Comment by cyphar
9 hours ago
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!