Welcome one and all. As the title states, this little tidbit of info is about a Flash Animation series that I am currently making and submitting here to Newgrounds, entitled "The Legend of Dark Zelda". My hopes are that it will be popular enough to be able to stay on and be added into a collection here on Newgrounds. The storyline is still a work in progress.

The main underlining story of this series follows very closely to the plot of the original "Legend of Zelda" for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The only difference in it is that there is a dark version of Link who is going around trying to collect the same Triforce pieces that the Good Link is after. So it ends up becoming a race between the two Links to obtain the pieces of the Triforce. And one other major difference from the original story line, there is a gimmick that the Good Link is killed in a different manner in each episode. Kind of like a Kenny from South Park idea. Dark Link's intention for wanting the Triforce pieces is unclear at the moment. Could it be that he is trying to repent for his sins and use the power of the Triforce to cleanse himself? Does he want the power of the Triforce to take over Hyrule and maybe even the world? Or could it even be that he just really likes to piss off the Good Link and just interfere in his quest? Could it even be the Dark Link just wants the power of the Triforce to place him back in his dimension that contrasts that of the Good Link's Hyrule? His true intentions will be revealed throughout the series.

Here is a little bit of a background story of how this series came to be. I have been working on this little project for almost 5 years. In the beginning, it was just me and a buddy of mine sitting at my computer playing around with an NES Emulator, more specifically, "The Legend of Zelda." As me and my buddy were sitting there playing it, we were discussing about how cool it would be to be able to edit the sprites and change the pixel colors of the ROM itself. After a little while of discussing it, we found a screen shot option in the emulator itself. We clicked on it and located the file the screen shot was saved to. From there, we simply opened it up in a photo editing program and started playing around with different color combinations for the Link sprite we captured. After an hour or so, we finally had our creation. We were happy. Just a little side note, the sprite we made that day is still the original and current design for our Dark Link. After we made it, I started playing around with different background images and other sprites and made the picture that is currently the title screen for the series. I was very pleased with the image, but I was still not all too sure on the concept and the fact that my fun started to seem to end there. After a few days of playing Zelda some more, I decided that I wanted to make a little comedy series involving the Dark and Good Links. From there, everything else I came up with. I truly thank my friend for helping me in the beginning with the creation of our Dark Link. Dark Link is the only concept I do not take full credit in creating.

At first, my plans were to just make it a slide show type presentation in a comic type form. You know, just edit sprites and backgrounds around in a photo editing program. After working on it for about a year, I started to get online and surf around and started watching videos here on Newgrounds. After watching a bunch of different sprite movies, (8-Bit Theater being my most favorite, Thanks Nuklear Power!) I started to think that I wanted to do that, I wanted to make my series move, make it animated. It would make it a lot more entertaining than just viewing a slide show. So for a few weeks straight, I started to do a little research on what I would need to make these videos. As soon as I was getting ready to actually collect what I needed, I started to get side-tracked with school. I was in high school at the time. That, and I was playing a lot of games on consoles and just kind of forgot about my computer. After a while, I completely forgot about my Zelda animations all together. It seemed that the series was never going to come to be. Until...

Back in the beginning of 2006, my last semester of my senior year, I had a Computer Programming class. The first semester we worked with Microsoft Visual Basic. In the second semester, we started to work with Macromedia Flash! After playing around with it a few days in class, I started to reminisce about things in the past, (which I tend to do). I started to think that the program sounded very familiar, I just couldn't put my finger on it. After a few minutes of searching my school network drive for pictures, I came across my Zelda slide show comics that I had brought to school to show my friends the previous year. I was so excited because I had finally remembered my Zelda comics and I now had the program I needed to make it! I was going to make my comic as a presentation for my class, but the teacher said it was inappropriate. So I had to wait for the summer to start before I could start working on them because I was loaded down with all my school work. As soon as school ended, I got a copy of Macromedia flash from a friend, went home and installed it, and proceeded to start my comics! Only one problem... we never covered most of the things in the class that I needed to make my series. I was bummed, so for most of the summer, I had to re-research all of the stuff I did when I first wanted to make these videos. Finally, nearing the end of the summer I started to work on my series. I am not going to lie, back then I really enjoyed my first episodes I made, but looking back on them now... they down right sucked!

I finally realized why my first few episodes bombed when I first submitted them back in the end of 2006. They had horrible quality sound, blurry backgrounds, bad sprite quality, and a few other things. Back then I was blind to those errors because I was so proud of them. After the couple that I submitted got Blammed, I started to feel discouraged. I ended up stopping the whole process mid-way through the forth episode. For almost a year and a half, my Zelda animations were put back on the shelf and forgotten.

Around late February into early March of 2008, I started to become hooked on a game a friend of mine lent me at college called Disgaea. I because so obsessed with it that I went out and bought the PSP port of the PS2 version after a couple of weeks of playing it. I love Disgaea so much that I ended up writing a walkthrough for it starting in early April, and finishing it in June. After finishing my work, I submitted it and all its 70+ glorious pages to GameFAQs.com. You can find it under the PSP games in the Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness section, submitted by me, titan_strife.

Anyway, after finishing that, I was happy once again, I had got my confidence back. I started to think, "What is going to be my next step, what am I going to do next." It was at this time I started to get bored again. I started to play with my NES emulator once again... I looked in the options and once again saw that one thing that started this whole thing out for me, the screen shot button! I took another screen shot of Link and opened up the file in a much better photo editing program than I had the first time around. I proceeded to change the color of the Link back into and recreating Dark Link. After I finished changing the colors, I remembered that I was using a better program and was able to correct a big problem that I had in my first episodes. That problem was the background behind the sprite. The program I used originally was not able to make the background transparent. I could only make it a solid color and delete it in Macromedia Flash. That ended up leaving a color silhouette around all of my sprites that moved. You can see that in my fourth episode when I submit it.

Continuing on, I also have a better audio editing program that allowed me to make better quality sounds than my first episodes had. After I finished playing around with the Dark Link sprite, I went back and continued working on my unfinished episode 4. After a few days of working on it, I finally finished it. If you look hard enough you will be able to see when the newer, better quality stuff came into it after I submit it. I didn't revamp episode 4 because I just wanted to get it done, it had been incomplete for almost 2 years. After I finished it, I did end up going back and revamping the first episode that very night and submitted it at 4:00 A.M on August 10th. I am proud to say that it has survived this long! (At least at the time I am writing this. I hope it never gets knocked off.)

After I re-submitted my new episode one, I started to work on revamping number two the next day. I finished that a few days later. I would have posted it the day I finished it, but I wanted to wait until I finished revamping episode three so I could post episodes two, three, and four close together. I ended up finishing number three on August 21st, so I posted number two up at around 11:00 P.M that night. I am really pleased with number two because it has received my highest score, a 3.39! (Remember, that is what it was at the time I wrote this.) Number three will go out the next day and number four shortly after it.

I hope you enjoyed my little lecture about my history of my Zelda series and hope that will continue to view my series.

Until Next Time!

Titan Strife
Key-to-Dreams