Community:Zelda Dungeon

Zelda Dungeon is a Legend of Zelda fan website created by Mases Hagopian on August 19th, 2001. The site's main purpose is to provide the most in-depth game guides possible, utilizing screenshots, maps, and artwork. The site is part of the Telefragged / Atomic Gamer network. As a part of this network, Zelda Dungeon has a media section on the 3ddownloads file server. Zelda Dungeon has recently launched a new message board, The Dark World. Zelda Dungeon was the recipient of the Golden Mirror Shield Award in 2008.

=History= Zelda Dungeon has been around for over 7 years, and during this long period of time, there have been plenty of ups and downs. Below is a detailed account of the creation and history of Zelda Dungeon.

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 had grown. Leading up to the release of Majora's Mask in the year 2000, Mases first 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.

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. The Zelda portion of the site was solely run by Mases during its first few months.

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 minor amounts of game content, and it was in October of 2001 that Mases began work on the 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 in visitors. Activity came to a complete halt until January 2nd, 2003, when Zelda Dungeon was first listed on the Google search engine. For the first time, consistent visitors began to flow into Zelda Dungeon. While such a tiny number in retrospect, the site was receiving 5-10 visitors per day, and this caused work to presume 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 the growing amount of content at the website was beginning to set in. With the help of the Webmaster of City of Clocktown, Mases setup an account at shorturl, and the sites much easier to remember url was now zeldadungeon.vze.com.

Controversy hit Zelda Dungeon during this early period, when Mases was directly linking to media files that were hosted by the website, Zelda Power. Mases, being the ignorant Webmaster at the time, could not comprehend that this was illegal. However, in response to these new audio files that were hosted at the website, more visitors began to come to the forum. 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.

HTML Conversion
On March 27th, 2002, Zelda Dungeon launched Layout version 2.0, and it was the first layout that was built with html code. The layout was built by the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Prior to this layout, Zelda Dungeon was built with a yahoo geocities site builder. With the introduction of HTML coding, plenty of new pros and cons came with transition.