History of LoZ.com

Early History

LegendOfZelda.com was founded in 1999 by Alex Jones, known as Link of Hyrule. Due to the name of the URL, Nintendo of America threatened the site with a lawsuit. Nintendo wanted to use the domain name, and filed a copyright infringement suit (Check it out here!). The lawsuit was deemed frivolous and was dropped shortly after it was issued.

After a few years, the site began to wane. Before taking an extended hiatus in 2002, Link of Hyrule left a few members with administrative control of the site. One of these members, Nemesis, took away forum powers from the other staff members and formed his own staff. Anger towards the new administration caused people to abandon the site and it eventually went down.

Link of Hyrule returned in 2003 and announced that the site would relaunch soon. A temporary Lycos messaging board was used by regular members while they awaited the resurrection of LegendofZelda.com. As people celebrated New Years 2004, it became apparent that Link of Hyrule wasn’t going to relaunch the site any time soon. Prominent members and then administrators Megaman X, Remus, and Droshi led a migration to a new site, Xero Gaming.com. This site centered on all gaming, not just the Legend of Zelda series.

LegendofZelda.com was relaunched nearly two years after originally promised, and was officially reborn in November of 2004. Prominent members from the old forums and Xerogaming.com were accepted into the Oldies group and given access to an Oldies-only restricted forum. Link of Hyrule appointed KingKrazyLink as an administrator.

Members of the boards saw the site destroyed and rebuilt several times by hackers in the summer of 2005. Quick action to restore order was impossible because Link of Hyrule and KingKrazyLink were often offline, incapable of doing anything. After a hack, Link of Hyrule gave Cartoons of ZeldaDungeon.net administrative powers to rebuild the site. Because nobody had heard of him before and he was now an administrator, most members assumed he was the hacker who destroyed the site. He rebuilt the site within hours, but many still insisted he was a hacker. Angered by the accusations, Cartoons abandoned the site in the face of yet another hack. Only a moderator at this point, Chance was promoted to administrator to restore the forums. For three days in July of 2005, he struggled through code to not just rebuild the forums, but to make them better.

However, about a month later, Chance was informed by three close friends that Link of Hyrule and KingKrazyLink were planning to remove him as administrator, and on August 17th, 2005, Chance erased the forums of LoZ.com, replacing them with a letter of explanation. He also changed his username and profile to appear that he was KingKrazyLink and said that everyone should go to XeroGaming.net, a reincarnation of the old XeroGaming.com (the new domain name being XeroGaming.net). Along with Darth X (formerly Megaman X), Chance recreated Xerogaming.net. Twenty members followed, and Xero Gaming once again had a healthy community, now devoted to bad-mouthing LegendofZelda.com.

Shortly thereafter, Link of Hyrule (Alex) returned from a vacation that would end up conflicting with the time he was supposedly conferring with KingKrazyLink to fire Chance. Upon learning this, Chance formally apologized to Link of Hyrule for destroying his site, and tension between both sites eased a bit. KingKrazyLink had managed to restore the forums of LegendofZelda.com, but due to a slew of forum Modifications to the open phpBB code, the forum code became so garbled that after just a couple of months, Link of Hyrule asked Chance to return as an administrator and fix the forums. Chance agreed and returned, joining KingKrazyLink and Link of Hyrule as Administrators of the forums. In January of 2006, KinkKrazyLink left to devote more time to his own site, ZeldaGaming.net, after a period of slipping activity. Chance officially became a co-owner of LegendofZelda.com in April of 2006 after LegendofZelda.com switched servers. XeroGaming.net merged with LegendofZelda.com on August 4th, 2006. Just a few days later, in lieu of the vast amount of new members, many veterans of LoZ.com, a change was made to the Oldies and Sage groups at LoZ.com. The Oldies were renamed the Sheikah, and the Sages retained their name, but their purposes flip-flopped, and their definitions clearly outlined.

The Switch to vBulletin

In October 2006, LegendofZelda.com underwent a massive layout change. LegendofZelda.com’s forums switched from being powered by phpBB to vBulletin. The main site and forums became integrated. After the switch, LegendofZelda.com forum activity skyrocketed, with membership surpassing 10,000 members in half of a year. Around this time, Xizor became a forum administrator.

In April of 2007, LegendofZelda.com and ZeldaDungeon.net tried to merge, but failed due to lack of support on both sides. Shortly thereafter, and in part due to the failed merge, Xizor became a Webmaster at LoZ.com. Chance labored over a new layout, which was launched in June of 2007 with the live assistance of several staff members, including Xizor, Kandid, Incubus, and Runeblade. It was met with an overall positive reaction, with only 28% of polled members stating that they preferred the old layout more.

LegendofZelda.com switched servers again in April of 2008 after a string of server problems. In June 2008, however, the administrators were made aware that the LegendofZelda.com server was expending too many resources for the type of server it was. At the time, LegendofZelda.com was also hosting Exploding Deku Nut and Zelda Blog. On July 5, 2008 all three sites were taken down temporarily. On July 26th 2008, LegendofZelda.com and ExplodingDekuNut.net were re-opened. However, Zelda Blog continues to remain offline to this day, indefinitely waiting to be relaunched.

To combat the lethargic feel of things, starting in Spring of 2009, Chance and Xizor began focusing on revitalizing the forums in a “Spring Cleaning” sort of process.

To breathe some life back into the Groups, based on popular races from the Zelda games, on March 22nd, 2009, Xizor announced that members of the three Social Membergroups would be allowed to run for “President of the Groups”, a new position that will help get the Forum Staff more in touch with the regular members. Elections for Group Candidates were held in March, and the election of the President was to be held in July of 2009.

In another effort to revitalize to the forums, on April 8th, 2009, it was unveiled by Xizor that Kandid was being promoted to be a Forum Administrator, having previously been a forum moderator for some time, among other roles. This promotion was viewed as a long time coming, and thus was not a major shock to the LoZ.com community.

In April 2009, Legendofzelda.com went public with a need for monetary donations in order to sustain the site, which doesn’t bring in enough money through the lone Google ad on their front page. The total sum needed is about $550 US, needed by the end of May, 2009. After the year’s financial situation is taken care of, Chance and Xizor have plans to find ways to increase the site’s revenue.

On April 28th, 2009, Legendofzelda.com became a contributor to ZeldaWiki.org. This addition to the Wiki was discussed by the LoZ.com Staff the year prior, but was shot down in favor of the defunct Zelda Almanac Project.

These events all came to a head when, in the beginning of June, Chance cleaned out the forums and deleted lots of old and useless posts, thus decreasing the size of the forum database and reducing overall forum clutter.

Real Legends Never Die

On June 14th, 2009, a new layout at LoZ.com went active for the first time in almost two years. The layout was met with mixed reaction, but for the most part, it was received positively by the Memberbase, as well as by the rest of the Zelda Community. Along with the new layout, the slogan was changed from “The Definitive Zelda Site” to “Real Legends Never Die”. This new slogan was really a blast from the past, as it was an old catchphrase from LoZ.com’s first revival in 2003.

According to both Xizor and Last Chance, the new layout was only the “tip of the iceberg” as far as summer events are concerned at LoZ.com in 2009. However, due to server troubles and a multitude of other things, not much more than a large string of site updates occurred.

The site also began actively seeking new content staff at the end of June, and hired Andoman as a News Updater on June 30th, 2009. New content was released for the first time in years on LoZ.com on July 3rd, 2009.

On July 1st, 2009, the first LoZ.com Presidential Election was held, and it was a huge success. As of July 4th, 2009, Andoman became the official President of the Groups. In an email from Xizor, it has been stated that the forums will be “more fun than ever before”, in light of the recent election. Sadly, the presidential position was not much use and the event is likely not to be repeated in the future.

On July 19th, Xizor announced that LoZ.com had “discovered” ancient hylian scrolls, and over the next few days, began releasing the scrolls’ “translations”. In reality, this is just a new, unique content feature at LoZ.com disguised as a “real” Hylian discovery. The last chapter of Book 1 was released on November 1st, 2009, resulting in a total of fourteen chapters for the texts.

Starting on August 10th, the First Annual Lozzies were unveiled, with two revealed each day until Friday the 14th, with the last one, “The Pinnacle”, being revealed. The awards were a huge success, bridging the community gap between LoZ.com and a lot of other sites in the community. This together with the addition of the Zelda Wiki to the site has really made LoZ a team player in the online Zelda Community.

The site seemed a bit stale for the next month or so, but celebrated its 10th Anniversary on November 21st, 2009. Finally in December another new layout was launched. This was mostly due to the fact that Chance had been on a “leave of absence” prior to its release, and the layout was intended to commemorate the site’s 10th Anniversary, Chance’s return, and the release of Spirit Tracks. The layout was launched on December 14th, and was met with widespread positive reaction from both the LoZ.com community, as well as the overall online Zelda community. Very few have been negatively critical of it, and as Chance said himself: “we not only still have what it takes to be one of the major players again, but we can do it in such style that no other website can even compare to.”

The site’s new and current slogan is “Legend of Zelda.com: Enhance Your Zelda Experience.”

For more information on our site, visit our page at the Zelda Wiki!