Community:Zelda Shrine 383

Zelda Shrine 383 is a fansite tailored to The Legend of Zelda series. The site itself is a conglomerate; in 2005, Zelda Shrine, a site originally founded by Carl Janson in 1999, and Zelda 383, founded by Dylan Holland in 2004, merged to create the site that uniquely catered to a wide variety of walkthroughs, screenshots, music and other media at the time. The site is known best for providing unique perks to their userbase; all users were provided an e-Subrosian that required nurturing; the amount of care it received became a status symbol across the site for many users, and acted as each user's avatar-like icon, as well. As of early 2010, the site has fallen into non-existence.

Zelda Shrine
The original Zelda Shrine was built by Carl to provide help and suggestions in respect to A Link to the Past, in January 1998. It featured a story and item walkthrough, and the official story given by Nintendo. The site also integrated a virtual download of the game that could be played using an emulation device. In October of the same year, Ocarina of Time had been released, the site was redesigned to promote a new section on the new Nintendo 64 title. Like the A Link to the Past segment, the Ocarina of Time portion of the site included a walkthrough, screenshots, and other media.

An entirely upgraded Zelda Shrine was released in May 2002 to utilize the new possibilities of Macromedia's Flash Player. With the use of Flash, one could play the songs from Ocarina of Time on a virtual ocarina and play a few non-Zelda online games via the site. However, though the reincarnation of the site operated entirely differently than before, the layout remained the same. Because of this and the fact that two years had passed since the initial site setup, a new coding direction was sought after in October 2002. PHP coding capabilities far succeeded HTML and allowed the site to incorporate search bars and a more highly integrated forum experience.

Introduction of Zelda 383 and Merger
A similar site, Zelda 383, began in August 2003 as an MSN Group subsidiary, ZeldaReview. Though the site's initial fan base was large, it only catered to content from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Zelda 383 was ported to tripod.com in February 2004 (in fact you can still see the old website (http://zelda383.tripod.com)), and remained active for some time until Dylan outsourced the site to a new domain in October 2004. Thus, Zelda383.net was purchased to harbor the old tripod.com site and content; because of this and the exposure from Google and other search engines, the site rose in popularity. Carl from Zelda Shrine and Dylan from Zelda 383 merged their sites into one during this period, yielding a new site entitled Zelda Shrine 383. Until January of 2006, the joint site operated smoothly, but in March the server crashed. It took two years before Dylan could gather the sources to reopen Zelda Shrine.

Zelda Shrine 383 was officially reopened in December 2009. However, in a short period of time, the site fell into limbo; the only content the site holds currently is a disclaimer that tells of a non-Zelda site to be made sometime in the undisclosed future.