Mirage Castle
Image: History of Hyrule / Nintendo, Studio Hard Co.

Fantastic game history archiving news, everybody! History of Hyrule, a prolific Zelda archivist, has just uploaded a high-quality scan of The Legend of Zelda: The Mirage Castle, a choose-your-own-adventure book from 1986, shortly after the release of the first Legend of Zelda game.

Because The Mirage Castle was released so long ago, it has a lot of weird and interesting Zelda lore that has since been scrubbed from the story, like a character called Fairy Fanny and Ganon's younger brother, Demon General Gaia. Zelda's father is a character we've met a few times over the last 30 years, but we've never known him as "King Graham II", as he's called in the book.

The book is entirely in Japanese, and features manga-style drawings on many of the pages. Take a look at some of the illustrations — and hover your mouse over each one to get a (very) rough translation of the captions:

For the full book, visit History of Hyrule's archival scan — and be aware that this is a manga-style book, so you'll need to press left on the keyboard or swipe left to go to the next page.

[source twitter.com]