Hat jemand von euch Erinnerungen an Zelda Kingdom Online?

Hi and welcome to the forum. That's incredible, I've never heard of it, especially as I had no contact with the internet at the time. We have some very dedicated collectors here though, so chances are someone here has the relevant issue of the Club Nintendo Magazine. I‘m just wondering when this issue was released. The post card i found on reddit says that Ocarina of Time was „coming soon“, but one user there states, they think its from the early 2000‘s which does not seem to make sense.

Honestly, I thought this was a joke at first. It strikes me as very advanced (and designwise still kind of cheap) for something official that is supposed to be from that era and is browser-based. On the other hand, I imagine the actual game was a lot more primitive than the introductory screenshots with the gate and the sword monk suggest. Those were probably just “fancy” render graphics.

It looks like a mixture of Zelda and The Elder Scrolls and, in my eyes, has the potential to shed new light on the lore of Ocarina of Time (even if certainly not canon). However, it may also be that it is so unknown because it had high hardware requirements for the time or was buggy, so almost nobody could actually experience its core. I don’t know anyone who even had propper access to the internet back then. In any case, it looks like a promo commission from Nintendo of Europe and nothing like something that actually came from Nintendo Japan themselves.

Thanks for the insight. Too bad Stop Killing Games is coming thirty years too late.

Hello and welcome to our forum! Feel free to write in English if that's easier for you - most of our community understands it, and it also helps to avoid potential misunderstandings.

I actually own several Club Nintendo magazines that contain an advertisement for Zelda Kingdom Online. When those magazines were published, I was a child and didn’t have access to the internet. That changed around 2002 or 2003, and I started searching for Zelda Kingdom Online because the ad had made me incredibly curious about it.

However, by that time, it no longer existed. Instead, I found a German-language fan forum also called Zelda Kingdom. The owner went by the username El#Paso, and as far as I know, he later helped create Zeldapendium, the German counterpart to the English Zelda Wiki. Zelda Kingdom by El#Paso was shut down years ago, too. Unfortunately, I can’t remember whether it was only accessible via the .de-domain or also via the .com-domain. If El#Paso took over the .com domain when it became available, it’s possible he even saw the original Zelda Kingdom Online. I can try to see if it’s still possible to contact El#Paso via Zeldapendium - if so, I can point him to this thread. Maybe he has some cool info to share in this discussion.

By the way, my personal guess is that Zelda Kingdom Online was simply an official website by Club Nintendo, possibly with animations and similar features that made it look like a game.

JCasper

What seems odd to me about the issue of the magazine you linked to is that although there is an advertisement for Zelda Kingdom, the Magazine doesn't explain at all what it's all about. It seems as if the editors had already assumed at this point that the readers would know about it. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an earlier issue that at least roughly explained the content of zeldakingdom.com. After all, it was expensive and time-consuming to surf the Internet back then and you wanted to know roughly what to expect beforehand.

Zitat von Jeanne

By the way, my personal guess is that Zelda Kingdom Online was simply an official website by Club Nintendo, possibly with animations and similar features that made it look like a game.

This sounds very plausible to me, because at the bottom left of the second double page of the linked issue there is a list of official domains for various big Nintendo franchises at the time. Zelda is only represented there with zeldakingdom.com. So it could simply have been the one and only official website for Zelda in Germany, a kind of overview portal. But I find a few things strange:

• Why are the screenshots so cryptic? Either they had no idea about UX yet or it wasn't an overview but additional content. It may also have been an overview but gamified.
• Why does the only page archived by the Wayback Machine contain a button labeled “Back to the castle courtyard”? Sounds like a kind of point and click adventure to me.
• Why is the page the only one listed with a .com top level domain and not .de like the others? Probably has no relevance, but still strange.
• Why does the site have its own logo and wasn't just called zelda.de? Perhaps NoE was allowed a bit more freedom back in the days and simply went creative for no particular reason.

Fun fact: I just found out that at least zelda.com was already occupied in 1998.... with a porn site. Maybe Nintendo knew about this and didn't use the similar-sounding domain zelda.de to prevent the kids from accidentally ending up there.

In case El#Paso turns out to not be contactable anymore we could also try to get in touch with the people credited for creating the Club Nintendo Magazine. Sure to get answers this way is way less likely, but hey „Online Redakteur Thomas Görg“ sounds promising.