Nielsthooft.com

Zelda Headquarters

This was a website about Nintendo’s series of adventure games ‘The Legend of Zelda’. It was the first of its kind and actually made some money, during IGN’s short-lived affiliation programme, just before the dotcom bust.

The way I see it, I always made stuff, like comic magazines. But it was pretty hard to distribute what I created. So when the internet entered our household, I jumped at the opportunity to build a website that could easily be reached by thousands. It’s coincidence that it was about a Nintendo game.

Zelda HQ started in 1996 and stopped around the GameSen era. Sometime inbetween, I also made a site called ‘Total RPG’, but because it’s not even on the Wayback Machine, it feels like it never really existed. You should believe me when I say it had a really cool hand-drawn dragon in its logo.

Some years ago I foolishly let the Zelda HQ domain name (zhq.com) expire. A couple of people in the Zelda community (such a thing exists, yes – and it was kickstarted by my website) still feel miffed about this.