If you were curious about this web site, or about its creator, you have stumbled across the right page.
Contents:
- Legends of Zelda
- Zelda Legends
Legends of Zelda
Nintendo's "Legend of Zelda" is one of the most beloved video game series of all time. However, the storyline behind the series is undeniably confusing and mixed-up. The internal time line, if there really is one, jumps around from game to game. Most Zelda fans agree that Ocarina of Time is first, but nobody can really agree on anything else, because the series is so riddled with ambiguities. After struggling to understand these mysteries, I decided to launch this site to sort it all out. This site's original mission was not to give strategies or cheats, but to solve Zelda storyline mysteries and figure out the chronological order of the games.
Since then, I have expanded the site to include multimedia, news, emulation, and even a detailed encyclopedia and bestiary. Now, after merging with Zelda Legends, I can offer a full-fledged village square where fans can interact with each other. Whether you decide to read my insightful articles, browse the large image gallery, read my in-depth storylines, or have fun in the village square, you are sure to find something to enjoy! Look around, be enlightened, and most importantly, have fun!
Legends of Zelda History
The first Zelda game I ever played was Ocarina of Time. I was blown away by the fantastic graphics, the rustic atmosphere, the epic story. Mainly, I was sucked in by the detailed storyline of the game. Even better, I soon realized, there were many more Zelda games where that came from.
After reading the storyline on ZHQ.com and preparing a brief storyline and timeline, I launched "The Legend of Zelda" (what an original name) in January 1999. There were no graphics, no frills, nothing "fun" or "interactive"; it was merely my own personal space for speculation about the Zelda storyline. Ultimately, my goal was to make a better storyline section than the one at ZHQ.com, which was too brief and unsatisfying.
At first "The Legend of Zelda" was only a side project, a secondary effort to my main work, the Nintendo Image Archive. Then, on November 11, 1999 (my 17th birthday), I was informed by Nintendo's lawyers that Nintendo Image Archive was violating their copyright. I had little choice but to remove my almost 4 year-old site from the web, and focus my attention on my fledgling Zelda site. First I had to find a new host. First I found Great Deku Tree, but their server was very slow and I never got very much support. Then I found zeldalegends.net, and khuffie agreed to host me. I became "The Legends of Zelda" (ooh look I added an "s" to "legend"), and loz.zeldalegends.net was my home for the next three years.
Over the years, I kept playing the games, studying the storyline, and most importantly, writing about them and posting information about them. Most of my storylines and older articles are a result of these early studies, and from feedback from visitors to my forum. Eventually, in an effort to end the chaos of "I think so and so said this," I wrote down all the important quotes in OoT and ALttP and typed up quote faqs. As time went on, and I improved my programming skills, I discovered the sweet goodness of text dumps. Meanwhile, I kept adding Zelda information, slowly, bit by bit.
Then, out of the blue, other "big" Zelda sites suddenly started dying, and people, wandering across the internet, found my little site, and discovered that it had a lot of information and good storyline discussion. I still find it amusing that my hit count kept going way up even though my site's content was changing very little during this time. Eventually, my site became "big" and more and more people were complaining that I wasn't covering enough of what they wanted to see. So I added things like special features, a section covering material other than the games, an encyclopedia, and an image gallery.
After a year of being "big," khuffie approached me about merging. I thought it was a good idea - there were many things I couldn't do because of lack of time and/or interest, like an interactive section. But we couldn't really figure out how we could merge and preserve our respective identities. So another year went by. Then, things happened, and khuffie asked me about merging again. This time I could see more clearly how we could merge. I had a theme picker, so he could simply have his own theme. We would merge content somewhat, and khuffie could be in charge of game content and fan stuff. And so, after two months of intense labor (um yeah) we finally finished the darn thing and merged.
"The Legends of Zelda" as you see it now is the result of years of effort. No matter how little free time I've had, I have never completely abandoned this site. In fact, this site happens to be one my main hobbies. With khuffie's help, I plan to put even more years of work into this fun project. Long live Zelda!
About Davogones
I get a lot of people asking me about my personal information. I'm not shy or paranoid about myself, so I'll tell all here. My name is David William Butler. My birthday is November 11, 1982, which makes me 24 now (woo hoo!). My home town is Thousand Oaks, California, and I recently graduated from UCLA with a Physics B.S. and a Philosophy minor. I am interested in reading (fantasy, fiction, Christian apologetics, philosophy, and anything else that expounds upon life in some way), Zelda (duh), anime, movies, programming, languages, games (mostly first person shooters and Nintendo games, but also stuff like DDR), logic, and "pursuing the gadfly of love." My screen name on AIM and MSN is davogones (duh-VAH-juh-knees). It's just a silly nickname that my dad calls me sometimes, a play on "David" and "Diogenes" (a Greek philosopher). Yeah, I know I spelled it weirdly, deal with it. I created the name "davogones" in junior high school and didn't find out about Diogenes until years later, okay?
I first started doing web sites back in January 1996. My first effort at a web page sort of evolved into a collection of Nintendo images. For years and years I always did all the HTML on my web sites by hand. "Nintendo Image Power" eventually morphed into Nintendo Image Archive, which soon moved to www.nintendo-images.com. It became the biggest collection of Nintendo images on the web, before Nintendo asked me to take it down. (Nintendo owns that URL now.) But my secondary site, "The Legend of Zelda," survived, and grew to the state you see it in today. I'm semi-retired from Zelda Legends, but I've refocused my energy into my blog, Tome of Wisdom.
I own the following video game systems: Game Boy, SNES, PC, N64, GB Color, GB Advance, GameCube, and most recently GB SP! I own every Zelda game except for the original Link's Awakening. I've played every Zelda game all the way through, emulated or otherwise, except for the original LoZ (haven't beaten) and the original Link's Awakening (haven't played). My favorite Zelda game is Majora's Mask, because it's fun and I like the story and graphical style.
If you want to contact me, see the Contact page or possibly the Mailbag.
Pictures of me. Uh oh, do you really want to find out what I look like? Am I a hunk, or am I geeky?
You'll never find out unless you click below! Somebody who wasn't qualified to judge said I looked like a
monkey, but I think I look a bit better than that!
16 yrs, w/o glasses
19 yrs, w/glasses
Zelda Legends
About Zelda Legends
Ocarina of Time was one of the most amazing and awe-inspiring games I've ever played, and my introdution
to the Legend of Zelda series. After dedicating a small section in my tiny little personal site, I
eventually decided to create Zelda Legends, which had its ups and downs throught the years.
Now, after what is hopefully the final 'down', I've merged with Davogones Legends Of Zelda, and together
we hope to bring you the ultimate Zelda experience on the web. Look forward to completely revamped game sections,
more interactive content at the Village Square, Zelda fan game archives, and hopefully, over time, the start of our
very own Zelda network.
About Khuffie
Interested about the almighty Khuffie, eh? Well, you shall hear it all now, my friends. My name is Ahmed El-Khuffash (from which Khuffie comes from!). I'm Jordanian, born on February 1st 1984 and lived in Kuwait all my life (no, that's not in Texas nor Hawaii, look at a globe!), and recently moved to Toronto, Canada where I am now studying New Media at Ryerson University.
If you want any more info about me, feel free to contact me.
If you want to see what I own (and hence get the urge to kill me), click here.
If you want to find out what I look like so you can hunt me down and kill me, click here.
Zelda Legends History
When I first bought Zelda: Ocarina of Time (the first Zelda game that I played) back in December, I was amazed by it! At that time I had a small personal site, and I thought it would be a nice idea to have a Zelda 5 guide there. So off I went to GameFAQs.com, searched for a decent guide and placed it on my sucky personal site.
After about two weeks I decided to renovate my site. I called it entertainmentZONE, and each section was called somethingZONE, e.g. comedyZONE. Naturally my Zelda 5 guide was called zeldaZONE, and instead of keeping it about Zelda 64 I decided to expand it to cover all the Zelda games. So off I went once again on a hunt for information.
The zeldaZONE section started to become too big, so I decided to make a separate Zelda site! So off I went in search of even more info for the site, and Zelda Legends was officially launched on 1st of February of 1999.
After about two weeks of being hosted by Freespeech.org, I decided that I wanted to expand. I have almost filled my 25mb limit, and new stuff was coming in fast. I started looking for another host, and finally my eyes fell on Classicgaming.com. After three goes at submitting my site they finally accepted to host me, and in each submission I had to improve my site. (First they said not enough info, then they said it was difficult to navigate!).
After something of less than two weeks at Classicgaming.com, trouble started to emerge. It was all my fault. You see, when I went on hunts for info, I kind of forgot to credit the people who I got the info from. This is where NecroVMX came into the picture. He contacted ZHQ.com, told them about me, and then he contacted me, threatening me and shouting at me for plagarizing. Pretty soon Classicgaming.com contacted me, and by then I was shambles! NecroVMX kept on talking to me. We talked and talked, and eventually he offered to help me get my content original!
Later on, at about July, I became unhappy with Classicgaming.com for reasons I'd rather not mention. I looked for another host, and finally came upon Rpgxtreme.com. I applied for hosting, and they accepted me straight away. I redesigned the site in occasion of my new host, and my hits soon started to rise!
In October of 1999 I was still trying to get Zelda Legends to become bigger. I looked for other more professional gaming networks. I applied at Futuregamer.com, and they promptly replied, accepting. On the 7th of December 1999, I signed a contract which marked my affiliation with Future Gamer, the people behind such magazines as Edge and PC Gamer.
The Coming of Darkness
After that is where the bad part comes in. I was hosted by Sng.net, which was
a dream come true, as it had everything I wanted and more for free. The only drawback
is that it kept going down. At one time before the new millenium, I contacted
its webmaster and he said that after the new year there should be no more errors.
The thing is, after the new year, the server went down completely, never to go
back up, and my site went down with it. I was stuck. I had no host, so I went
off in search of another host. I eventually came to Siteshosting. While not free,
I offered to design their site in exchange for free hosting, and they accepted.
However, it turns out that Siteshosting was a reseller to another server, and
never bothered to pay their cheques. The guy who owned the server kept closing
his account to force him to pay, but to no avail. He then eventually shut off
his account completely. This left me yet again with no host. I went off on a hunt,
and not long after I found Cgamenet, where I soon moved to.
After the move i decided a redesign was in the works. The old design was boring, dull and to top it off incompatible with Netscape (I wish everyone would just use IE!).
The Days of Light
The summer of 2000 marked the launch of Legends Alliance, the father network of
Zelda Legends. It launched with some amazing sites, including Zelda Legends of
course. In the following months, especially between November and December 2000,
the forums at Zelda Legends became a HUGE success (and about time too) and the
hits almost tripled!
Things were running fine for us, but then the CPM rate for ads rapidly fell,
IGN stopped paying tis affiliates (which affected me) and my host was not getting
enough money to maintain itself. I had to move my server, and i ended up at ztnet.com,
which is the host of such popular sites as zophar.net.
On the 1st of February 2001, I launched a completely new design in celebration
of the sites 2nd birthday. These are the days when the site was it its most popular,
hits were sky high, submittions kept coming in, updates were like clockwork.
Darkness Reborn
After a few months, updates began to slow down. Call it loss of interest, call
it pure laziness, as I am lazy at heart. Sometimes updates would be almost a month
in between, if that. Soon hits began to fall, I began to lose visitors.
Eventually, after about a year of this, I decided to revamp the site once again. The site was launched in August of 2002, and I decided to use PostNuke, a content management system which I used for Legends Alliance. While it was functional, it looked like a piece of tripe, and I didn't even update the site that much even though it was completely automated! Hits were falling off the scale, I had to do something...
The Revival?
Which brings us up to date. Will Zelda Legends reclaim its position as THE source
for Zelda information on the internet? Will it once again be among the top in
a vast list of Zelda sites? I hope so, but it requires me to quit my lazy nature.
The Merger
After talking to Davogones, webmaster of Legends of Zelda and one of my hostees,
we realized that our sites are perfect together. We threw the idea of merging
out sites together. Nothing happened then. Around three months later, we played
with the idea again, and this time things got rolling.
While ZTNet have been great to us, we needed more control (Big thanks go to Zachary and Brian for all your help!), so off we went to buy a new server. We worked together on merging our content (unfortunately, by this time, a lot of my content is out-dated, or useless, or lost due to server crashes and hard disc crashes), and our sites, and what you see here is the fruits of our labour.
Enjoy!