Community:Zelda Dungeon History

Conception
Mases Hagopian originally gained interest in the Zelda series after playing A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo. Years later, Mases obtained a copy of Ocarina of Time and his interest in the series grew. Leading up to the release of Majora's Mask in the year 2000, Mases became involved in the online Zelda community, frequently visiting the Zelda fan website known as Zelda Power. During the summer of 2001, Mases thought of the idea of creating his own Legend of Zelda website where he could provide written strategy guides for all of the Zelda games. This idea came to fruition near the end of the summer of 2001.

Layout 1.0 - The Early Days
The site launched on August 19th, 2001 and was originally hosted at Yahoo Geocities free hosting service. The site initially launched as part of a network of sites about several other gaming and TV show series', including Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Dark Cloud, and Dragonball Z.

This early era didn't last long, and by October of 2001, all of the network sites had gone inactive and only Zelda Dungeon remained. This primitive version of Zelda Dungeon had very little game content, and it was in October of 2001 that Mases began working on an Ocarina of Time Walkthrough. After about a month of work, Mases was beginning to lose interest in working on the site, based on the fact that there were no incoming visitors. Activity came to a complete halt in December of 2001. It wasn't until January 2nd, 2002, when Zelda Dungeon was first listed on the Google search engine. For the first time, consistent visitors began to flow into Zelda Dungeon. While it was such a tiny number in retrospect, the site was receiving 5-10 visitors per day, and this caused work to resume on Zelda Dungeon. The site got its first affiliate in City of Clocktown, an aspiring website at the time, and Mases became very close friends with the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Zelda Dungeon continued to rack up more affiliates and there was a consistent flow of new content appearing at the site. With the help of the Webmaster of City of Clocktown, Mases setup an account at shorturl, and the site could now be found at the much easier to remember zeldadungeon.vze.com.

Controversy hit Zelda Dungeon during this early period, when Mases was directly linking to mp3 audio files that were hosted by Zelda Power. Mases did not know that he was not supposed to this at the time, but in response to these new audio files, more visitors began to come to the website. After a few weeks, Mases was contacted by Aaron Holt, Webmaster of Zelda Power, and was asked to remove the direct links to Zelda Power's media.

Layout 2.0 - HTML Conversion
On March 27th, 2002, Zelda Dungeon launched Layout version 2.0, and it was the first layout that was built with html coding. The layout was built by the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Prior to this layout, Zelda Dungeon had been built with a yahoo geocities site builder. With the introduction of HTML coding, the website now had a consistent appearance throughout all of the pages.

Two versions of this layout were actually released. Upon release, version 2.0 had a listing of all the Zelda games along the navigation, and every specific page of content for each of the games was also listed. This worked well at the layouts launch, as there were so few content pages. However, the website began to grow and new pages were constantly being added to the site, which caused the left navigation to become very lengthy. Additionally, because site was using basic HTML, after every new page or affiliate was added, every single page of the website had to be individual edited.

Several months into the layouts existence, version 2.5 was launched. The noticeable difference was that game menu on the left navigation has been compacted so that it only listed the actual games. With version 2.5, the website began using shtml. What shtml did, was allowed the navigation bars to be adjusted without having to go through and edit every single page when a single link was changed, and this made editing the website a lot more efficient.

The site was growing rapidly during this layout, and yahoo geocities was no longer large enough for Zelda Dungeon. At the end of each month, Zelda Dungeon was being taken offline due to overuse of the allowed bandwidth. After searching online for other free hosts that were more reliable, Mases stumbled upon a website known as Zelda Odyssey, which was part of the Chatville network. After contacting the webmaster of Zelda Odyssey, Zelda Dungeon was accepted for hosting, and moved to this new network.

During this time frame, Zelda Dungeon hired its first ever staff member, Steph. Steph originated from Link's Domain, a Zelda website which had just closed down. After seeing her work and seeing the closure of the Link's Domain, Mases contacted Steph and offered her a job at the website, where she officially became a staff member on October 27th, 2002. Steph ended up creating much of the Adventure of Link content at the time, and had set a new standard of content for Zelda Dungeon. Steph was only at the website for several months before leaving her position behind. Almost all of her content has since been replaced, but Steph still leaves behind a legacy of being the first staff member at Zelda Dungeon.

Layout 3.0 - Hosting Issues
Just prior to the launch of Layout 2.0, Zelda Dungeon became affiliated with one of the leading Zelda websites online at the time, Zelda Central. Victor, the Webmaster of Zelda Central had grown to be close friends with Mases, and becuase of this, he offered to create Zelda Dungeon a brand new layout. On November 23rd, 2002, layout 3.0 was launched and it was a visual upgrade over layout 2.0, as it added more color to the website. Several noticeable changes could immediately be seen with the new layout, including the first official banner that the website had at the top of the layout. In previous layouts, there was just simply a line of text stating the websites name, but now a traditional banner was in place including the sites name and artwork from the Zelda franchise. Also, prior to layout 3.0, the site was always referred to as The Zelda Dungeon, but with the new layout, 'the' was dropped from the website title, and it was now simply referred to has Zelda Dungeon.

Zelda Odyssey, the host of Zelda Dungeon, was experiencing frequent downtime, and this led to Zelda Dungeon also having frequent downtime. With the growth of Zelda Dungeon being stunted because of hosting issues, Mases began looking elsewhere in the Zelda community for websites that offered free hosting. On December 14th, 2002, Zelda Dungeon was accepted by Lars-Christian of Zelda Universe and began to move to its new home. Zelda Universe did not support shtml at the time, and this caused the transition process to be a bit more difficult. Zelda Dungeon abandoned shtml, and shifted towards php, of which remains the primary coding system of the website today. One of the luxuries of being hosted by Zelda Universe, was the large influx of fans that began pouring into the website. Zelda Universe was one of the largest Zelda websites online during this time, and this brought a lot of traffic to Zelda Dungeon.

In early 2003, Mases applied for a domain name at acidmist.com, a website that offered free domain names. Zelda Dungeon was accepted, and the new url for the website was now zeldadungeon.com. In March of 2003, Zelda Dungeon once again contacted acidmist, and this time applied for the free hosting package that acidmist offered. Free hosting would be provided in exchange for the placement of a small banner advertisement at the top of each page of the website. Zelda Dungeon was accepted and in March of 2003 left Zelda Universe and found its new home at Acidmist. Leaving Zelda Universe slowed the growth process of Zelda Dungeon, but Zelda Dungeon was now on its own, outside of the shadow of being hosted at other Zelda websites.

Layout 4.0 - New Co-Webmaster
Zelda Dungeon released Layout version 4.0 on May 3rd, 2003. Mases found this layout online from a website known as Free Layouts. The site offered a bunch of free layout templates that could be freely used by anybody who runs a website. The layouts color scheme was drastically different than the previous two white layouts, as it had a much darker feel to it. After the initial release of the layout, Mases found that there was another, much smaller website, using the exact same layout template found at Free Layouts. This lack of uniqueness, caused the layout to not be much of a hit with the frequent visitors of the website or with Mases himself.

After Steph became the first staff member of Zelda Dungeon a year earlier, the website hired numerous staff members to create content and write articles and editorials, but none of these staff members ever ended up sticking around for more than a couple weeks. On May 3rd, the same day as the launch of the new layout, Mases hired a new staff member who went by the alias of Cartoons. Upon his hiring, Cartoons was treated as a normal staff member and was assigned to work on content projects for Ocarina of Time as well as some material for Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. After being told which parts of the website that he would work on, Cartoons worked very hard and efficiently and just mere hours after being assigned this material, his first content pieces were ready to be released online.

Mases saw this dedication that Cartoons had for the website, and over the next several months of the websites existence, updates became very frequent, content was being added on a daily basis, and the sites visitors were experiencing record highs. On August 18th of 2003, the eve of the websites second birthday, Zelda Dungeon hit the mark of 1000 visitors in a single day. A few months later, Cartoons was promoted to a Webmaster role at Zelda Dungeon.

It was also during this time period, that the first ideas of a Zelda Dungeon Forum were being tossed around. Mases was reluctant to create his own forum, as he felt it would be distracting from growth of the actual website, and because of the relative youth of Zelda Dungeon, would not become very active. However, Mases began seeing the importance of giving a fan base a place to discuss, and formed the first of what became a series of partnered forums. Rather than attempting to create his own forum, Mases agreed to link to existing forums of various affiliate websites of Zelda Dungeon.

Layout 5.0 - Green Return
Layout 5.0 was released on November 25th, 2003. The layout was created by Avenged, who at the time, was the Webmaster of a Zelda Chronicles. The website marked the return of the green color scheme that was seen in Layout 1.0. The layout was filled with dozens of variations of the color green, and this could be seen with a quick glance of the index page. There were very few images within the layout, and this allowed the green to really stand out and the page to load rather quickly.

During the time period of this layout, Zelda Dungeon was able to affiliate with Zelda Power, one of the biggest inspirations for Mases throughout the creation and growth of Zelda Dungeon.

Towards the end of this layouts lifespan, a stunt to the growth of Zelda Dungeon occurred once again because of hosting problems. Acidmist had been a great website for free hosting and a free domain name, but a big downfall was the poor technical support that was offered, and the reluctance of them to comply with the needs of their clients. In this case, Zelda Dungeon had outgrown the hosting package that acidmist offered, and towards the end of each month, the site was reaching its bandwidth limits and the site was coming offline.

This layout did see the hiring of Metalmallow, a new staff member that was brought on board to help the graphics field. Metalmallow created dozens of messenger icons, wallpaper images, avatars, and more. In addition to his graphics expertise, Metalmallow spent a lot of his time working on behind the scenes projects.

Layout 6.0 - ZeldaDungeon.net
During the rough stretch towards the end of the lifespan of Layout 5.0, Zelda Dungeon also hired a new staff member to help produce a brand new layout. This new staff member began creating layout 6.0, but never quite finished before he vanished from the website. It is not known exactly what happened to this member or to where this member went off to, but the layout was not completed. Mases and Cartoons had all the various images that went with the layout, but it was only partially coded when the creator left. This made Cartoons and Mases slowly piece together the layout, which at the time was quite difficult given the primitive knowledge that both Mases and Cartoons had with coding. After nearly three weeks of the site going without an update, Layout 6.0 was launched on March 30th, 2004. It was the first Zelda Dungeon layout to be created and hand coded by members of the Zelda Dungeon staff.

The hosting problems with Acidmist continued, and the search for yet another new host had begun. Unfortunately this also meant that the zeldadungeon.com domain name was also in serious jeopardy, because it was owned by Acidmist. After a search for various other websites that offered free hosting services, Zelda Dungeon discovered a website known as Telefragged. The website was a well established gaming website that hosted several large fan websites from all over the gaming spectrum. They offered free hosting in exchange for a simple banner advertisement that had to be placed on the website. Mases jumped at this offer and after weeks of uncertainty with acidmist, the website moved to Telefragged and was now located at zd.telefragged.com.

With the domain name switch, visitors immediately plummeted. Fortunately enough for Zelda Dungeon, the switch ended up being a great benefit, as for the first time in quite awhile, the website was hosted on a consistent server, and visitors soon reached their peak position during the layout 5.0 era.

The 6th layout of Zelda Dungeon was the first layout that had a quick navigation system for the Zelda games. This was a trend started by popular Zelda websites such as Zelda Elements and Zelda Universe, and during this period, nearly every single large Zelda website had a similar quick navigation menu. The quick menu and the additional images on the side bars led this layout to be by far the most image complex layout to date. The lavender colored layout was also something quite different than any previous Zelda Dungeon layout, and was quite a unique look in color for its time. However, after the strong initial reaction of the layouts launch, most fans did not have good opinions of the layout.

During this time period, Zelda Dungeon switched to Cutenews, a news system that allowed users to make edits on the sites index page without having to edit and upload pages through a FTP program. Having a new content management system like this allowed Zelda Dungeon to have staff members that can work independently to post news articles without having to go through one of the Webmasters or upload through FTP. Thus, during this time period, several new staff members were hired strictly as news reporters. Unfortunately, none of these staff members ever stuck around for more than just a couple of months.

Zelda Dungeon also saw its first active participation in a forum during this time period. One of the websites closest friends at the time was a website known as Zelda Legacies. They had their own community forum, but it was run by Cartoons, a webmaster of Zelda Dungeon. While not officially a part of Zelda Dungeon at its conception, the forums were actively promoted at Zelda Dungeon with links and consistent mentions of the forums. Throughout this time period, Zelda Legacies was beginning to dwindle away, and the forums were becoming more and more interlaced with Zelda Dungeon. This forum was known as the Forsaken Forums and in retrospect, is known as the 1st generation of Zelda Dungeon forums. The forum was run on the vBulletin forum software, which was licensed to the webmaster of Zelda Legacies. Unfortunately, Zelda Legacies and its forums experienced some rough times and went offline, leaving Zelda Dungeon without its own community forum. Throughout its lifetime, the first generation of forums for Zelda Dungeon accumulated over 300 registered members and 7,000 total posts.

Layout 7.0 - Community Forums


Layout 7.0 was launched on August 23rd, 2004, just four days after the websites third anniversary. This was the first of three layouts that would keep the tradition of launching a new layout in celebration of the websites birthday. The layout itself returned Zelda Dungeon to a white background that wasn't seen since the websites 3rd layout. The layout was created by Metalmallow of Zelda Dungeon, and it was his first attempt at a layout. The layout did however, receive a mostly positive reaction from fans of the website.

Zelda Dungeon's content areas began making a gradual shift from standard content to full blown walkthroughs during the period just prior to the launch of this layout, as well as through much of this layouts lifespan. The first of these walkthroughs was completed in the summer of 2004 and it was the A Link to the Past site walkthrough. It was the first full game guide at Zelda Dungeon to have a complete walkthrough of the game, complete with both text and screenshots. This new standard of game guides carried over to the original Legend of Zelda, which was completed in October of 2004. In retrospect, many of these early guides appear to be quite primitive, but at the time of their release, it was top of the line material.

Shortly after the fall of the first generation of forums, Cartoons wanted to relaunch the forums once again, and he did so on October 10th of 2004. The was the first forum software to be hosted by Zelda Dungeon and it became known as the 2nd generation of Zelda Dungeon forums. The forum program used for this second forum was the phpbb software. Phpbb is a very popular free forum software that was used by several Zelda fan websites at the time. Activity at the forum sparked immediately upon the launch of the forums, and a steady incline in activity followed for the next several months.

Near the end of 2004, Mases had taken a backseat as the webmaster of the website. Mases was still active in terms of writing content for the website, but Cartoons had taken over the day to day operations of the website.

Layout 8.0 - New Heights
Zelda Dungeon launched layout 8.0 on February 25th, 2005. The layout was MetalMallow's second attempt at a layout, and it took upon a gold color scheme. The layout had dropped the quick links navigation system at the top of the site.

This era of the website saw some major changes in the day to day activities and updates at the website. In the previous four layouts, Mases and Cartoons were the primary news posters at the website, with the occasional post by MetalMallow. However, during the months after the release of layout 8.0, Zelda Dungeon hired several new staff members in Air Grady and Chance. Air Grady was brought on board to report on recent Nintendo and Zelda news, while Chance was hired at the website to help boaster the graphics department of the site, adding various new icons and buttons, as well as Zelda related wallpapers. Updates had reached their peak during this layout, with nearly daily updates occurring for several months.

In January of 2005, The Minish Cap was released for the Game Boy Advance in the United States, and just a few months later, Mases began working on a Minish Cap Walkthrough. Work on the walkthrough continued throughout the summer, fall and winter until its eventual completion in January of 2006. With the updates on the Minish Cap Walkthrough and content sections, as well as the frequent updates by the staff members of the website, visitors began soaring to new heights. The website repeatedly was breaking new records in total visitors for a single day. On April 2nd of 2005, Zelda Dungeon received 3159 unique visitors, which was a single day record at the time, and a record that would stand for the next 29 months.

The Zelda Dungeon Forums also continued to slowly grow during this point in time, eclipsing the 200 member mark and the 5000 posts count. It was during this point in time that the Zelda Dungeon Forums saw the registration of several members who would go on to become forum staff members. Many of these members that joined the forums during this period of time still remain a part of the Zelda Dungeon forum staff including Arbiter Y2K3 and Super Moderator Linkman8.

Layout 9.0 - Big Surprise
The 9th layout of Zelda Dungeon was released just before the sites 4th birthday on August 18th, 2005. The organization of this layout was done by Cartoons, and the coder of the layout was Henry of Zelda Dimension. MetalMallow and Chance also contributed with some imagery and help with the coding. The layout was created behind the scenes by Cartoons, so much so that Mases did not even know about the layout. On the day of the sites birthday, Cartoons released the layout and made a post entitled 'Surprise' to celebrate the sites birthday. The next morning on the sites birthday, Mases came to the website to see the big surprise and made a formal happy birthday post, thanking Cartoons, Henry, and the fans of the website.

On November 14th of 2005, Avenged joined Zelda Dungeon as a new Webmaster. Avenged offered Zelda Dungeon some very unique material that was previously exclusive to his own website, Zelda Chronicles. However, with the merger between Zelda Dungeon and Zelda Chronicles, this information was now available at Zelda Dungeon

In early January of 2006, our host had setup a Zelda Dungeon media server as part of the already established 3ddownloads. Zelda Dungeon began offering a whole listing of downloadable music from the Legend of Zelda series, including mp3 file rips and downloadable Zelda soundtracks.

Layout 10.0 - Short Lived
Layout 10.0 of Zelda Dungeon was launched on February 12th, 2006. It was created by Webmaster of Zelda Dungeon, Avenged, who at this time was using the alias Chrono. This was Avenged's 2nd attempt at a Zelda Dungeon layout after previous helping create layout 5.0. This was the first Zelda Dungeon layout that was not symmetrical. There were still two navigation bars on both sides of the layout, but they each had a different appearance.

The layout in general had an old school Zelda feel to it, using many aspects from the original Legend of Zelda and The Adventure of Link. The banner used in the background of the header was a map created by Melora, the Webmaster of History of Hyrule. It was a painting like modification to the original Legend of Zelda overworld. Overlapping the map, was a rare official artwork image of Link from the Adventure of Link. The rest of the layout had sprite images and background themes that very much resembled the Adventure of Link. The layout did come out really well, and it was a hit for the short time span that it was online.

There was even a small, unknown Easter egg at the corner of the banner. The statement, "The Evil Jar Awaits The Chosen One" can be seen clearly, and this is a reference to the Legend of Zelda Animated Series. The evil jar was an item used by Ganon during the cartoon and it was symbolic as an item that was kept for the dead. Thus, inferring that death awaits Link.

A lot of the Zelda Chronicles content that Avenged had at his website was brought over to Zelda Dungeon. During this transition, much of the content was reworked to bring up to new standards, and one of the highlights was Avenged's 'Beta Files'. This included a well documented and thorough analysis of the beta history of Ocarina of Time. Prior to Avenged coming on board, Zelda Dungeon had a Coppermine Image Gallery, but it was not popular, had very few images, and was not being up kept. With Avenged as a Webmaster, the image gallery was no longer neglected and media from Zelda Chronicles and other online sources was constantly being added. Another new feature at Zelda Dungeon was a character game. Each week Avenged would post up a screenshot from a Legend of Zelda game, but would blur out a character. Fans would then be able to send in their guesses as to who the hidden character was, and the results were posted the next week, along with a new character. It was one of many intuitive ideas that Avenged had to get fans more involved with the website.

Layout 11.0 - Bright Lights
Just weeks after the release of layout 10.0, talks of yet another new Zelda Dungeon Layout had surfaced. Layout 11.0 was released on April 19th, 2006, and it was Avenged's third layout creation for Zelda Dungeon. The release of the layout came with almost universal displeasure of the color scheme. The new layout took on a gold color scheme, but most fans considered it to be too yellow and viewed it as being way too bright. Along with the new layout came a new greenish-gold forum template, which unlike the layout, received positive reactions from the forums users of Zelda Dungeon.

While Avenged and Mases were big proponents of the layout, the general fan base was not, and a steady decline in visitors was a result of this. After noticing the fans displeasure just three months after the launch of the layout, plans of replacing it with a better layout was in the works.

The staff at Zelda Dungeon was shuffling around quite a bit at this time. Cartoons, after being quite inactive for several months prior to this layout, began making a small comeback with frequent updates in the summer of 2006. Avenged on the other hand, had his interest sway away from the Legend of Zelda series and Zelda Dungeon in particular. Avenged began working on his own website, Planet Vegeta, a dragon ball website, and became less active as a Webmaster of Zelda Dungeon. Avenged then resigned from his position as Webmaster of Zelda Dungeon and went on to resurrect his old Zelda website, Zelda Chronicles. Avenged provided the site with a steady flow of new material, frequent content updates, news articles, and two layouts during his time as Webmaster. With Avenged gone from the website, this marked the first time in several years where the site had fallen to just two active staff members.

Layout 12.0 - Failed Mergers


Avenged and MetalMallow had been a big part of the creation of the previous 5 layouts at Zelda Dungeon, and now with both of them gone from the Zelda Dungeon staff, Mases looked elsewhere for help with the creation of a new layout. Originally Killswitch of Zelda Legacy offered to create a layout for Zelda Dungeon. However, after a few compatibility issues, the layout was scratched, Jessica, a good friend of Cartoons, offered to create a layout for the website. The new layout launched on the websites 5th birthday on August 19th, 2006.

The layout returned to a greenish color, but it took on a much duller color scheme than anything that Zelda Dungeon previously had. The layout was received with a mixed reaction from fans. Most users at the time did not overly like the layout, but much preferred it over the bright Layout 11.0.

Not too much happened during much of the first few months of Layout 12.0. Several new staff members were brought on board and frequent news updates and articles were written, but none of them received a positive reaction from the fans. The ideas were scrapped, and the staff members began to dwindle away. Usual content upgrades were being made at the website, and even the beginnings of a Link's Awakening Walkthrough were under way. The walkthrough however was never finished at this time, as other issues became more prevalent with the website.

Cartoons, the long time Webmaster of Zelda Dungeon, was beginning to take a much less active role with the website. He rarely made any news updates, and most of all his work was now being done behind the scenes. In January of 2007, Cartoons removed himself from the staff page at Zelda Dungeon and months later, Mases posted an update about his formal resignation as Webmaster of Zelda Dungeon. This left Mases, for the first time in nearly five years, as the only active staff member of Zelda Dungeon.

On October 31st of 2006, Mases made an update at the website, stating that it was the end of Zelda Dungeon as everybody had come to know it. Mases had been disgusted with the direction of the website over the previous few months as he watched site visitors dwindle to the worst that they had been in nearly 3 years. Even on the eve of the release of Twilight Princess, Mases at the time believed that Zelda Dungeon could not continue to exist in its current form, and Mases was beginning to look elsewhere in the community for Zelda websites to merge with.

In late October Mases approached the webmaster of a now closed website, Zelda Compendium. Early plans were in place for a merger between Zelda Dungeon and Zelda Compendium, but plans never fell through, as the webmaster of Zelda Compendium seemingly disappeared.

Several weeks later, the long awaited Twilight Princess was released. A dejected Mases, after the failure with Zelda Compendium, contacted Killswitch about a potential merger between Zelda Dungeon and Zelda Legacy. Unfortunately, things never worked out and weeks later, plans of a potential merger were dead.

With two consecutive failed attempts at mergers, even with the release of Twilight Princess, Zelda Dungeon had truly hit rock bottom. Site visitors did receive a short jump with the release of Twilight Princess, but moral at the website was at an all time low. December of 2006 marked the first month in site history that there was no update. It wasn't until January of 2007 where Mases formally announced that the plans he had with the website had not fallen through, and thus, regular updates would resume.

In January of 2007, Mases released a new section at the website known as 'Mas and Vic Present'. In this section of the website, Mases, and his close friend Victor, would review old NES games with a mixture of a serious and humerus tone. The videos were uploaded to Youtube, but Zelda Dungeon was the primary home of the videos. A section at the forums was created for the game reviews, and the project did end up gathering a decent viewership. The long term effects of this, included a gradual shift towards the inclusion of video based content at the website.

In February of 2007, Mases released what he dubbed as the 'State of the Dungeon address'. It was the first video based update where Mased spoke about the failed mergers with Zelda Compendium, Zelda Legacy, and a broad overview of what had happened in the previous few months. Mases also gave a brief idea of plans that he had for the future of the website, including a much bigger emphasis on the inclusion of more video content.

The update sparked interest from the Webmaster of LegendOfZelda.com. After a few days of talks, a very short lived merger between Zelda Dungeon and LegendofZelda.com took place. However, Mases quickly turned around and withdrew from the merger, believing that it was rushed and not followed through as originally planned.

Layout 13.0 - Video Content
Layout 13.0 was the second layout that was created by Jessica and it took on a much brighter color scheme than the previous dull layout. The layout was focused on simplicity, with two standard navigation bars, very limited amounts of imagery, and a large content area.

After a failed merger attempt with LegendOfZelda.com in the previous layouts lifespan, talks of a potential merger began to pop up once again. Both sides acknowledged the problems that occurred the first time around and tried to give it another go. Disputes arose about what the possible new layout for this merged site would look like, tensions arose, and the second merger idea never came to fruition and was almost immediately shut down.

The new layout marked the continuation of the emphases on video based material at the website. All updates during this layout were done in a video form. Updates were much larger, but also further apart from one another, often happening every weekend or every other weekend. Updates were embedded onto the sites home page, and a subsequent textual update was placed right below the video. In addition to video updates, Mas and Vic NES reviews continued during this period of time, and towards the end of the layout, a subsequent page was created devoted to the Mas and Vic reviews.

In addition to videos to the NES game reviews and video updates, several more videos were added to the site. One of the features was a 'Top 10 Zelda Website' video countdown, where Mases and other webmasters voted on websites to be listed. After tallying up the vote totals, Mases began airing these countdown videos. The countdown was originally destined to be released in five segments, with each segment covering two websites in the countdown. However, only four of these segments were ever released, which meant only sites three through ten were ever revealed.

Another feature that has since grown at the website, was the inclusion of video based walkthroughs. Mases began working on a video guide for the original Legend of Zelda title. The videos were released at Zelda Dungeon as well as on YouTube. The current YouTube account for Zelda Dungeon was created on February 22nd, and quickly began to gather a following of subscribers.

On March 25th, 2007, Caleb Simpson was formally announced as a new staff member at Zelda Dungeon. Caleb actually applied to the website months before he was hired, but because of the uncertainty with the site during these months, he wasn't officially hired until March. Caleb began working at the website as a content specialist, working with Mases on some of the older game content, with more of an emphasis on better display and completeness of the material. Mases and Caleb revamped much of the original Legend of Zelda section of the site during the time period of this layout.

Layout 14.0 - Phantom Growth
Avenged, after leaving the website 10 months ago, returned to Zelda Dungeon at the launch of Layout 14.0. The layout that was launched was originally intended to be released for Avenged's own Zelda website, Zelda Chronicles. After various issues came up with Zelda Chronicles, and some influence from Mases, Avenged decided to come back and once again merge Zelda Chronicles into Zelda Dungeon.

The layout had a few notable differences than any previous Zelda Dungeon based layout, one of them being the color scheme. The tannish color offered a fresh look to Zelda Dungeon. This marked the first layout in Zelda Dungeon history that went away from the standard two navigation bar system. While there was still two navigation bars on the website, they were both arranged on the right side of the layout. This layout marked the return of a quick links navigation system for all of the Zelda games, however there was more to it this time around. When the viewer scrolled their mouse over the game menu at the top of the layout, a small drop down menu would pop up, allowing the viewer to quickly navigate to a specific game page, without having to go through the game index page. These drop downs did not have a complete listing of every game page, as it was believed that the menus would appear quite bulky.

Content during this layout began to really thrive, starting with the continuation and completion of the Legend of Zelda Video Guide. The success of the Video Walkthrough, led the Zelda Dungeon YouTube account to reaching 145 subscribers by August 6th, 2007. Additionally, Caleb began working on the Majora's Mask site walkthrough. Before Caleb joined the Zelda Dungeon staff, he had already completed a Majora's Mask text guide, in a style similar to what would be accustomed to what is found at gamefaqs. Caleb began the transition of migrating the text guide into a site walkthrough, complete with screenshots and artwork, all in a well displayed form with boxes keeping things informative and organized. This new style of walkthrough was the foundation for future walkthroughs, and was a drastic upgrade to the previous styles that Mases created.

Since Cartoons left the website earlier within the year, the Zelda Dungeon Forums were becoming neglected by Mases and security upgrades for the forums phpbb software were ignored. Mases was disgusted with the direction that forum was going, as the forum was becoming more focused on forum word games, textual role playing games, and a controversial mature discussion. None of which had much to do with Zelda Dungeon or the Legend of Zelda series.

On July 27th, due to poor handling of security by Mases, the Zelda Dungeon forums were hacked into. Later that day, Mases made an announcement about the hacking and removed the forums from the website. In subsequent announcements, Mases claimed that the hacking was irreversible and that the data from the php forums was gone forever. However, this was not entirely true, as both Mases and former staff member Cartoons, had database backups that could have been restored. Mases chose not to pursue this route and made the forum appear as if it was gone for good. Mases had long term goals of restarting the forums with new forum software and a fresh slate. On the 28th of July, Mases made an announcement that the forums at Zelda Legacy were to become the new temporary home of Zelda Dungeon until further notice.

On August 19th, 2007, Zelda Dungeon celebrated its 6th birthday and had one of its largest content updates in a single day. On this one day, two new content pages for Majora's Mask were completed, a new Link to the Past content page, two full chapters of the Majora's Mask walkthrough, as well as several new videos, including a new Mas and Vic NES review. An even bigger update was planned, however Avenged was not able to contribute content to the website at the time. Avenged had aspirations of resurrecting his own website, Zelda Chronicles, and shortly after the sites birthday, Avenged left as a webmaster of Zelda Dungeon. Avenged has since gone on to create a popular Dragonball movie fan site known as Dragonball Legends.

Just days after the sites birthday, Caleb was rewarded for his hard work and dedication and was officially promoted to a Webmaster position on August 28th, 2007. Just days later on September 2nd, 2007, Caleb completed the Majora's Mask site walkthrough as well as all other Majora's Mask game pages. A week later on the 8th of September, Caleb released the Majora's Mask official guide. The official guide was a complete textual guide for Majora's Mask, including a full walkthrough, boss guide, enemy guide, character guide, and much more. The guide included detailed textual maps that made the guide stand out compared to most other textual guides for Majora's Mask. The guide marked the creation of a Zelda Dungeon gamefaqs account, where the Majora's Mask site walkthrough was released. The official guide is the largest guide on Gamefaqs for Majora's Mask and it has since received a star rating by the website. The official guide is also currently featured at our affiliate, Zelda Power.

Just over a week later, on September 17th, Caleb began work on the Ocarina of Time site walkthrough. During this time, Mases was also in the process of creating an Adventure of Link video walkthrough for the Zelda Dungeon YouTube account. However, with the imminent release of Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS, both projects were brought to a halt.

Earlier within the month on September 6th of 2007, Zelda Dungeon broke its single day visitor mark of 3159 unique visitors, a mark that stood for nearly 27 months. The 6th of September recorded 3325 unique visitors, and to this date, there has yet to be a single day at Zelda Dungeon that has fallen under this mark of unique visitors.

On September 26th of 2007, the first pieces of Phantom Hourglass content were being released for the site, five days before the games launched on October 1st. On October 9th, chapter 1 of the site walkthrough for Phantom Hourglass was released. The walkthrough was written by Mases, but edited and put together by Caleb, who at the time, did not even own a copy of the game.

On October 16th of 2007, Zelda Dungeon launched a brand new Forum, this time abandoning the old phpbb software, and switching to mybb. The forums were created by Mases, with the support of former webmaster, Cartoons. The forums began to immediately pick up a fan base, many joining to discuss the recently released Phantom Hourglass, while others joining from the old incarnation of the forums. The forum was drastically different than the previous incarnations, as at the time of launch it exclusively featured site and Zelda material, and did not have any features that were popular at the old forums, including a general discussion, role playing area, forum text game area, or a mature discussion. Mases received harsh criticism by some members of the old community at the time of this, but Mases stayed the path during the early months of the forums life, and many of the long time Zelda Dungeon members left the community.

Layout 15.0 - Sprite Layout
Layout 15 was launched on November 22nd, 2007, the day after Thanksgiving. The layout was the first layout that was created by webmaster of Zelda Dungeon, Caleb. It was themed after the Temple of Droplets from The Minish Cap. The initial goal was to design a layout that made it feel like one was actually within a dungeon. The top banner of the website had a puzzle within it. A block of ice with a small key could be seen on the right side of the banner, and an area of fire could be seen on the left side of the banner. Much like many puzzles within the Temple of Droplets, the puzzles solution involved Link pushing blocks of ice to get the small key to the fire. The original idea was to make the banner interactive and playable, but this never did come to fruition.

The layout added a few buttons along the right navigation signifying the current site projects that the staff was working on. One of which, was Phantom Hourglass. Still less than two months after the release of Phantom Hourglass, the Zelda Dungeon team progressed on the section and walkthrough. Walkthrough chapters were released on a near weekly basis since the release of the game and on January 2nd, the walkthrough had been completed. In the coming weeks, just about all the subsequent side pages for Phantom Hourglass were also completed.

On January 23rd of 2008, the Zelda Dungeon Forums received a big upgrade as the site switched over to the vbulletin forum software. This switchover saw a large initial push in registered members and total posts. Over the coming months, significant changes were made to the hierarchy of the forums with the introduction of several new forum rankings. New shoutbox software was installed on the forums, and with that, a new usergroup known as Arbiters were established. Arbiters are those who are just behind Moderators on the forum hierarchy and have powers over the new Zelda Dungeon shoutbox.

On March 1st of 2008, Zelda Dungeon was the recipient of the Golden Mirror Shield award, given out by the Exploding Deku Nut. Each year during the month of February, Darth Citrus of EDN hosted the Golden Item Awards, where sites were nominated and awards were given out to sites that were unique, aspiring, had a lively forum, had a great layout, and an award for the lifetime achievement. Zelda Dungeon was award the lifetime achievement award, and it followed with an acceptance post by Mases at Zelda Dungeon in the days following.

April 4th marked the first time a staff member at Zelda Dungeon got married when Caleb married his wife Michelle.

Zelda Dungeon added a new staff member in Dabombster near the end of the life of layout 15.0. Dabombster was formally a webmaster at the website, Zelda Legacy. However, after he stepped down from his position, he was seen often at the Zelda Dungeon Forums. Mases approached Dabombster, asking if he had interest in helping out Zelda Dungeon as part of the site staff. Shortly after, Dabombster was added on board to help revamp The Wind Waker section at the website.

Layout 16.0 - Dungeon Alliance


Beginning in February of 2008, Mases began revealing a project at the website known as the Zelda Dungeon Alliance. Over the next several weeks and months, Mases began revealing websites that were a part of the Zelda Dungeon Alliance. The original goal that Mases had envisioned with the alliance, was to have a network of eight Zelda websites, each who were unique in their own way. At Zelda Dungeon, rather than having minuscule sections devoted to things like fan artwork, a sprite comic, or a fan games section, Mases preferred to focus strictly on game content and allow other websites in the alliance to satisfy the needs of the other areas. At the launch of the 16th layout of Zelda Dungeon, all these minuscule sections at Zelda Dungeon were to be deleted, and frequent updates of the alliance sites would be posted at Zelda Dungeon.

One of the first websites introduced into the alliance was North Castle, a website devoted to fan artwork, fan fictions, and an assortment of other fan submitted content. Each month, Juliet, the webmaster of North Castle, made an update revealing the newest pieces of artwork and fiction. Mases at Zelda Dungeon, would then feature several of these fan artwork images in what would become know as the monthly artwork update. Four to Six pieces of artwork would be posted at Zelda Dungeon, and this allowed a constant flow of updates to be put on Zelda Dungeon, with minimum work required from the staff of Zelda Dungeon. It also gave a lot of extra exposure to these pieces of unique content and gave the fans of Zelda Dungeon something interesting and unique. Other unique websites that were initially announced as part of the Zelda Dungeon Alliance, included, Zelda Comic, Zelda Reorchestrated, Zelda Classic, and several other unique websites. On May 18th of 2008, Layout 16, which was created by Caleb, was launched, and the alliance websites were now being fully implemented. The websites were listed at the top-right corner of the layout in button form.

The layout had a quite a few drastic changes made to the website. With the inclusion of the alliance, all material at Zelda Dungeon was removed, other than game content, site content, and selective media content. All of the site content was stored in pop down navigation bars that could be found along the left navigation and within the header of the layout. The game menus along the left navigation now had huge pop out menus that displayed every piece of content for each game. The compacted navigation bars made it so that it was no longer needed to have two navigation bars on every page of the website. On the right navigation bar on the index page, there was a listing of site projects and affiliates. This page however, was only seen on the index page, and if a user navigated to a game content or media page, the right navigation would be removed and it will be replaced with an expanded content area. This extra space of content allowed the staff members of Zelda Dungeon a wider area to work with, and this ultimately led to higher quality guides because more boxes and larger thumbnail images could be used. New sections of the Ocarina of Time walkthrough that Caleb was working on, were the first pages that took these adjustments into effect.

The layout also so the release of a new slogan for Zelda Dungeon that Caleb created, 'Let us take you through the dungeons'. This signified the extra stress the website had on game content and specifically, strategy guides. Content continued to pour in during this time period, with several new chapters of the Ocarina of Time walkthrough being completed, as well as the beginnings of Twilight Princess site and video walkthroughs.

Prior to the launch of layout, Caleb had been working on another layout that had a black and red color scheme. This layout was never officially released but can be found at the history page of Zelda Dungeon. All of the same fundamental features in the red layout crossed over with the blue layout, but the red layout had too many large images, and this caused the load time of the website to be quite high.

On August 19th, 2008 Zelda Dungeon celebrated its seventh birthday and released a retro version of layout 1.0. Caleb created a mimic of layout 1.0 in a short period of time, and for several hours, it was available for viewing at the Zelda Dungeon index page. The actual birthday update had several new content upgrades, including a new video walkthrough for Twilight Princess and a new site chapter for Ocarina of Time. Mases uploaded the entire Twilight Princess Walkthrough for the sites birthday, however, it was not in complete form, but rather, just temporarily available in text form.

The period of time during this layout saw a drastic increase in active members and total posts at the Zelda Dungeon Forums. Beginning in April of 2008, every consecutive month after April, had more total posts than the previous month. This trend continued every month through the entire lifespan of Layout 16 and into Layout 17. On September 19th, the Zelda Dungeon Forums reached the milestone of 10,000 total posts.

The Zelda Dungeon alliance had not worked out entirely as was originally planned. Many of the alliance websites were going through rough times during the last several months, and many of the sites were not even being updated. Other websites, such as Zelda Wiki or Realms of Hyrule were unique in their own way, but creating constant, interested alliance updates for them, was nearly impossible. North Castle had been the only alliance websites that has been constantly featured at Zelda Dungeon with monthly artwork updates. When discussion of the new layout was being made, Mases and Caleb decided to reduce the alliance down to four websites, only keeping what they felt made the most sense for Zelda Dungeon.

The last few months of the layout saw an influx of several new staff members at Zelda Dungeon. Karashimu, Josh, and Kybyrian all joined the Zelda Dungeon staff during this period. Karashiumu was a former webmaster at several other Zelda websites in the past and was brought on board to help contribute to the Wind Waker section. Josh was hired at the site to help contribute to the Wind Waker section and Kybyrian was hired to help work on the Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages.

Layout 17.0 - Video Podcast


Layout 17.0 was created by Caleb and released on October 21st, 2008. The layout was structurally very similar to layout 16.0, but had a much different color scheme, and included a huge fan artwork image for the banner.

The lifespan of the layout saw the hiring of several new staff members at the website. Just prior to the layouts launch, Karashimu, Josh, and Kybyrian were hired, and begining in January of 2009, five new staff members were hired. Yumil, Zenox, Alder Dragon Brandkins,, and blackice_cc all joined the staff in a two month period. Each of them were brought on board to work on specialty guides with Yumil and Alder Dragon working on Link's Awakening, Zenox working on The Legend of Zelda, and blackice_cc working on the Oracle titles. Prior to joining the team, Yumil was the webmaster over at Zelda Relic. After some convincing from Mases, Yumil decided to put his website on a hiatus and joined the team at Zelda Dungeon.

In November of 2008, Mases began experimenting with hardware that would allow for a Live Zelda Dungeon Video podcast. The first podcast took place on November 29th, 2008, but since it was not recorded, it is viewed as a beta version of the podcast. The first official podcast took place on December 9th, 2008. The podcast was streamed live onto the Zelda Dungeon Forums and appeared side by side with the forum shoutbox. Forum users could actively communicate with Mases and other guests on the shoutbox while the podcast was taking place. The podcast ran through the latest news at Zelda Dungeon, at the forums, and within the Zelda world. The podcast then had a Question and Answer section. Each subsequent podcast after the initial one included a special guest, usually a webmaster of another gaming website. Mases interviewed the guest live on the podcast, asking questions about their website or their interest in the Zelda world. The guest would remain online for discussion during the question and answer section.

During the 5th podcast, a featured thread discussion was added to the podcast. Mases would find a thread, give various quotes from some of the member posts, get live involvement from users in the shoutbox, and then it would be discussed amongst the hosts and guests of the podcast. The video podcast is made available for download on google video usually 24 hours after its completion.

After the conclusion of the podcast, Mases remains online for several hours talking with the members of Zelda Dungeon. Often times, other members of the staff or the forums are welcomed onto the live stream to discuss. Mases often times acts as a DJ playing various music throughout the after party. Several activities take place in the after hours of the podcast including Name That Tune, Zelda Hangman, and The Amazing Gameplay Adventures.