I figured - if you're playing a game about Ganondorf, you're going to want to be able to win, right?
"The Rise of Evil" is also a backstory behind a "Lost Era" in my special Timeline for another long story of mine, "The Great Desert." My co-writer and I worked up our own complicated Zelda-Timeline for that story, and it included an era in which the Link lost and died. I wanted to do a game-style story about Ganondorf and thought "Hey, expanding upon that one fic-verse Timeline would be perfect."