You know you’re a child of the webernets when you remember the thousands of video game fan sites that littered the Internet on hosts like Geocities and Angelfire. In the early 2000s, having your own website was the cool-kid thing to do (or at least that’s what I would tell myself). Anyone with a computer and Internet access could create their own website complete with animated GIFs, flashing text, and rainbow dividers. I used to be one of those self-proclaimed Internet entrepreneurs with my very own Zelda fan site, “Link’s Legends.”
Like many others, my site began on Geocities as a small resource for Zelda fans. I had some things available like official art and game music but the site was (like most of the internet at the time) largely under construction. Despite this, I would get giddy as a schoolboy whenever my hits would peak above a few dozen or whenever I would get a response on my guestbook. Once I discovered that Geocities was maybe not the right place to build a real website, my search for a new host began. After all, I didn’t want to be a n00b.
Enter the rabbit hole. The fansite community could sometimes be brutal. Sites would claw their ways up to get a sufficient number of hits just to establish some kind of sacred bond with larger sites called affiliation. The mudslinging that went on in some forums would put modern politics to shame. There were the gods of the ecosystem like Zelda Universe as well as the indies like Kasuto.
My journeys led me to the holy grail of hosting: another well-established site that would host me for free. I was lucky enough to attain this affiliates-with-benefits status with the webmaster of another Zelda site, Rauru’s Return. Once I had a taste of the possibilities a “real” webserver could provide with FTP, CSS and PHP, my site actually started to develop an inkling of a reputation. I had visitors! Forums! I even had a fancy-shmancy design and some actual content!
Things weren’t always pretty, though. Like I said before, sometimes, things could get a little dirty. My site was once the victim of theft. It was a new design I had been working on for months, complete with flashy drop down menus that took forever to code. All my hard work was thrown on to some poser’s Geocities page, horribly disfigured! I was so pissed off and wanted to punch whoever it was square in the face! I was at school when I found this out, and by the time I got home, the Internet was already taking care of things for me. My aforementioned mingling had paid off, and my theft along with the theft of lots of other art eventually chased this rat off the web. Remember folks, don’t mess with the Internet.
Developing my site literally took hours of my day. I even developed friendships with a couple of my fellow fansite owners over IM and forums. My nights were spent in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and MSN Messenger, tweaking code and designing new things. I loved it.
When I started writing this I began to scour the web for remnants of my site and I was surprised by how much of this culture still remained. Those forum posts about the thief? Still there. Forum posts of me asking for help or plugging my site? Still there. One of my friends from early on who I still keep a loose connection with is even bringing back his Zelda site, Ingo’s Ranch, in the form of the best Zelda wiki resource in Spanish.
I look back on this whole experience like it was some kind of important life journey and lesson. Even though I was simply building a fansite I gained a lot of skills that help me now, especially in an Internet culture.
