It should come as no surprise that throughout my years of school I tried to insert video games into my assignments and projects whenever possible, particularly in my college years.  In the summer of 2001 I had to take a course in technical writing.  Now, technical writing courses aren't the most exciting classes in the world.  Most of the assignments involved reading dry case files and coming up with a document that stated only the bare facts.  There was no room for linguistic flair or creativity.  That's why when the final project was announced I knew I had to tie gaming into it somehow.  I had to wring some fun out of that class. 

The objective for this final project was to write an instruction manual for an existing product in a technical style.  I talked my workgroup into writing a new manual for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.  The catch was that we had to omit flashy graphics, story elements, and fun fonts and instead only provide actual factual gameplay information in an easy to follow style with simple diagrams and basic illustrations. Basically, we had to suck the fun out of the source material. I like to think that my group and I achieved this, taking the original manual and updating it with thirteen years of gameplay experience. Now I'm offering up this revised manual in PDF format.  Some of the graphics in the manual may look familiar, as they were scanned from the original instruction booklet for the game that is still in my possession. Beyond that I wowed everyone in the group and the professor himself with some custom screenshots of the game, something that at the time seemed like the work of sorcery.  My work must have paid off. I earned an A on this project and passed the course.