November, 1999. This was the month during which me and my internet pals had an infamous conference... one that included myself, sprite, Yoshi785, and de_super_mario. In between our normal BSing and RPing, de_super_mario got around to bringing up a rather novel idea... "Hey, guys, I was thinking about starting a website. Wanna help out?"
This of course led to pipe dreams and a halfhearted "Sure," by those gathered, and after considerable debate (actually, we didn't debate it all, we picked the first thing that popped out) Someone mentioned "Let's call ourselves The Mushroom Kingdom Squad!" Everyone else said "Okay," And that was it... we were the Mushroom Squad. Naturally, next came our site name, which was quickly decided to be The Mushroom Kingdom Squad's Domain, despite it's horrendously long nature. We then decided on a password, created the Yahoo! Geocities account, and proceeded to put up our main page, which consisted of ROMs, some Music, pictures, and... uh, that was it. The first incarnation of TMKSD was put up on Nov. 28, 1999.
Things continued this way for a month or so... I was doing the music site in HTML, and de_super_mario was doing everything else with the Yahoo Geocities Pagebuilder. Then, mysteriously, de_super_mario dissapeared, leaving the website without a webmaster and poised over a very dark pit known as "failure." Yoshi785 and Sprite were still hanging around at this point, along with Lzn64, and after de_super_mario dissapeared, they went to look for someone to fill his shoes as a web designer. Enter Princess Ruto.
I took the reigns of webmistress at that point, and Princess Ruto did a lot of general helping out at the time. On April 22, 2000, we officially ran out of space on Geocities, and switched over to Fortunecity. The site was really growing fast, and the promise of 100 free MB of space really was the reason we chose that server. Fortunecity proved to be a bit of a disaster decision, however. Although I did finally get to put the entire thing up in HTML, rather than a measly pagebuilder, and also create a much easier new layout with frames and buttons... Fortunecity had a lot of problems. The server was down a lot and we continually had files erased mysteriously from our file manager. We stayed on Fortunecity for over a year. For the last three months of our stay there, we could not enter our filemanager and our site was down quite a lot... it took about a month for everything to be switched over to our next server, Tripod.
However, a lot of good things did happen during this time, especially with the Fan sections. Fanart and Fanfiction were added all the time, and a Poll was put up just to keep our visitors busy for an extra five seconds. The site began to get a bit prettier, with the new buttons, and our layout was drastically improved. Toward the end of the Fortunecity year, Tcr62000 was added to the Mushroom Kingdom Squad under the premise that he would do Fanfiction. (haha, yeah right.)
A New Beginning (AKA All Hail Tripod)
After 3 months of downtime, and seriously thinking about just dropping the site, I decided to give it one final try. I was really tired after all the crap I went through at Fortunecity, and after debating several options, including Homestead and Angelfire, I finally decided on Tripod to be the new home of TMKSD. After 2 weeks of endless uploading, writing HTML, and making new buttons on my trial version of Paint Shop Pro, I finally was able to put up the new and improved site on Tripod on June 31, 2001.
After moving to Tripod, I decided that what we already had wasn't enough, and after some support from my friends at VGF, I started up the Mariology section. This section started off great, and continues to be a big hit, and one of the most appealing features of the site. After getting tons of email about how bad our characters section sucked, I asked my buddy Ditto McCloaker to write some new ones up, and to my delight he agreed. These are still being added as they come in, and since I haven't received any more threatening emails, I'm assuming they're a success. I also halted updates to the Emulation section upon moving to Tripod, much to the dismay of some... but life goes on. We still have a good amount there to download. I also met Alladin Rohit, who decided to run a Wallpapers subsite on our domain, which can be found in the Themes section.
I really, honestly don't know what the future of TMKSD is. I personally think that we have the largest collection of Mario Music and Pictures on the internet (if you see a site with more than us, please tell me, I'll be shocked.) And though our fan sections are still low compared to other sites, that will improve with time. We're getting new visitors all the time, and I'm really glad that I decided to stick with the site. Every time I get a new email with a new name on it, it makes it worth the effort. As of now, I pretty much do everything on this site, with the help and support of my friends on VGF, including Ditto McCloaker, Vorpal, Masamune and Luigi of the Pipes... Thanks guys.
The Mushroom Kingdom Squad itself has become more of an online group of friends... I still talk with the original group on occasion. But for the most part, we've gone our seperate ways.
I really do enjoy keeping up on this site, and trying to make it the best it can be. With the almighty Tripod, I don't think we'll be entering another dark age (until we run out of space on here, *gulp!*), and you can look forward to updates well into the next couple years. As long as there is Mario... there will be cult fans. Until the next great adventure... Ciao.