I started Mario Party Legacy on an ordinary Monday afternoon in 2008. I was working on the site behind the scenes for several months at that point, and I settled on officially opening the site on January 14. I got back from school (freshman year), touched up a few things here and there, and made the very first post of the site:
Welcome to The Super Mario Party Site, a mario party fan-site. Not much is done, but you can look forward to a lot of Mario Party content. As for me, most of you know me as SuperZambezi from sites like GameFAQs and Mariopartyds.com. For now just enjoy the forum and some of the Character Pages (click on Mario, Luigi, etc.) and have fun. You can expect pages like History, About, Contact, etc. to be up soon.
That was seven years ago. Yes, that’s back when the website was known as The Super Mario Party Site and when the site was green and was created using an HTML editor. We’ve definitely come a long way since there, the most obvious changes seen in the layouts and the themes we’ve had over the years.
But that’s not the only thing that changed. On a personal standpoint, I know that so many things have changed for me throughout the last years. I learned so much about creating websites, from the actual designs to writing news stories and features. I had to learn how to manage time and people, different projects and different opportunities. There were major ups and downs all over the place, but I always seemed to learn and grow from it. It’s been a long way to get where we are today.
I could go on and talk about how Mario Party 9 gave Mario Party Legacy a huge boost in activity and guidance or the different events and major milestones we achieved in the last seven years (if you want that, go read my post from the 6th anniversary!). Or maybe talk about the fact that a Nintendo Direct aired today with the first news on Mario Party 10 since its announcement last June. Instead, I wanted to talk about our biggest change in the last two years: the community. I never would have been able to guess that such a community would ever form here on Mario Party Legacy. If a few years ago you told me you checked the main site of Mario Party Legacy on a daily basis, I would have thought you had nowhere else to go. Never did I expect to have such a vibrant and excited community like we do today.
I love Community Nights. I love being able to sit down and play these awesome Nintendo titles with the community that loves the site so many of us have worked so hard on. I love posting articles. I love knowing that the community is here are ready to comment and share their own thoughts (*Ahem* even if those thoughts are many times off-topic). I love recording The Lost Levels podcast. I love being able to provide a different and interesting way to interact with everyone that listens. I love having this community that loves to be a part of the site.
Of course, I need to make the usual rounds of thanking people. I need to thank the staff here at MPL for another year of awesome work. Specific thanks to 8B1T for his awesome work on the weekly Picture of the Day and Community Picture of the Day posts. Big thanks to Tyler Treese for starting and continuing many cool features and segments throughout the year, and another thanks to Vipsoccermaster for keeping us up to date on all the releases and other announcements throughout the past year. Thank you to the Forum staff for another year of holding down the old fort, thanks to Yoshiman222 for setting up and planning the Community Nights throughout the year, and finally a thanks to the The Lost Levels team for another year of awesome podcasts.
Who knows where Mario Party Legacy will go next. I don’t know what big change will come next. Whatever it is, I’m glad we have this awesome community to experience it with!