The First Annual Bloggiversary!
October 3rd, 2006 at 2:32 am

Huzzah! It’s time to unveil the news post that has taken an entire year to make. Drumroll please… ZeldaBlog is officially one year old! (Alright, alright, yes I’m aware of the fact that we really opened on October 1. Give me a break; I have excuses, and they’re good too!) Needless to say, I’m glad that we’ve made it this far… and best yet, I’m glad that we’ve been continuing to get more and more readers as each month passes. So I owe a lot of thanks to all of you for making this happen.

I wanted to do something really special for ZeldaBlog for it’s bloggiversary. That special something was going to be a slight change of layout—that is, a change of setting from ye olde Kakariko house to some new and exciting locale in the Link to the Past environment. Sadly, I didn’t get that done ahead of time (again, valid excuses!); however, I still intend to get that done, although the date on its completion is still unknown. Instead, however, I felt that doing a “Year in Review” type segment would be more appropriate, but instead of using my “blogger voice” to do so (as I am prone to do), I wanted to shed away for this post what you know as The Missing Link and be a bit more personal and share a bit of my inner monologue with you all.

Some of you might remember that the ‘Blog here was actually created for a specific reason. (It turned out to be, to my surprise, a rather controversial reason, but, alas, so goes the story.) I was dismayed by the sheer competition (and outright theft) going on within the Zelda community and wanted to find a way to change that. I wanted webmasters to be able to celebrate the differences between our assorted sites so that we could come together and work with one another to make the community a better place. The goal was something that I knew would be difficult if not impossible to achieve with just ZeldaBlog alone, but I figure that it’s always better to aim too high and miss than to aim too low and hit the target.

This past year, I pleased to say, was a much better year for our community in my opinion. We didn’t lose all that many websites (not our doing), what little drama there was got quenched fairly quickly (again, not our doing), and webmasters from several sites came here to ZeldaBlog to share their experiences with others (okay, so that one is our “fault”). While ZeldaBlog still has not reached the lofty goal I set for it, where the ‘Blog serves as a nexus point between all the other websites out there, I feel as if we have done something significant, something unique, something that I do not believe has happened in the entire history of the Zelda community: We created a project that, for a long-term basis, has had the constant cooperation of many webmasters across the community, with readers pooled from several websites all together in one place.

And I’m happy with that. I feel, truly, that that’s as good a start as any to this experiment of mine. So I want to give a big special thank you to the webmasters that have made this happen; I am utterly amazed at how far we have managed to come.

As a random aside, when I came up with the idea for ZeldaBlog, I chose October 1, 2005 to be the launch date of the site because I wanted it to get out a little ahead of Twilight Princess. This way, I felt, we’d be able to get a budding discussion rather quickly over all the Twilight news that we’d be getting from the Nintendo RP Machine. One year (and two days) later, here we are… still waiting… patiently… patiently… so very patiently. Que será será…)

As far as what did happen over the course of the year, we’ve been both awestruck by Nintendo’s brilliant strategy as well as taken back over their various missteps. (I told you all; you all would get over the name Wii. Trust the TML, for he is good.) We’ve gone through dry spots of news, and we’ve gone through a virtual buffet of updates. Some predictions have been shown true, while much speculation has been shown to be lots of fluff. Nintendo, despite having been so secretive, has actually been in flux quite a bit this year as slowly we salivated, waiting for the next morsel of information to be flung into our cage. Nintendo has managed to move from third place in the current-gen market to the pole position for this the next-gen race, and it will be very interesting to see how that turns out. I, for one, will be intrigued just to see how the 360, the PS3, and the Wii will fare come November. The future is absolutely unknown.

Speaking of the future, I do have one announcement to make. This actually is somewhat out of character for me to be so candid to you on the ‘Blog; I’m quite used to hiding behind my Internet moniker and simply relaying whatever Zelda thoughts I have been recently contemplating, but I wanted (and needed) to share with you some “late, breaking news”…

I have been offered a job within the videogame industry to help make games, and it is my intention to accept this offer. (This, actually, is the reason my post is late; I was in some secret, undisclosed location interviewing for this position, and I heard back this afternoon the good news.) Personally, I do not believe in coincidence, so the fact that this announcement is happening so close to the blog’s bloggiversary… well, I think it’s absolutely curious.

I’m not going to say who I’m working for, but no, it is not Nintendo of America. No, it is not NCL (Nintendo of Japan). No, it’s not Nintendo of anything. (As such, there will be no conflicts of interest in me talking about Zelda here at the ‘Blog, so no worries! I have absolutely no plans to stop blogging anytime soon!) I’m also not going to say to where in the country I’ll be moving either, but I will have to move from my command station in New Hyrule, Ohio. Since my home server (which runs that which you are reading) is going to have to take a small trip, I’m going to be transitioning ZeldaBlog over to the Zelda Legends server within the next few weeks. (Thanks Khuffie!) Sometime between then and now, there’ll be a small interruption as I physically move the ‘Blog, but I’ll try to give you a heads up as to when that will be ahead of time.

But what I do want to say about this job is that it has been a dream of mine ever since I played A Link to the Past to work in the videogame industry making games. I actually for a long time never thought that the dream would come true, but the hard work I have done (no, not with ZeldaBlog—it’s the work in that place you call “the Real World”) has allowed me this opportunity to fill my dream. It may sound sort of tacky for me to end the post on some sappy moral, but I think it’s a statement that needs said regardless. If you have a dream to one day get into this videogame business thing, I will admit that it’s not going to be a walk in the park, but don’t give up. It can happen; granted, you may have to work quite a bit to make it happen, but it can always happen.

So happy Bloggiversary, ZeldaBlog, and here’s hopefully to many more. (No, we are not going to give the ‘Blog spankings. You sickos.)

Written by The Missing Link

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