Year: 1998-2006
Date of Archival: May 2nd, 2021
Run by: Video Gamer X
Originally hosted at: www.tbi.net/~max & www.odysseyofhyrule.com
Status: Incomplete
Archive Link: Click here
Video games were once a mysterious medium. Vast worlds sat at our fingertips, packed with secrets, oddities, mysterious treasures, and stuff just waiting to be found. When you tossed in things like rumors, Gameshark codes, cut content, and magazine scans, you ended up uncovering what felt like a vast conspiracy about your favorite games and that lead to the rise of playground rumors, hushed whispers on the internet, and a bunch of enthusiasts doing everything they could to plumb the depths of the games they loved. And few games in the late-90s and earlly-00s were as loved as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
The Odyssey of Hyrule was for a lot of people, myself included, a one-stop-shop for all kinds of bizarre glitches, oddities, and rumors. People would go to this site and share their stories with Video Gamer X and some of them would lead to some really interesting places. Some of them, of course, were just bunk, but that was all part of the fun, really. One of arguably the most memorable moments was when Ariana, a teenager from Colombia, had the entire fanbase convinced it was actually possible to find the Triforce in OoT! Her hoax was quickly debunked, but at the time it just shows that all it took was some ingenuity, some whispering in the right ears, and some convincing image manipulation, and you could make people’s brains run wild.
This is one of the first websites that really dove deep into what at the time was called the “Beta Quest”. We know now that the Beta Quest was just ways to GameShark yourself into the maps used for cutscenes, but for a 1999 audience this stuff was new, exciting, and more than a little creepy, like we were trespassing in places we were never meant to go. There was a sense of danger and wonder, one that was only exacerbated when more games joined in the fun.
There really wasn’t anyone quite like Video Gamer X. Growing up, I mostly stuck around The Odyssey of Hyrule and The Oddity of Hyrule, as OOT and Majora’s Mask were my jam, but now that I’m older I find that the VGX website is a boundless rabbit hole stuffed to the gills with information, stories, shared experiences, game and product reviews, and a fascinating look into a period of gaming where PlayStation vs. Nintendo and Zelda vs. Final Fantasy ruled the world. VGX had opinions on anything and everything, an entire section of their website dedicated to personal thoughts on events such as the fight for marriage equality or the tragedy of 9/11. Websites were strange back then, and I think this place really captures that feeling of discovery from a time before the web was scary like the ocean and was more scary like an unknown frontier – or perhaps like the “Beta Quest”. From a beautiful and passionate Sephiroth defense piece calling him one of the most tragic villains in media, to an unfinished Xenogears review, to the Ariana Almandoz saga, The Odyssey of Hyrule and VGX as a whole is a cultural turning point frozen in time, a primary source ready for perusal.
VGX’s website continued on until around 2006, with sections dedicated to Final Fantasy 8 and 9, the Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and plenty of other little reviews and sub-fan-sites. In order to reconstruct what I could of this site, I attempted to merge VGChat’s archive of this site with the archive from the original URL. This does mean that there are some links that lead to the external URL and to places that are gone for good, so be careful about clicking on any footer links. There are also plenty of dead images, and tragically some articles and pages that cannot be recovered. However, an attempt was made.
I highly recommend going on a deep dive on this one. To me, it’s just as interesting now as it was then, if not moreso because of the firsthand cultural context and knowledge and benefit of hindsight. As mentioned, I tried to archive what I could, though I did actively choose not to host the music on my own server. I did archive all of it, though, so I recommend opening this in a new tab for maximum nostalgia. I do dearly wish I could fully recover this one, but as it stands I think it’s as complete as it’s gonna get. I just hope you all have as much fun searching for the Triforce as I did.