A Legendary Site

Once upon a time, the internet wasn't the endless public playground that we begrudgingly let consume our life enjoy today. As a clueless kid in the early 2000s, using the Internet was like being adrift in the ocean, or maybe lost in an unfamiliar city. I found websites either by word-of-mouth, seeing somebody else using a site at the library, or searching things I liked in Google and just scrolling for hours.

Being shuffled from state to state in my early youth, it was hard to find friends. There was no continuity; every year or two we would pack up and move, and I would never see the majority of those people I knew ever again. Combine my lack of deep ties and my own unwillingness to meet my mom halfway on things, I ended up spending a lot of time indoors. My free time was usually split 50/50 between reading physical books and spending time on the Internet or otherwise using the computer.

As I mentioned, there were few agreed-upon "hubs" for the Internet in the 2000s. There was MySpace, but I was too young for that. Instead, the Internet as I understood it was segregated into many, many small groups centered on specific interests. A lot of the ones that I visited were fan-made websites for video games. One such website was The Sacred Realm, in my opinion the greatest fan site of all time, and nothing you could say will ever convince me otherwise.

The site as it looked in 2009, saved by WebArchive. At this time, it was still called "Legends and Adventure." For simplicity, it will be called The Sacred Realm henceforth.

It's clear to anybody who looks that The Sacred Realm is a labor of love. Unlike today, when the largest websites are made of and given value by user-submitted content, websites of the past were largely authored and administrated by one person, or a handful of people at most. Rather than copy-pasted from official sources or built from a template, much of the content on The Sacred Realm was handwritten by the site's owner-operator, Lysia.

Here's a brief section she wrote about the infamous CD-i Legend of Zelda titles:

Nintendo would rather forget that these three games ever existed. I haven't actually played them myself, but I have seen videos of the gameplay, and screenshots, and they really are very ordinary, especially compared to the Nintendo Zelda games. If you think that the Link from the Zelda cartoon series was annoying, he's nothing compared to the Link in these games.

"They really are very ordinary." When talking about the CD-i, that's a phrase that could only be written before the invention of YouTube Poop.

The main page for Link's Awakening. All of this was written by Lysia, rather than copied from the manual or another website.

This website fueled my addiction to the Legend of Zelda series like nothing else. I knew about the Zelda games for the Phillips CD-i before they were YouTube memes, before YouTube was even around. I devoured fanfiction and wrote dozens of my own stories, usually no longer than a page and written with equal parts poor grammar and wish fulfillment. (Why would Link and Zelda be listening to Franz Ferdinand and dating characters from AdventureQuest? I didn't even know back then, much less now.)

My friends, such as they were, were typically wealthier and had a seemingly constant stream of new purchases (games) to talk about. They were less than impressed with my dedication to The Legend of Zelda. While other kids were catching the newest Pokemon and drawing that pointy S design on anything that held still, I told anybody who would listen about how I'd finally found an Ocarina of Time ROM and was stuck on the first dungeon. In other words, I didn't have a lot of friends.

Sadly, all good things had to end. One day, I went to visit The Sacred Realm and it was just... gone. All the fan fiction, all those loving hand-written descriptions, the files for download... all gone.

It's said that The Sacred Realm "merged" with Zelda Universe, but really I don't see it. Zelda Universe is a fine site, don't get me wrong, but it has a much different focus and feeling. It doesn't have articles and bios for every character in the series, or hints and tricks for the games written from the webmaster's own experience. The content it does have is great, but it can never replace what The Sacred Realm meant to me.

Another fansite I frequented around the same time as The Sacred Realm. It's still up but apparently abandoned. Note that php error, and that "Save GoldenEye" button leads to a defunct petition website. The FAQ was last updated in 2006.

Just like The Sacred Realm, there really is no resolution to this blog article. One day it was there, and the next day it was simply ended. Almost all of it was saved by WebArchive, but it's not the same; it's a museum piece now, a vision of how the Internet once was. Those warm golds and browns, those unfinished stories, those articles and book scans... They're a vision of how I once was, when I was little and the biggest concern in my life was downloading the trailer for Twilight Princess, a game that I wouldn't have a chance to play for almost a decade after it released.

Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the fate that befell The Sacred Realm happening to a website that anybody majorly cares about. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so on are all owned by gigantic corporations. They wouldn't vanish on you one day like mist in the wind; they might change hands, update their looks now and then, but it seems like they're in for the long haul.

Lysia, if you're somehow reading this: I want to thank you for a big part of my early childhood.