Growing up on Zelda Universe: A look back

Hi, there! My name is Eden — EzloSpirit on the forums — and I’m the current executive producer of the ZUCast, Zelda Universe’s(ZU) homegrown audio podcast. I also serve as a moderator of ZU’s Creative Corner sub-forum, home of the forum community’s creative efforts.

When Reece put out a call for articles about Zelda Universe for its 20th(!) anniversary, I made an oath to myself that I would write something, probably on the longer side, for the occasion. ZU has been an important part of my life for 13 years, now. I joined the forums shortly before my 13th birthday, under some auspicious circumstances I will discuss below, and I have been neck-deep in the community in some form or another for almost every day since. In effect, I essentially grew up on this website. So, I wanted to write something super special to celebrate this community that means so much to me.

So without further ado, allow me to tell you the story of how I came to be here today, writing thousands of words for a Legend of Zelda fansite, and how the forum community that today remains the backbone of Zelda Universe has evolved over more than a decade. If you were around ZU in the late aughts, you may find yourself smiling and nodding a few times. If you are a newer ZUer, you’ll find yourself raising your eyebrows a few times. And if you’re not a ZUer (yet), I hope you’ll come to see how special this community is.

That darn banner ad: My first impressions of Zelda Universe

My first Zelda game was A Link to the Past on Game Boy Advance. I was about seven or eight years old, and I wasn’t all that great at video games. In fact, I stopped playing for a while because I was so terrified of the Dark World that I was afraid to go to sleep the night after I beat Agahnim in Hyrule Castle. Needless to say, I wasn’t sold on the series by A Link to the Past.

It was in 2007, when I got my hands on Twilight Princess for the Wii, that I fell in love with the franchise. By then, I had relied on Prima and Nintendo Power Player’s Guides to get me through all kinds of tight puzzles, most notably those awful, awful Strength puzzles in Pokémon. So when I started to have some trouble in Twilight Princess, I turned to the web, which was already brutalizing the print game guides industry.

Full disclosure: Most, if not all, of the Zelda guides I used back then were on Zelda Dungeon. See, I’d found Zelda Universe, too, but it wasn’t a particularly attractive site in 2007. The home page was dominated by a massive banner advertisement for Zelda ringtones that never actually delivered on what it was selling — believe me, I would have loved some Zelda ringtones back then, but I couldn’t find any on that ringtone site. Like, that ad was so massive that the banner even had a 90-degree angle in it, something I had never seen before and have not seen since. Oh, and I couldn’t find the guides I was looking for on ZU at the time, either. But really, I’m still bitter about that ad and my ever-present lack of Zelda ringtones.

Anyway, that was unfortunately my introduction to ZU!

An online haven: My first gaming forum

In 2007, I belonged to a Pokémon forum called Pokémon Online (POL), which was part of a fansite whose staff was attempting to develop an unlicensed Pokémon fan-MMO of the same name. (I eventually played their barebones demo, which had no Pokémon and no collisions. It was like wandering through a debug area with a walk-through-walls cheat enabled.) I had first gotten into internet message boards on a site called SparkTop, an internet community for kids with learning differences. (I have attention deficit– oh, look, a squirrel!) I have also been a Pokémon fan since 1999 or so, so POL was a great place for me to connect with like-minded fans of the Pokeymans.

As someone who has been writing fiction in one form or another since the age of nine, I got involved in POL’s writing board. I vaguely remember entering a contest or two with some flash fiction that may or may not now be lost to the aether. But I enjoyed the opportunity to share my writing with strangers for the first time.

And then, in January 2008, POL died. There was no warning and no explanation. The domain “pokemononline.org” no longer pointed to anything other than a page claiming it was for sale — and at 12 years of age, I had no idea what that meant. I looked for weeks for my online community, but it was gone.

I was like a fish out of water. I was in middle school at the time, three traumatic years of my life about which I occasionally still have nightmares of social isolation and crippling anxiety. I went to a school with over a thousand students, and I was the quiet introvert with Asperger’s syndrome. Sure, I had a few friends, but I had precious few moments during a day when I could interact with them outside of an academic context. So, Pokémon Online had become a refuge for me, a place where I could gush about the adorableness that is Togepi without fear of ridicule or side-eye from peers, and a place where I could share my writing without feeling like I was bearing my deeper thoughts and emotions to those who knew me.

I felt lost without POL. I did find the site again several months later on a different domain, but by then, I had joined Zelda Universe.

The podcast: My first years at Zelda Universe

My first contact with the Zelda Universe forums was through ZCast. It was February 18, 2008, and having just discovered podcasts, I was looking for a Legend of Zelda podcast to which I could subscribe. Instead, I found ZCast, the “Official Podcast of Zelda Universe.net.” I figured a podcast on a Legend of Zelda fansite must be about the Legend of Zelda.

It was not. ZCast, I discovered after subscribing to the RSS feed—this was the very first episode, released less than a week prior, and it wasn’t even on the iTunes Store yet — and not bothering to read the release post, I had discovered a podcast about the Zelda Universe forum community, not about the Zelda games themselves. Whoops!

Fortunately, by the time I realized my mistake, I was spellbound by Asci and Lunk, the hosts, and their chaotic sense of humor. Cody would then come on for the first of his many on-air rants over the years. I had no idea who this deadpan, vaguely British-sounding guy was, and the words coming out of his mouth sounded like they were anesthesia-induced, but the sheer absurdity of what he was saying — something about how the members of the British royal family were aliens or something — combined with the complete lack of context surrounding any of it or even his presence on the podcast, really spoke to my love of all things random. And then, after Cody said, “The thing is, we’re all the same person, and our name is Richard,” there was no way I was turning this thing off midway.

That ZCast episode introduced me to the forum’s Clans, the Forum Awards, the site’s fundraising efforts for its upcoming design overhaul, to Hazz (a prominent member of the Din Clan), to then-webmaster Scott (now Tohopekaliga on the forums), and, yes, to the Swedish accent. And that all sounded really cool! What appealed to me most, however, was how tightknit the community sounded. It was a community with traditions, where people knew each other’s names (both usernames and real names) and formed actual friendships; I learned that ZUers even had meetups, during which they would hang out and do fun things together in person! Wow!

With a gaping hole in my social life and being in awe of this massive community (which was many times larger than POL) and all it had to offer, I bit the bullet and joined the ZU forums the next day. My username was Morpheel Man, named after my favorite Zelda boss at the time and my gender assigned at birth, and one of my first acts on ZU was to send weird, overzealous fanmail via private message to Asci, Lunk, and Margar (the podcast’s editor and a forum moderator), and probably Cody, too. This actually became a pattern, and I pretty much pestered the podcast team for release dates, which were sporadic that year, throughout 2008.

Back then and still to this day, most new members post primarily in the Zelda boards at first before branching out elsewhere, and I was the same way. After all, here was this community with at least as many active members as my middle school had students, and I was this super shy almost-13-year-old who was still relatively new to social media and message boards, so of course I started in the forums that were the least specific to this community.

I think I was actually overwhelmed by ZU at the beginning. There were so many people, most of whom were in their mid-to-late teens, some even older, who were not particularly interested in letting an awkward, excited 12-year-old into their existing social circle. Plus, there were people with thousands of posts — and back then, posts in the Clan boards didn’t count — and custom user ranks, which you could only get back then if you had made over 1,000 posts. It was like looking at towering social monoliths. A beloved moderator named BigGoronSword had taken me under his wing through ZU’s Adoption Center, a system that exists in largely the same form today, but while he was nice, he was much older and we couldn’t really relate to each other.

So, for that first year, I was active sporadically, usually only returning for short bursts after podcast episode releases, of which there were only four (plus a mini-episode) in all of 2008. I started eighth grade later that year, and that would end up being one of the worst years of my life. I think I decided to dive head-first into the ZU community in March 2009 in large part because my life offline was so deeply miserable; ZU became a veritable safe haven for me. At that point, I changed my username to EzloSpirit, a portmanteau of Ezlo (having recently played The Minish Cap) and my FictionPress username, SightSpirit. From that point on, I logged onto the forums at least once almost every day for years.

The connections I made with people on ZU were precious to me. I befriended several of the podcast staff, even though they were all several years older than me. (Margar would later tell me she had no idea I was Morpheel Man and had actually been wondering what had happened to that kid.) I also joined several social groups, which were a feature of the forum software at the time that kind of mimicked Facebook groups; it was actually in ZU’s LGBT social group in 2010 where I first came out to anyone outside of myself, even before any of my family or offline friends.

I eventually joined the Clans, too. In those days, you couldn’t just pick your Clan and instead had to respond to a personality quiz; I got dropped in Farore, which was by far the largest of the three at the time. Discourse in the Clans was much less regulated than that in other boards, which is probably why posts there did not increase your count back then, and I found it both refreshing and daunting. Farorians were very tightknit, and their numbers made it very easy for one’s posts to get buried by others in the Utopia, the main chat thread. I became disenchanted with the Clan and almost left the Clans entirely before I was approached by none other than Margar, herself being a member of the Nayru Clan, who convinced me to switch to Nayru, which was smaller and therefore less of a constant popularity contest. In Nayru, I was welcomed with open arms, and although I didn’t really jive with the Clan’s well-deserved reputation at the time for bawdy humor, I still managed to feel like I was part of that family because they treated me like one of them. I am still a proud member of Nayru, though it is almost unrecognizable compared to 2009-era Nayru; now, it’s more about being a fun, supportive family than about making perverted innuendos and trash-talking the Din Clan.

One of my favorite days on ZU was April 1, 2009: April Fool’s Day. We were all still riding high from the recent announcement of Spirit Tracks, and the site staff went all-out in transforming the website from Zelda Universe into Train Universe, complete with Thomas the Tank Engine’s face replacing the ZU shield logo. All of the forums had their names changed to something about trains, and the Zelda boards were changed from the likes of “N64 Zelda” and “Zelda Theorizing” to different categories of trains, (like “steam” and “electric”). That was the funniest April Fool’s prank I have ever seen to this day. Several moderators even changed their usernames to reflect train themes, such as Hombre de Mundo becoming “Hombre de Locomotivo.” For years after that, the forums would continue to be graced at random by a secret forum called “The Ghost Train.” (Actually, The Ghost Train still exists, under a different name.)

What the muses dictate: Finding my creative community

I also got involved in ZU’s Art & Writing board early on, posting my original short fiction, as well as a lousy attempt at a Zelda fan fiction that shall forever remain incomplete. Despite my omnipresent aversion to competition, I even dared to enter a ZU writing contest in October 2009. I wound up winning “runner-up” with what was both my first-ever horror story and one of my favorite short stories I have ever written. I continue to share my written works on ZU today, and I continued to enter writing contests through 2011; I found that they provided great inspiration for new stories, pushing me to enter genres in which I didn’t usually dabble.

The Art & Writing board was eventually expanded into its own section, dubbed the Creativity Corner, and the original Fan Fiction and Poetry & Originals sub-boards ultimately combined to become the top-level Writing board. Within the latter, there was a Writing School sub-board that hosted writing tutorials, but it didn’t get much use for a while. That is, it got little use until a few of us partnered with the section staff to turn it into an actual “school,” with designated teachers who provided assigned students with feedback and lessons. I was one of those teachers. The Writing School lasted several months in that incarnation, and I got to work with some lovely fellow writers, even though I secretly felt way out of my depth as a 15-year-old with relatively limited creative writing experience. But that was okay; no one was paying me and no one expected the world from me. It was all in good fun, in the spirit of the art form. The Writing School then returned to being a less structured space, governed instead by “Muses,” who were the former Writing Teachers. Rather than teaching lessons to specific sets of ZUers, we provided feedback for anyone who desired it. The Writing School board thus became more of a workshopping space, known as the Muses’ Oasis; this, too, lasted only a few months.

In June 2012, I peeked into the forum staff board (which I could access for podcast-related reasons that will become apparent in this article’s next section) to find an ongoing discussion about a new moderator for the Writing board. Unsurprisingly, I was on the shortlist. As much as I am ashamed to admit it these days, I followed this discussion with excitement and a certain amount of coveting. (Hey, I was 15, and power was almost within my reach! You probably would have been in the same boat in my situation.) Sure enough, I soon became the top pick, and then someone realized that I had access to that discussion and asked me to make my case for modship. Clearly, the staff didn’t perceive me as power-hungry because they promoted me to Forum Mod of Writing. And while I let it get to my head in private for the remainder of that day — I took desktop screenshots of various moderation menus and interfaces to feed my ego — I carried myself honorably throughout my tenure, and I think I did the board some good.

A dream come true: Working on the ZU podcast

In the spring of 2009, I submitted my first podcast segment to Liah and Margar, who had taken over the reins of the ZU podcast, now called ZUCast. I figured that, since people basically talked about whatever they were passionate about on the original, forum-focused podcast, I would talk about some Flash games I enjoyed. The producers shot down my first take because it was ten minutes long, completely unscripted, and a rambling mess. They shot down the second take because, as they informed me, the focus of the podcast was shifting more toward the Zelda franchise and there wouldn’t be room for a Flash games segment. Undeterred, I adapted a comedic thread I had recently posted in the GameCube & Wii Zelda forum in which I made up humorous “profiles” for some Wind Waker islands. I was over the moon when the producers accepted this segment, which made it into the June 2009 episode and was the first ZUCast segment submitted by someone from outside of the podcast’s staff.

I continued submitting segments periodically and eventually got invited to be a “production assistant” on the podcast. I suddenly found myself working among a bunch of young adults whose work I admired as much as any published author, and I was a little starstruck. I was the youngest among them by quite a few years, but they welcomed me in as their small, innocent buddy.

I remember that I was raking those spiky sweetgum seeds in my family’s backyard when I was listening to the March 2010 episode of the ZUCast. For that episode, I had submitted my third total segment and my second “EzloSpirit-Style Profiles” one. Then, after my segment finished playing, episode hosts Margar and Lunk made a surprise announcement: I was now officially part of the team. I dropped the rake and literally jumped for joy; a squee probably escaped me, too. It was a dream come true for me to be part of the team that put together the podcast that brought me to my favorite corner of the web.

My profile segment wasn’t the most well-received among the general listener base, with a lot of complaints regarding how juvenile the humor was. (I was 15 in 2010, and my voice was just starting to drop.) It was more popular with younger ZUers, for probably the same reasons. For my last profile segment, I even collaborated with someone who had become something of a groupie of mine: Fcgfyv, who is currently the moderator of the Nayru Clan, Monika. (Go figure.) Fcgfyv had reached out to me on the forums as a fan of my podcast segments, and we quickly became friends, even video chatting here and there. He was basically my first “internet friend,” and while we no longer have virtual hangouts like how we did back then, I still treasure our friendship today.

The ZUCast continued strong through the end of 2011. I transitioned to a more serious recurring segment that explored the music of the franchise, which has always been my favorite aspect. The podcast retained a charming sense of humor, with little story arcs about how, for example, people kept falling down the stairs of our fictional production studio, or how hosts Liah and Mattocks moonlighted as superheroes that embodied stereotypes from their respective countries of origin (New Zealand and Canada). We even sparked some controversy with Power Shot’s R-rated audio drama comedy, the oddly named La Radionovela de los Zelda: Pasión de Otaku, otherwise known as “The Taco Show” thanks to Cody. That serial was a fully voiced parody of Ocarina of Time, except it thrust a beloved fantasy world into a much more “adult” light, complete with strong profanity and a most unsavory portrayal of the Great Deku Tree.

Then, during the production cycle for the 2011 Christmas special, things fell apart. I’m not quite sure what happened to this day. Deadlines came and went. The secret podcast forum went dead. It seemed as though my favorite podcast was to be no more. And it remained that way for the better part of a year. I did get to participate in a two-person discussion with Hombre de Mundo, someone I admired, in which we reflected upon the Zelda franchise’s 25th-anniversary celebrations. That was really fun. But there were no regular ZUCast episodes in 2012. Hombre himself took up the podcast’s reins toward the end of the year, and we pumped out one more episode with a new format that centered around several hosts having roundtable discussions. I even got to guest host the second episode of the new format, alongside more people I looked up to — but that episode never saw the light of day. The original incarnation of the ZUCast ended in January 2013 after almost five years. I guess the momentum never built up again after that 2012 hiatus. Hombre and Cody revived the podcast on ZU’s YouTube channel as pure roundtable discussions for a few months, but that never appeared on iTunes, and it fell off my radar.

It was a combination of the death of the ZUCast, a fatal server crash in February 2013 that caused the forums to lose almost three months of posts, and crippling anxiety stemming from an academically brutal senior year of high school that caused me to disappear from ZU that March. I was overwhelmed by everything going on, including all of the things in the Writing board that I needed to restore after the server crash, and I felt like I couldn’t face anyone here. So I effectively “ghosted” Zelda Universe. I popped in only a handful of times over the following few years, never for more than a day or so. Unsurprisingly, I was stripped of my forum staff position in May or June 2013 on account of my MIA status. Life went on, albeit with a hole left that was far bigger than that left by the demise of Pokémon Online. But it was too intimidating to remedy it at the time.

Many happy returns: 2018 to present

In 2018, I was serving as a staff member of Zelda Wiki, ZU’s sister site. Breath of the Wild had been out for almost a full year. I hadn’t been an active member of the forums for almost half a decade.

In February or March, Zelda Wiki opened up a presence on the ZU Forums in an attempt to bring the wiki and forum communities closer together. Head wiki admin Tony wanted us to get as involved in that new board as possible. So, after almost five years, I finally came home to ZU.

We have an old adage on the forums: “They always come back.”

It wasn’t the same place I had basically abandoned years earlier — the new forum software was a big part of that, as well as a major changing of the guard, with most old members’ having gone and new ones having taken their place — and yet it was familiar. The whole atmosphere was more relaxed, with less strict posting rules site-wide. It wasn’t as bustling as before, as social media had been dominated by corporate platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. The average age of ZUers had skyrocketed as well, probably due in large part to the migration of younger gamers to mainstream platforms. But that left the people who really wanted to be there, who had chosen to be on a Zelda forum rather than conduct all of their online discourse on Reddit or Twitter. And that has been a wonderful thing.

I jumped back into the Writing board, taking the initiative in reviving the writing contests with the support of the current staff. I was invited to consult on the revamp of the Creativity section into its current incarnation, the Creative Corner board. I was also invited, in April 2018, to lead a team of two other Board Mods in the new board. I was a little wary of taking up that mantle again, but I had since resolved most of the emotional issues that had led to my previous abandonment of duties. So I accepted. And the rest is history.

That August, Cody added me to a new channel in Slack, which ZU staff uses to communicate. It was called “#podcast,” and I did not see it coming. Indeed, it turned out that Cody wanted to reboot the audio-based ZUCast of old, and he wanted me (as one of the only people from the original incarnation besides him who was still around in staff), to be involved. Naturally, I was enthusiastic. There were only a few of us in the channel, and Cody was the only one I knew at the time.

I don’t remember how the discussion went, but I found myself nominated unanimously as the executive producer of the reboot. Ten years earlier, I would have laughed. (Actually, I probably would have run away.) I was shy, I hated confrontation, and I hadn’t pictured myself leading anyone, let alone a bunch of complete strangers. But in early 2011, I managed to recruit and lead a team in putting together a short-lived Pokémon podcast, resembling the ZUCast, that made it onto iTunes. Plus, I had led a few team projects in school since then, so I thought, “Sure?”

The new ZUCast has turned out very different from the old one, despite my best efforts toward the contrary. The biggest difference is that the staff members didn’t all meet on the forums, and thus they don’t have that kind of close-knit rapport that the old team had among its members. We have few running jokes, no B-plots, not even Cody’s Rant. (Mind you, Cody does still host sometimes, and we still get the occasional rant from him.) But you know what? I’ve come to accept that. The new ZUCast is a different beast, and it has its own special charm and engaging content that makes it into the very Zelda podcast I thought I had found that February in 2008. I love my team, and I love what we produce. Managing everything gets tiring, not infrequently, either, and compared to the old incarnation of the podcast, we don’t get much feedback of any kind. But I continue to produce the podcast because I love it. I love its legacy. I love the art of it. And I love the people I have gotten to know through it.

Thanks for the memories: In conclusion

Wow. Twenty years. Not many websites can claim that milestone, especially fansites dedicated to singular franchises. Looking back, I realize that I have been on Zelda Universe for half my life; I basically came of age on ZU. That’s awesome.

Through the good times and the bad, this website and its community members have been my rock, my home in cyberspace. I appreciate each and every person with whom I have communicated on the forums or beyond over the years. You have given my life meaning, brought me great joy, comforted me when I’ve felt down. We’ve had some amazing conversations about the Zelda games, good feelings, terrible RPGs, good music, writing styles, cute pets, Clan Wars, choo-choo trains, mental health, poorly designed Pokémon, gender identity, and yes, Togepi. I don’t really believe in blessings from higher powers, but I still feel absolutely blessed to be a part of ZU, even after 13 years.

I’ve watched this community and this website grow up and change along with me, and it has been one of the most meaningful parts of my life so far. I am so excited for the future of Zelda Universe, just as I am enthusiastic about its past.

If you aren’t a member of the forums, we await you with open arms. If this article gets us even one new ZUer, just as that first episode of the ZCast did, I would consider the time I put into writing it well spent.

Happy birthday, Zelda Universe. And thank you. Here’s to many more decades to come.