This article is not meant to be a history of Camp Hyrule, it’s a more personal take on what made this Nintendo virtual Summer Camp so special. Imagine this: It’s late summer, School is about to begin, you’re hyped for all the video game announcents made at E3 and space world. But before your summer break is over, you get to enjoy the annual Camp Hyrule and meet new and old friends in various Nintendo sponsored activities. It’s such a great concept that I can’t believe it was cancelled and hasn’t been revived in the current era.
Camp Hyrule started in the early era of web 1.0 in the 90s, really innovative at the time since building communities was not something many companies were doing and that’s what Camp Hyrule was. An experiment on how to use the internet to help brand awareness. The internet was still very new and companies didn’t know how to use it. It might’ve had a couple of technical problems at first but it was bound to happen. I mean how do you even do a virtual online camp in the 90s when you have modems slower than 56k speed and not much ability to load images. I might’ve signed up for Camp Hyrule 1999 but I am not certain I did, I remember the Nintendo website was quite basic at the time. My memories lie more with Camp Hyrule 20000 and after.
My expectations were already very high on my first camp, I imagined a virtual reality type of thing. I was still a kid and even if I somewhat understood the limitations of the internet back then I let my imagination run wild. I really liked the Camp overview as well as the Majora’s Mask Moon on top, felt exciting. You were assigned a cabin and there people would talk about what would happen this year, it seemed at least half or more of the users were from the Nsider forums or previous Camp Hyrules. There was no direct messaging and there were too many chat rooms so it was hard to make friendships. I’d rarely see the same people in the cabin.
So while you can argue Camp Hyrule was a glorified themed chatroom, it was more than that, there was still community involved. I was disappointed at first but quickly understood it was something special. One of the first tasks had the councelor talking to you and telling you to pick a name for your cabin. Sadly sometimes decisions were made when you weren’t there. It was still fun to choose a cabin name as well as choosing a cabin flag. And that was the point of the cabin system, you competed against other cabins by making challenges. Some of them were individual others were done in collaboration and depending the number of participants and the quality the cabins would get points.
The camp was only open for a week and you made the most out of it. Different chat rooms would open up at different times of the day and people would congregate to those events. For the most part you waned to be in the events that had people from NoA as it felt like nothing cooler than interacting with the people who helped bring the games you loved to life. Still it was always fun to go to the different chats.
The last day of the camp after the winning cabin was announced was always sad as you know you might not see most of the people you interacted with. The Camp’s mistery or tragedy was always resolved or happened in the end. They’d basically change the graphics of what happened, each year was different themed for the game or console being released like Super Mario Sunshine, Gamecube and GBA etc. The camp always ended in some tragedy of sorts and that was just tradition. You also had mini games that you could play, they weren’t particularly fun but they’re nostalgic for those who played them and luckily many of them have been archived online as they were flash games. And who can forget the mascot of Camp Hyrule Stumpy the How. Not a cow and not a horse, the most obscure nintendo character. He was always there and the fact that he was a Camp Hyrule exclusive character made him special.
Most of the early years I participated heavily in Camp Hyrule and sadly my cabin would never win at least not the first price cabin that usually got autographed posters, I ony ever got avatars and wallpapers when my cabin got third place or whatever. I can’t quite remember and information on what was given is scarce. My participation was diffeerent each year, with the Gamecube launch being te one I participated the most and my Cabin did the worst. It really was a team effort. I still remember that year I had a Game & watch fan art for a Smash type of activity and everyone ignored it, little did I and anyone know that Game & watch would debut as a New character in Super mash Bros Melee just a few months later. The one year I signed up and did not participate at all was 2005, I just signed up, perhaps logged in once that time and forgot about it. That time my Cabin won first place and that year they decided to give the best reward more than just a poster but a Camp Hyrule shirt, the best gift they ever gave to the winners and the only time they did something beyond posters. I felt I hadn’t earned it but at the same time all my hard work in previous years meant I did deserve some Camp Hyrule memorabilia which I keep to this day.
After that I decided to go all in the next year but if I remember correctly they didn’t do a full Camp Hyrule again, and the year after that it was discontinued giving fans only a chance to win a Link statue. Because of fan outcry they implemented some minigames from previous years but after that they just eliminated it. It was a sad time that they got rid of it, but unfortunately Camp Hyrule came at a time when Nintendo had a small hardcore following online so not many people cared, this was before the wii era and even Switch era so most of the fanbase it gathered during those years did not exist, just the dwindling fans from the late N64 and gamecube era. It was a nice experiment and it was a lot of fun. There’s not a lot of Camp Hyrule information out there and the info that’s out there is either not organized really well or told by people who didn’t experience the actual Camp Hyrule which leads to inconsistencies. One day I’ll try to write more about the history of Camp Hyrule in general and the potential of a new Camp Hyrule.