Camp Hyrule

Camp Hyrule was an online summer camp that was hosted by Nintendo for a week every summer. It featured various upcoming Nintendo games, and had many of its own mini-games, chatrooms, team-based games, and interviews. Camp Hyrule's mascot is Stumpy the How.

The last annual Camp Hyrule took place in the summer of 2007. The event was tied to the Nintendo NSider Forums with many of the members and administrators of the forum participating. It is possible that the event was discontinued after the forums closed in late 2007.

History
The first Camp Hyrule occurred from August 15 to August 19, 1995, and was hosted by AOL. After 1996, Nintendo began hosting subsequent Camp Hyrules on their official website, nintendo.com, and after 1998 the event was hosted on a different domain, camphyrule.com.

The event was substantially popular, and occasionally Nintendo's servers struggled to cope with overloads of connections. For instance, Nintendo's servers crashed after registration opened for the 2001 camp, forcing sign-ups to be postponed until the next day.

Contests
Each year, registrants were divided into a series of "cabins" which served as teams for major contests. The success of a cabin was determined by its user's successes in various competitions, such as virtual face painting, or poetry writing. A series of individualized contests were held as well, such as high scores in flash games and community contests. At the end of each Camp Hyrule, an overall point score was determined for every cabin, and each member of the highest-scoring cabin received a prize.