Please note that this site history is adopted from another part of the site.

Version 1.0 Where it all began...

First of all, excuse the pathetic screenshot. Despite my best attempts and years of lawsuits (not really), the old Desert Colossus still remains, more or less, alive and well at it's original location. The site itself was not my first, but it was still very amateurish in both design and implementation. My writing was immature and pubescent, compared to how I write today. If you check it out you can tell from the frequent "yays" and other flourishes that screamed "n00b!"

Nevertheless, and criticisms aside, this is really where it all began. I was very proud of this site, I thought it was a nice niche kind of Zelda site, with a charm all its own, which is relatively true. On October 20, 1999 I opened TDC for the first time, though not as a Zelda gaming site, but rather a companion site to a Zelda RPG group of the same name. After a few weeks I decided to launch a game guide to Ocarina of Time on it, and soon after a Link's Awakening guide followed. I got bored with the concept of Zelda RPGs and devoted TDC purely to the Zelda gaming series. What followed was a glut of improvement on the game guides, including ones for Legend of Zelda and Adventure of Link, as well as new sections like the Mailbag and even the debut of our much-loved Who Would Have Thunk It? section.

Around December of 1999 or so TDC got "headhunted" by the webmaster of Megaman Online, who informed me that his host, Videogame Zone Network (VGZN) was looking for promising sites to host and they asked me to join them. I of course agreed (since Angelfire is a death wish of sorts for website growth) and on January 9, 2000 Version 1.0 saw its last update.

Before I move onto the next chapter, I want to note that TDC in stage could not have been what it was (the good parts that is) without the help of three great staffers: La Resistance, Marco Bartoli, and Xvfiregodvx. They all played their special part in TDC's tale. Now, moving on...

Version 2.0 New and improved...

On January 15 of 2000, The Desert Colossus relaunched at the address zelda.vgznetwork.com (don't go there now, it's a search engine mirror) with a brand new layout and a determination to make our name known. By this time the staffers had left and I was on my own to this aim. Fortunately, I did quite well, making TDC a very popular site in its own little way. There was trouble in paradise though, and I didn't get along with VGZN's webmaster very well, and I ended up taking TDC elsewhere. It was good timing too, since VGZN, named Lusoris Online at that time, collapsed a few months later.

Version 3.0 Before the fall...

I wish I knew the date, but sometime in late 2000/early 2001 the Desert Colossus launched once more at colossus.zeldagames.com (nothing of ours is there anymore, though). I celebrated with a brand new layout, which was much more professional looking than the two previous ones. It was at this time that the Caption Game debuted as a feature, as well as the Pressbox, which was a fun little feature where readers could pose a question to Zelda characters and they would answer it in a comical fashion. Things went along swimmingly for sometime until mid-summer 2001 when, after a long period of intermittent downtime, zeldagames.com went down permanently and took TDC with it. I subsequently lost interest in rebuilding TDC, and it passed into obscurity as I let it languish in the Internet graveyard for nearly a year.

Then, in March of 2002, I was talking with an old affiliate (the webmaster of City of Clocktown, no longer open) and mentioned I was thinking of bringing back TDC. He was excited about the idea and mentioned it at some message board. Some viewers there saw it, as well as the webmaster of zeldauniverse.net. He offered to host The Desert Colossus at his site and I happily agreed.

Version 4.0 Begun again...

On March 28, 2002 TDC launched after nearly a year out of the game (er, metaphorically, of course) at the address colossus.zeldauniverse.net. Out of all the version thus far, this one was far and away the absolute best. At this time our popularity was immense and TDC as whole was doing very well. Unfortunately, after a few months, I once again lost interest, and pathetically just stopped updating. I will never stop regretting that action. Well, the result was TDC was removed from Zelda Universe's server, and passed once more into the shadow, waiting to be revived in the future.

Version 5.0 Begun again, once again...

On March 30, 2004, more than a year after TDC closed down for the second time, and two years and two days to the day Version 4.0 launched, version 5.0 debuted at the address www.desertcolossus.com. I originally sought to keep this site small and more archival in nature, after a few weeks I was struck by the urge to expand, and thus I couldn't help but do so. This particular design marked a big departure for the Colossus, being the first "real" layout to ditch the desert/sand background image, and didn't even feature some image of the Colossus itself on the main page! Nevertheless, this version served the site well for almost two years, until on December 11, 2005 when the Version 6.0 layout debuted.

Version 6 Another change!

As Jack JUST told us, this debuted on December 11, 2005. Is "debuted" a word? Ah, he used it, so I will too. This layout featured a few changes from version 5, like the link for HA2 which inspired the ad in the current version! Also featured were funny little talking leevers and Links and such. TDC, man, you used to be fun. What happened? Click the pic for a really, really poor reproduction of version 6 featuring the actual code from the day after its debut!

Version 7.5 or something A tune up...

The final version of TDC created by founder Jack. For me, it was the first layout change I experienced at TDC. It was pretty epic, considering I had no idea how it worked back then... It's still amazing, when you consider how ridiculously complicated TDC is at heart. But I guess only I know that...