Community:North Castle
From Zelda Wiki, the Zelda encyclopedia
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| URL | http://www.northcastle.co.uk/ |
| Language | English |
| Owner(s) | Juliet Singleton |
| Webmaster(s) | Juliet Singleton |
| Launch Date | 1997 |
| Status | Active |
Contents |
History
The history of North Castle dates back to the Summer of 1997 when the site was founded by Juliet Singleton. It is the oldest actively running Zelda sites surpassing the 10 year old mark in 2007. While the site has been around for such a long time, the basic display has only had minor adjustments over the years and still retains a very similar layout to when the site first launched.
With Juliet growing older and having less time to work on the site, the site has moved to having a monthly update, usually occurring in the 3rd week of the month. In February of 2008, North Castle was the first site announced as part of the Zelda Dungeon Alliance.[1]
Content
North Castle features content from only the first 4 Zelda titles, The Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, and Link's Awakening. The reasoning for choosing this path, is Juliet disliked the direction of Zelda with Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.[2] She wanted the site to be there to educate fans of Ocarina of Time era, by highlighting the old games in the series.
North Castle also provides information pertaining to the Legend of Zelda Comics and the Cartoon series. The site also has plenty of specialty pages including material on the History of Hyrule, Zelda Romance, a listing of Collectibles & Merchandise, and much more.
Fan Works
Perhaps what North Castle is most known for is their massive collection of fan submitted fiction and artwork. The site boasts a collection of over 500 fan fictions, conveniently divided into categories based on genre.[3] The archive of these fictional writings each give their respective authors, a title, the genre, what game they are based on, a rating, and some reviews.
Forum Community
The message boards for North Castle are currently shared with their sister website, Brotherhood of the Underworld. The forum has been online since July of 2004 and has amounted over 100 members and over 40,000 posts, making it one of the more active forums within the Zelda Community.
Brotherhood of the Underworld
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| URL | http://www.northcastle.co.uk/botu/ |
| Language | English |
| Owner(s) | Kirsty Singleton |
| Webmaster(s) | Kirsty Singleton |
| Launch Date | 2000 |
| Status | Hiatus |
History
Originally Brotherhood of the Underworld (More commonly referred to as BotU) was a subsidiary of its host North Castle. The site's purpose was to provide bestiaries from the Zelda World. However, it has since expanded to cover both fan artwork and fan fiction, highlighting the dark side of The Legend of Zelda series. BotU has gone through some ups and downs, including a server crash in which all was lost from the site.
BotU made a return later on and expanded to cover more material. One of the great features of the site is its BotUSupply for the villains of the Zelda series. This acts as a shop for the villains of Hyrule, highlighting all the various pieces of equipment that they use to try to achieve their goals of complete domination.
Layout
BotU is one of the few Zelda sites that still use frames as the main form of navigation with the design. The layout features a simple navigation bar on the left that expands with each click, making every single page of the site easily navigable with no load time.
Forum Community
The message boards for BotU are currently shared with their sister website, North Castle. The forum has been online since July of 2004 and has amassed over 100 members and over 40,000 posts, making it one of the more active forums within the Zelda Community.
