But let's start at the beginning, since it's always a good place to start. I had just completed the basic business college degree back in 1993 and was wondering what to do (study) next. A few years earlier my brother bought my family's first PC, a 386DX2 with 8MB ram and an 80 megabyte HardDisk, man that was hot stuff. I of course used this new wonder as often as I could and gained an interest in learning how to use it better, I had done quite well on the business college, always one of the first to complete the assignments in the computer lab. So I decided to go for another, 2 year, business degree which had a computer degree "built-in", how great was that?!

I quickly learned that I wasn't as geeky as I thought, or atleast there were people here who were more geeky than me taking the same degree, don't get me wrong though they were cool people and a few of them introduced me to something called the Internet, sort of like something called BBS'es I had heard of a few years earlier, only this was bigger and you could do a lot more on the internet, such as gopher, telnet, text based html sites, it was the shit and I quickly got addicted to the IRC part, actually using a telnet server to gain access, pissy and slow but it worked.

About a year into the degree I got some crazy idea of making a NES fanzine, I had bought a NES in 1992 and games were sold cheap by now, so my NES library had expanded to atleast 10 cartridges, what a number. I posted my idea on a few newsgroups and quickly had 50-60 subscribers for the first issue.

An Australian magazine wrote me right after the first issue asking a lot of questions, guess the journalist was a NES fan hehe, and they made a small article about this incredible new electronic fanzine (hah right), I think the guy did mail me the text before it went into the magazine, but I've lost it along the way, well crap!

My english was poor though, and some may even say it hasn't improved since, but I managed to put a few nice fanzines together over some 6-8 months. It was now April-May 1995 and someone in my class introduced me to something called HTML and even installed a "web browser" called Mosaic which would allow those text based webpages to show pictures along with the text, how cool what that! Very cool obviously and just what I needed for my NES Journal fanzine.

I messed a bit with some graphical editions of the NES Journal but none of them made it very far for who knows what reason, probably lack of pictures hehehe. I then decided to do a multi-console, though limited to Nintendo, website and actually launched one just before the summer holiday, there wasn't much there besides a few NES items and I doubt anyone ever noticed it.

So I deleted it after the summer break, and forgot to keep an offline copy, duuh, would've been cool to see it today. Sometime during the summer there had been a massive sale of Sega GameGears and I was hooked to this "Gameboy with colors" and what would the coolest web project be? a Game Gear site of course!! I got the basic layout done, but soon realized that I didn't know shit about Sega or the Game Gear and couldn't really be bothered anyway.

But I still wanted to make a cool webpage, so I sat down and decided to make NES Journal into a web info source instead of a text fanzine. The guy in my class who had introduced me to HTML was planning this site which was to be called Binary World, guess it was something about binaries? (*grin*). Anyway I stole half of his webpage title, sorry Alex hehe, and NES WORLD was born.

The first layout was very very basic and only had a few things, actually grabbed from the older "multi-console" page, and with a logo image made with a mouse going nuts in Paint Shop Pro, looks awful but not at the time. I had already searched the net for NES websites and found nothing at all, not even Nintendo themselves had a website at this time, so NES WORLD could very well be the first NES specific website ever created on the Internet.

Soon after the launch, late August 1995 eventhough the site always said September 1st, I began contacting some of the major software companies, I remember Capcom, Konami and Nintendo themselves being contacted. Capcom didn't bother to answer, and have proved to be selfish assholes ever since when a fan asked them something. Konami on the other hand was very polite and a guy there, Christian A Munoz, actually sent me a very nice package with boxes, layouts, manuals and brochures, a very cool thing indeed and I'm still very grateful for that.

Nintendo took a bit to reply and when they did, it was with a huge mail telling me about copyrights, trademarks, what I could and could/should not do when using Nintendo's products or their name. Being bad at english I didn't understand much of this and decided I was better off closing down the webpage until I knew what exactly that mail was about, I didn't feel like getting sued by the big N.

But this time other NES websites had appeared, such as Jeff Bogumill's NES page and a guy who called himself "tsr" was days away from putting his site online, called tsr's NES Archive. He contacted me wanting to take over NES WORLD and add the content to his website, he wasn't affraid of Nintendo. I turned him down as I didn't wan't to ditch the project just yet. Since I had not heard anything more from Nintendo for a few weeks (months?) I decided that NES WORLD should reappear, so the logo (the word Nintendo was removed) and the index html was slightly changed, though the content was still the same.

While Jeff Bogumill dissapeared, tsr and I had a great time competeting, or atleast I did as it made me update more often. I began scanning different material from english magazines and a german guy sent me pictures of a pirate NES with a 1000000in1 cart built-in. This clone soon became the main attraction and I received a lot of e-mails from people around the world who wanted to buy one these gadgets.

NES WORLD's design has changed a lot over the years, those of you who have followed it since 1995 will definately agree to that, and hopefully agree that it has come a long way down the right track, I hope.

Around October 1996 NES WORLD became a part of Damaged Cybernetics, a gray-area emulation, among other, group probably most known for it's founder, MindRape, stealing the source for NESticle, a very popular NES emulator at the time. Ths caused the group to split. But I left even before that happend. When entering the group I was give a whole set of website rules to follow, so every DC site would be similar in design. I kinda felt I had lost control over my own work, and quickly decided it was time to go back on my own.

This was also the time where NES emulation began and being the fan of NES i am (hey that rhymes!), I of course had to be a part of this, believe it or not. I litterally shit my pants the day I downloaded an emulator called PasoWing from some Japanese website along with a few rom images of Super Mario Bros, Circus Charlie and a couple of other first generation Famicom games. NES WORLD contributed with a small page making the latest emulators available for download, and even a few roms were available at one time, others were released on IRC in the "NW packs". I've made the old emulation pages available here, here and here in the order they were made published and revised. Also an old rom page is available here. Please note that downloads are not available anymore :)

But things got way out of hand, I received so many rom requests I couldn't believe it and it got worse and worse. Even when the roms were removed, they were illegal so I didn't want them there anyway, the requests for roms kept rolling in. So I decided to remove every single mention of emulation and roms on the site and sort of "make a campaign" against emulation, simply to get NES WORLD back on the right track, as a NES info source and not an emu/rom download site.

For a long time I was made the most anti-emulation person probably on the entire internet, not counting Howard Lincoln. Eventhough I serveral times tried to explain myself, by saying I had nothing against emulation personally, I just didn't want emulation and roms combined with NES WORLD because of experiences in the past. Things have changed a little bit towards emulation lately, but I still prefer NES WORLD emulation free, atleast 99%. The emulation pages and history is great fun to look back at now, but had you asked me a few years ago I wouldn't exactly have been proud of it, not that I am now ;)

Early April 1997 some of NES WORLD went off line because of a host, skp.plys.net, going down. It was hosted at a college in the US which had 40 computers stolen, one of them hosting a few of NES WORLDs pages, screenshots and some graphical walkthroughs for Rad Gravity and Zelda.

Around August 1997 I began getting problems with my internet access, loosing access to my college UNIX account where NES WORLD was located (www.aalborges.dk/~i1q), since I had graduated a year earlier the sysadm started deleting own accounts to free up space. So a "net friend" of mine at the time, Kry, offered to host NES WORLD on his server, pengu.v-wave.com, and another now long-time friend, Jeremy Chadwick gave me a link from his server, parodius, linking to "pengu.v-wave.com/~nesworld". Jeremy also had some problems finding work and had problems paying the hosting bill for parodius, which also went down for a few years, I think, around that time (early 1997?).

Kry got in trouble with his ISP, something about too much bandwidth used I think, and "pengu.v-wave.com" died. A third friend from the net, Stumble, gave me an account on a small ISP "internet1.net" he worked at. The stay at "www.internet1.net/~nesworld" was rather long.

It was around this time I had my first couple of major fights with people on the net, one being Michael J Novak, who litterally took the entire manual archive from NES WORLD and tsr's NES Archive, edited out all credits from those tho spent hours typing this crap, most tsr, who also was quite pissed but didn't bother, I guess, to do anything about it.

I decided to write Novak an email, explaning my anger. My problem was not that he posted the manuals on his website, but editing out all names pissed me off, I remember finding my name in the Moon Ranger manual as he didn't bother to read it through, and I had typed my name somewhere in the middle of the manual :)

Anyway, I ended up with a rather nice page on his website, of course telling "his side of the truth". I believe the page still is around somewhere, you might want to look it up for a laugh. I was not the only one he decided to post about on his website and some of the others have tried to contact his ISP to have it removed, I just decided to give back what he gave and posted his mails on NES WORLD. The arguement died out shortly after as I couldn't be bothered trying to explain to the guy that atleast he could've kept the damn names in the manuals, oh well...

Next up was classicgaming.com who was trying to talk me into moving to their servers, free of charge of course. I declined as I was pretty happy with my current hosting at internet1. At the time I had been talking about registering nesworld.com, but was short on cash, being in school and all. So to piss me off classicgaming.com registered nesworld.com and of course directed it to their own site.

Eventhough I could not claim the domain name as mine I was still pissed, since they knew I wanted to register it. A huge fight was started by various people, including myself. Conjurer of davesclassics.com fame (now vg-classics.com I think) and Zophar of Zophar's Domain also played a big part in the fight. After a few months of harrashment, both ways, it became too much for classicgaming.com and they removed the link from nesworld.com to their own site, but didn't want to give up the domain name. It was only half a victory, but better than nothing. Some of the mails from those days are available here.

Fragmaster of classicgaming.com eventually gave up on the nesworld.com domain, unfortunately it was then registered by "NES-God" who I believe wanted to sell it to me, unsuccessful at that he made a page with a link to NES WORLD sometime in 2001. April 2002, nesworld.com was finally where it should be, with the site of the same name, and will most likely stay registered by me until I die ;). Classicgaming did the same thing with mame.com, and I think they lost that aswell.

Next guy in line, probably not the right order though, was Mark Farinas. This guy mailed me out of the blue one day with a very nice image of a NES console, with zapper and 2 joypads. He gave me permission to use this on my website, which I did, and told me just to ask if there was anything else I wanted drawn. I asked him to make a GB image in the same style, which he did and it was great, but never used (was supposed to be a part of a GB site I was working on, GB Zone).

Everything was great and all until he one day mailed me bitching about having seen the image used by a local videogame store and that he wasn't credited, not even on NES WORLD. I surely made a mistake of not crediting him, but he never asked for it until this day, I believe I must've mailed him right after the picture was put on the site the first time, so he could've complained then.

The guy went nuts and threatened with lawsuits and so on, so I removed it. A few years later I decided to use the image again, I had forgotten why it was removed in the first place, as a slightly blurred out image behind the NES WORLD logo, pretty much how the logo looks today. It didn't take long for the guy to be back bitching, but by this time I had discovered that he actually had ripped off an old NES promotion picture and caimed it as his work, just by redrawing it. Again he claimed he claimed to sue me if I didn't, so I replaced it with the original promotion picture, he still bitched but what could he do now?

He might have been right about owning the rights for that version he supposedly drew, I honestly don't know, but going crazy over a damn picture which was a ripoff, argh! (heh). I'm still using that old promo picture, but now in an altered version, not claiming it as my work ;)

As all this wasn't enough, Roger, owner of Internet1 contacted me early November 1998, telling that NES WORLD was illegally placed on one of his servers and asked me to remove everything immediately. Problem here was that he had already changed my password and renamed then index.html, how was I to remove everything then?

We mailed a little, finally agreeing that NES WORLD should stay in Internet1 for free, but with a couple of banner ads of Rogers' choice. The ads were some sort of herb/health deal that surely wasn't stuff the readers of NES WORLD cared about. He soon began complaing about orders not exactly rolling in. I was placed as the user with the lowest bandwidth available, making it almost impossible to update or even access the site at times.

I was then asked to make a new website for Internet1, as payment for the hosting. I of course agreed to the offer and started making a new website for Internet1. Things didn't work out as Roger planned, my suggestion was called "too complex", though I don't think he ever really intended to use any of my work, just a wild guess though.

Early 1999 NES WORLD was without hosting again. While being at Internet1 I had serveral hosting offers, from placs like gotgames.com, they had too many rules to follow though. Then there was brinstar.com, can't remember exactly what happend, but I didn't go that way either I guess. Emulationzone.org also offered webhosting in 1998.

With all these offers it didn't take long to find a new host. Nicolas Choukron of emuclassics.com offered to host the site and NES WORLD was back online (www.emuclassics.com/nesworld). But in the history of the site this was, sorry Nicolas, the worst hosting. Serveral HD crashes screwed up images on the site, backup rollbacks replaced NW's images with those of other sites hosted by emuclassics. It was a mess and ended late 1999 when emuclassics was hacked, including NES WORLD.

I couldn't be bothered to upload go through the entire site to fix all errors and didn't feel like uploading it all again, as I was on a 56k dial-up. So I was better off finding a new host. While being at emuclassics I was also using the "come.to/nesworld" link, is wasn't that big a success, the logs showed people weren't using it to access the site. It's still around though and still linking to emuclassics, hehe.

From sometime in 1999 to late 2001, NES WORLD was hosted by conjurer at davesclassics.com, though now known as vg-network, which probably has been one of the most reliable places that has hosted the site. I did have one problem with being there, at all time, the stinking banner code I had to put on every page of the site, but it had to be done. However late 2001, the entire GameFan network collapsed, dragging the vg-network down in the dirt.

After a month of no news or signs of recovery, Jeremy Chadwick, owner of Parodius Network, who also had helped me earlier, stepped forward and offered to host NES WORLD. I couldn't get any news out of Conjurer, so I accepted Jeremy's offer as this also meant no banners, since parodius has a no banner policy. Then a bit of nasty-ness happed as the vg-network reappeared shortly after I had uploaded NES WORLD to parodius.

Conjurer took my move from vg to parodius very personally it seemed and handled things very immature (bet he sees red if he reads this). I had nothing against Conjurer, still don't, I was very grateful for the time hosted at his server. But I've seen so many servers go down that I always try to find a new host quickly, and since I had no sign of a vg-network re-appearance at the sime I accepted Jeremy's offer, I of course moved.

Unfortunately Parodius suffered a month downtime ahortly after, February 2002, as Jeremy lost his job (the company was sold and shut down as far as I remember). That could've been the last breath of NES WORLD, I was tired of moving around and promised myself when I moved to Parodius that this would be the last server to host the site, if this one went down, that was it, no more NES WORLD updates.

So there was nothing to do than sit back and hope for sign of life from Jeremy, which happened early March 2002, one deep breath and we were back in business. About a month later I bought nesworld.com for $35, what a mistake as I could've had it for $12 by registering at weblaunching.net, oh well atleast it was mine now :).

Everything was going smoothly until the next battle was ready to set off, just a few months later. Dave Allwein (TRM) of The Warp Zone, who years earlier had made serveral attempts to make a good website, moving around on various free commercial hosts, and had claimed he could do every article seen on NES WORLD better than me, that was how it sounded atleast.

I had been tired of TRM's attitude for some time, not least him borrowing serveral ideas when he claimed he could do better. One day asking him about an email address for a former unlicensed programmer, Art Cestaro of Odyssey Software fame, he gave me the usual attitude eventhough I had helped him just days earlier. Things got nasty for a short while and then died out.

Then the biggest scam that has ever been pulled off in the history of NES sites happened. I later discovered that TRM had his house filled with former unlicensed programmers, or atleast someone pretending to be, either it was TRM or someone using the internet connection at his house. When it finally was discovered I had been scammed for months, eventhough I had a feeling something was wrong, I was fed with small pictures, pieces of code, assemblers and other pieces of info that would put the doubt to shame.

It all ended out in me giving a treasured rom image, though altered slightly as I wasn't convinced 100% that I was talking to the real programmer of Escape of Atlantis, who supposedly was Anthony Henderson. The entire mailing is available in two articles called "Lowlife - TRM of The Warp Zone". ( read #1 ) ( read #2 )

Since then things have been pretty quiet, thank god. I moved (house) in December 2002 and have had very little time to work on the site recently. But as often as I've wanted to quit it all, and that has been quite a few times over the years, I just seem addiced to this website, it has now been a part of my life almost 8 years and could very well be the next 8 years too. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought the site would exist this long, it has been one crazy ride of good and bad sofar, I wouldn't mind if things around the site would be a bit more quiet from now on, but who knows what arguements the future brings, heh.

It hasn't all been bad though, I've met a lot of cool people over the years, besides the ones already mentioned, though this is just a few of them:

VmprHntrD who took over the NES Jukebox and turned into it into an amazing archive of videogame midis. He was around pretty much from the beginning helping out with various bits and pieces. He later joined the davesclassics crew and we of course lost contact after the fight I had with conjurer after the move.

Hessel Meun, helped out a lot over a few years with scans and info about various piate stuff, amazing guy. I remember contacting him because he had made a small page about a Famicom clone, called Terminator2, and it all went from there. Thanks :)

G_Dragon, my Russian friend who sent me chocolate and pirate carts, free of charge, amazingly friendly. He worked for a Russian mangazine and some of the information from NES WORLD ended up in his magazine. ( view ) I've later been told that he was/is quite popular in Russia. Unfortunately we lost contact.

Morgan Johansson, Chris Covell (Solar Wars fame), Tootai, Paul Hogger (Ace), Jeff Jensen (You know who you are ;), JL_Picard (vNES64), Clint Dyer (Bugs Bunny's Fun House), RedboX (1996, Emulation), Rowan (my first FC cart, 300in1), Barry Chan, Franz Lanzinger (Krazy Kreatures), Nina Stanley (Color Dreams graphics fame), Vance Kozik (Menace Beach), Dan Lawton (Color Dreams), Dan Burke (CD), Jon Valesh (CD), Phil Mikkelson (Thanks for everything!), Richard Frick (AVE), Michael Crick, Bill Hindorff (Tengen), Ian Bell, Steve Hughes (Solar Jetman fame), Owe Bergsten (Bergsala AB), Jayces (Thanks for the Famicom Disk System), Mark Knibbs, DiskDude, Alexander Upton (P-r0t), Brian Miller, Todd Miller, Daren Adams, Patricia Strobel, Ben Strobel (Maxi15, heh), Christopher Coleman, FM2000 (Nintendo Repository), Neil Gordon (My collection wouldn't be what it is without Pepper's Videogame Auctions :), Sven Carlberg, Adam Lamontagne (Been around forever, it seems, hehehe), Firebug, J. Drain, Terry (Wisdom Tree), _Demo_, EFX (NES rom fight!!! hehe), Memblers, DeceiverX, Lugnut, B00daW, TheRedEye, Skrybe, Sardius, Drache, Charles Doty, Jeff H. Davidson, Somari, David Braben, Tarm (Gluk please :), NES-God, David Dayton, Imid, James (old ICQ buddy), DeGen, Gloone, SimonB, Niels Pit, DreamTR, Dave Allwein (Eventhough you're an asshole, you still deserve a spot here ;), Mike Etler (VideoGame Connections), Jesse Smith from world-of-nintendo.com (for hosting the first NW messageboard), tbirdsc, SnowBro, Clem, Anton Adolphsen, Shinobi, Demiforce, Steve Begin, Akiyoshi (Famicom Basic), Ted Michael, Jeff and Gary Kilber (NES Interface System), Will Crowe, Splice, Elementl1, Vivid Barrier, Sgt. Bowhack, TrelaneQ, Hiroshi, Sylvio Hodos, Vadim Gerasimov (Tetris), Pascal Blancaneaux, Photon, FanWen, Amos More, Chris Hickman, Alex Krasivsky (LandyNES).

I definately forgot a lot of people, but thanks aswell to everyone not mentioned who were "close" to me, contributed information to NES WORLD, or simply just stopped by over the years.

A special greeting to BitchSlap, former bot of IRC EFnet #snesemu, rest in peace (heh).

It hasn't always been NES WORLD though, other projects were launched, such as GB Zone back in 1997'ish that eventually became Classicon (Classic Consoles), a site that unfortunately never really got off the ground. Then Videogame Zone, pretty much just Classicon in new wrapping.

Then there was 64zone, a N64 scene site that later was renamed to 64scener and still exist, recently relaunched on www.64scener.com after relocating from Parodius to paid webhosting. 64scener was a huge success and only suffered a few downtimes on emuclassics, vg-network and Parodius, until it went offline in it's old form in March 2003 because of harrashment from the IDSA because of some homebrewn games they believed were violating copyrights. But it's now back again under new wrapping and started from scratch as a GameCube, Gameboy Advance and (Nintendo64) site.