Following legal issues, the creators of Hand-Drawn Game Guides have announced that the project "as we know it" is over.
Hand-Drawn Game Guides was a Kickstarter that aimed to create hand-made guide books for The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, and Contra. The books would have had maps and illustrations that were completely hand-drawn, and it was received well by Nintendo fans, resulting in over $322,000 pledged at the time of being taken down.
Last week, Hand-Drawn Game Guides had to be taken down from Kickstarter due to legal troubles with an unmentioned company (take a guess). The Kickstarter had more than $322,000 at the time of the Kickstarter being taken down.
Phillip Summers, the creator of Hand-Drawn Game Guides, announced the full closure on Twitter, saying, "Well there is no easy way to say this but Hand-Drawn Game Guides as we currently know it is done. The good news is that there are many exciting opportunities opening up. It ain't about how hard you can hit, but about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Thanks all."
DreamPrism Press, who were originally going to publish Hand-Drawn Game guides, said, "I have a feeling we’ll be bouncing back with something even stronger soon enough. Stay tuned".
It's clear from the Tweets that something else is in the works from DreamPrism Press and Phillip Summers, but it's doubtful that it will have anything more to do with Nintendo. It's not been explicitly said by either party that Nintendo shut the project down, but considering how the company has been with pretty much any fan-made use of its licences, it's pretty clear what's happened.
Since announcing the closure of the project, Phillip Summer has changed his Twitter bio to "Was the Hand-Drawn Game Guides guy". He's also been Tweeting out images from the proposed Metroid guides, joking that he's found them on Google and has nothing to do with them. Go take a look if you want to see what could have been.