The History of Zelda Xtreme

Optimism

Zelda Xtreme was started back in fall 1999 as just a small Homestead.com website named "Zelda 64 Glitches & Codes and as the title suggested, only covered codes and GameShark codes for Ocarina of Time. On the first day of opening, the site had over 400 unique hits mostly due to the help and friendship with Kukyfrope of Abstrusness of Hyrule who had a huge hand in getting the website started. I had dabbled in creating numerous web pages before this one, but none that met with such popularity especially so early on. I knew that this was going to change and grow how much I knew about creating web pages.

In early 2000, I started looking for a new hosting service where I wouldn't have homestead ads plastered all over my website. Through Kukyfrope's suggestion, I found dekutree.com and started talking to Dingodonkey who was the owner of the site. It didn't take long before I decided this would be a good choice for a hosted server to move my site too. Dekutree offered numerous benefits at the time, including a forum system which was just a sub forum of the Deku Boards, the main forum of dekutree.com. Through the Deku Boards I met a lot of the people who are still regulars on my own forums today, and the boards were also the building ground to what the site would eventually become. The Deku Boards set off an obsession for me on using internet message board software and all the modding and hacks you could do with them.

In the middle of 2001, with my message board obsession growing, I decided I wanted to expand the website and host my own forums that I could modify and style however I wanted. Egged on by my father, I purchased ZeldaGlitches.com and renamed the website to "Zelda Glitches" and purchased a copy of Ultimate Bulletin Board software (UBB). Due to dekutree.com and many other affiliates I had gained early up to this point, it didn't take long for Zelda Glitches to grow even faster. We expanded to include all Zelda games and thousands of unique IPs would visit the site on average every day. The forums would have dozens of new members joining up every day to talk to other Zelda fanatics. Eventually my webhost couldn't take the stress of my busy website and told me I either had to upgrade to a much more expensive plan, or pay every time my site exceeded the bandwidth limit. We had passed the one million unique hits by this point, so we changed servers again.

In August 2002, my domain name and server were sold out from under me to a domain seller without any warning or notification. I had to come up with a new name quickly and settled on "ZeldaXtreme.com" and quickly worked to put the site back online. Since there wasn't any warning I was going to lose the domain, there was no way to notify the people we were going to change domains, or back up any of the files that were on the server such as the UBB database files. Most of the people found their way back to the site, some taking way longer than others, but the site was never able to regain the same levels of traffic that ZeldaGlitches.com had.

At the end of 2002 my real life was starting to greatly affect the time I would have working on the site and I gradually lost interest over the next year of Zelda Xtreme's life span, only spending time to make redesigns or update little things here and there. Nevertheless the site was still fairly popular, and was still pulling in new members at a steady rate. In August 2003, the site achieved over 2 million unique hits and popularity was climbing. Regardless, the urge I had to do a different subject matter was building as time went on.

Confused Monkey

On November 11th, 2003 I decided to shut Zelda Xtreme down for good. I sold the ZeldaXtreme.com domain to one of the sites I hosted at the time and I bought Xeforce.com and started creating a website that was just a gaming community. The forums had always been my favorite part of the website, so I wanted to make the forums my entire website. Less than two months after the start of Xeforce, I was hit by a personal blow that really ruined any motivation I had towards the website for a long time. The site remained just a forum for three and a half years as the loyal members of Zelda Xtreme who stayed here with me would come daily to chat with each other about gaming and other such topics.

Eventually Xeforce was scrapped in July 2007 and we've had various websites to take it's place over the years, mostly to see if they would garner any interest and to keep in touch with the same people that has been here since the Zelda Glitches days. I made Gamer Handles in 2009 which had a lot of success in its GamerCard program, and was even able to earn me a career doing what I love. As time went on however, my love for Zelda and Nintendo in general continued to chip away at me and I strived to return to my Zelda roots and create a Zelda website again.

In April 2012, I noticed Zelda Xtreme.com was available to be bought again so I immediately purchased it and began working on designing and developer a website for my old name.

So here we are, I originally wrote this on November 11th, 2013, because of it being ten years exactly since the closing of the original Zelda Xtreme. It's been a long time coming but we've done a complete three-sixty and we are back to continue what we originally started. As our motto says, we want to share with you our everlasting passion for the Legend of Zelda series - again.