Hyrule — the Player's Guide line at the peak of its powers.
When Ocarina of Time arrived in 1998 to universal acclaim — including Famitsu's first ever perfect 40/40 score — Nintendo of America published a Player's Guide under its Nintendo Power imprint that treated the game with the reverence it had earned. Running to 128 pages, the guide was less a walkthrough than a companion volume, and it remains among the most fondly remembered artefacts of the Nintendo Power era. The book opened with a preface written and signed by Shigeru Miyamoto himself, an unusual gesture that framed the guide as an official document of the game's significance rather than a mere product. It then devoted four pages to the history of the Legend of Zelda series up to that point, positioning Ocarina of Time as the culmination of a twelve-year lineage — an editorial choice that reflected Nintendo's own understanding that this game was a landmark. What followed was exhaustive. The guide provided a complete walkthrough alongside a wealth of official artwork covering the game's items, characters, bosses, and scenes — art that, in an era before the internet made such material trivially accessible, was for many players their only chance to see the game's designs rendered properly. A four-page fold-out presented an overworld map of Hyrule together with a listing of the ocarina songs, turning the centre of the book into a reference chart players could keep open beside them. The appendices completed the picture, cataloguing every item, the trading sequence, all Pieces of Heart, the magic bean locations, and the hundred Gold Skulltulas whose collection had become the game's most notorious completionist task. Taken together, the guide represents the Player's Guide format at its zenith: comprehensive, beautifully produced, and treated as a keepsake rather than a disposable manual. It is a reminder that for a brief period, the strategy guide was a genuine publishing art form — one that free online walkthroughs would shortly render commercially obsolete.
Being the Player's Guide format at its absolute peak — a lavish, Miyamoto-endorsed companion volume to the most acclaimed game ever made.
In 1998 the internet was not yet the default place to look things up, and a game as vast as Ocarina of Time — with its hundred Gold Skulltulas, its trading sequence, its magic beans and Heart Pieces scattered across two timelines — was genuinely difficult to complete without help. The Player's Guide filled that gap and then some, offering not only a full walkthrough but the game's official artwork, a four-page fold-out map of Hyrule, and complete appendices for every collectible. For most players it was the only way to see this material, and the book became a fixture beside the television rather than a reference consulted once and shelved.
What distinguishes the Ocarina of Time guide is how clearly it was designed to be kept. Shigeru Miyamoto contributed a signed preface, and four pages were given over to the history of the series — editorial decisions that make sense only if the publisher understood it was documenting a landmark rather than shifting a product. The result is the Player's Guide line at its zenith, and a poignant one: within a few years GameFAQs and its volunteer army would make every piece of information in these pages available for nothing, and lavish printed guides like this would cease to be commercially viable.