Kyle Morell

The big one was the original Nintendo Nsider forums, which were active from 2003-2007. These was the official online community for all things Nintendo; I remember joining in 2005 or so when i was 10 years old, when my more internet-savvy friend introduced me to it. There were boards for all of the main Nintendo series, but also for the latest releases—it seems weird and myopic to have an entire board dedicated to the DS remake of Diddy Kong Racing, but it was wild times back then. Despite that, the most popular board was its off-topic, heavily-moderated “Power On” board, where everything was fair game.

It was really the watershed moment where I became an “internet kid,” moving on from flash games and corporate sites to actual communities. I owe my internet literacy to those formative years, I think.

I remember very clearly that my username was BKWHOPPER, because I was hungry when I thought of it.

I don’t remember many, but the ones I do, I remember very clearly. The first was NOA_Andy, that is, Nintendo of America Andy. The moderators and admins were all official NOA staff, and NOA_Andy was the “face” of the site, and I remember him being a fairly strict moderator, which made the rowdier members of the site kind of bitter. The other big moderator was NOA_Shaun, who was immortalized by one user, YOUNGLINK, in a fanfiction where he turns into a pickle and raises an army. As you can imagine, this was a lot of preteens on the internet for the first time, so there was a huge current of “random” humor.

The only users I distinctly remember were immensely popular artists on the forum: YOSHI1118, a.k.a. “YoshiMan,” who in retrospect produced cartoons that were BRIMMING with fetishes I was too young to recognize back in the day. When Nsider closed, Yoshiman was actually one of the founders of its spiritual successor, Nsider2, but more on that later. The other artist was HUNGRYMINIBOMBKART, who produced a sprite comic called “Shy Guy Tale” that was, without a doubt, the hottest thing on the forum. Everybody loved it and the was a practical celebrity on the site. Other than that, I don’t remember any members, nor any that I remained close to (that I first met on those forums).

HUNGRYMINIBOMBKART wasn’t the only person making sprite comics—everybody was making sprite comics back in those days, so much so that a referendum was held on the Kirby board because there were more comics than there was actual discussion about the games.

Every sprite comic I ever made, all the posts I ever wrote back then, they’re all gone. Quality image-hosting like Imgur just didn’t exist back then, we had to use dinosaurs like Photobucket, TinyPic, and ImageShack, which have all kind of broken down, taking all of those artifacts with them.

They’re irrecoverable, and there’s such a melancholy to knowing I’ll never be able to read these comics that my ten-year old self treated as so important and had so much fun making. They were my earliest creative endeavors that were posted online, and now everything about them is gone, gone, gone.
If I could recover anything, it would be those comics, not just mine and not just for me, but everyone’s comics, for everyone who ever made, read, or enjoyed them as a kid.

I wanted to briefly let you in on what happened why Nsider closed down, and what happened after. The forums closed right after the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, with you’d think would be a huge time for the forum, but essentially, it was getting too big for its own good and the moderation staff was having too hard of a time preventing the spread of personal information between members (remember, these were kids, and the sharing of friend codes was forbidden on the forums due to safety concerns). The forums closed and were replaced by general, Yahoo Answers-esque tech support forums. In its wake, the Nsider refugees flocked to a ton of different forums, and everyone was trying to be the one to found the “new” Nsider on shitty Invision or php forum websites. Hell, even I got into the mix, but even the names of the crummy sites I made have been lost. The eventual successor was Nsider2, founded by various high rollers from the original site like YoshiMan, and I stayed there for a few years until corruption, drama, and mismanagement from the moderating staff turned me (and many others) away from the site. From the looks of it now, it appears to have been officially pronounced dead by its sole remaining administrator around the release of the Nintendo Switch. How the mighty have fallen!

I suppose the ubiquity of social media in the 2010s onward, and sites like 4chan and Twitch where people can readily find popular chatrooms or threads about anything and everything, killed forums like that.