Comment by Laremere
9 hours ago
It's questionable that it's not literally just a fan theory. For years fans were trying to put the Zelda games on a single timeline, and Nintendo just didn't care. The split timeline was one of the top theories of how everything can be put together, based off of a single developer comment that implied a 2 way split instead of a 3 way split: https://zelda-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Split_Timeline
Then Hyrule Hostoria came out as a collectable. I would put good money on a conversation during its writing that went like this "What else can we put in here?" "Maybe a timeline of the games?" "Yeah, sure. What's the official one?" "There isn't one. The fans have a fun split timeline one." "Oh neat. Yeah work out the details. Now has anyone found that Wind Waker concept art yet?"
A common flaw I see in media literacy is operating like the author has pulled a completely coherent story from a different universe and simply written it down, as opposed to a creative process. Nintendo has never cared about the timeline, nor developing a single coherent story across all of the Zelda games. Some games are sequals, prequels, or have direct references. The timeline itself is purely from non-game sources, and is obviously not a factor when they design a new game.
The timeline was obviously not a planned aspect of the story originally and I personally don't find it particularly great storytelling but there is evidence in interviews of a timeline document existing internally since at least 2002[1] (where Shigeru Miyamoto explicitly said they do take it into consideration when writing the game's story but primarily focus on the games individually).
Maybe they did release the timeline because of fan pressure but some sort of timeline did exist for at least a decade before they released it which doesn't fit your theory they just came up with something and released it in secondary media because of fan pressure.
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
Right? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in this thread. Almost every Zelda game has a clear sequential relationship to another Zelda game. They aren't complicated stories and one doesn't need to be a deeply-read Zelda nerd to see it.
The only questions which the official timeline answers is how exactly to connect some otherwise-disparate sequences of games into a unified directed graph.
2002 was the first point in time where having a timeline document was useful, because it was the first game to make it clear there was at least a "child timeline" and an "adult timeline". Before then, there was a simple sequential chronology in the series.
Well the best proof they that didn't want to make games within a timeline is they published it and their next game was like yeah this is so far into the future that the timeline has all become stuff of legends.
Which was exactly the situation before they published the timeline!