Katsuya Terada's Zelda illustrations

Between 1989 and 1995 Terada produced promotional illustrations for The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, printed in Nintendo Power and in the official player's guides, with a further set made for the German Link's Awakening guide. For many players, especially outside Japan, these pages were the games: the hardware showed a handful of pixels, and Terada's ink supplied the scale, the grime and the weather.

The confession came decades later, in a Time Extension interview: 'I hadn't actually played any Zelda games.' He knew the world from the Japanese game magazines of the time. Nintendo, he remembers, was relaxed about character management in those years, and the low resolution of the Famicom left him room: 'I could basically do whatever I saw fit.' His one discipline was translation, rendering the games' world in a more realistic language without straying far from the original visuals.

It worked well enough to typecast him, happily, as the man who could draw fantasy realistically, and the work is now archived and celebrated by Zelda historians as a high point of the series' print era. Asked which Nintendo world he would still like to draw, he picked the one he never got: 'I liked Metroid a lot, so it might be nice to draw something from that.'