Announcement Regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development

[Russ]

www.zeldaclassic.com[/URL] or Armageddon Games from any of their links either at purezc, github, or any of the rest of it. Moreover they have been going around to Zelda sites and removing or altering the history of the zeldaclassic project even though AGN has been the home of Zelda Classic for 25 years! purezc is entirely complicit in this act of betrayal.

Hey Gleeok, hope you're doing well. Speaking on behalf of the PureZC Staff here.

We just wanted to touch base around a few things you have stated around PureZC's involvement - and us being "complicit" around the ZQuest Classic devs and their moving of the repo.

First off, an apology - while we did scrub most links to AGN at the time, removing acknowledgement of AGN's contributions to ZC development was a mistake. We have decided to restore those acknowledgements on our About page.

In the days after the repo pull, you approached us regarding the status of the repo ownership - David and I agreed with you about moving it back. We began conversations with the ZQuest Classic dev team to try to intermediate and facilitate a return.

In the meantime, you posted the "Announcement regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development" thread on PureZC. This thread served nothing more than to agitate the community further in the wake of the monetization proposal from the ZQuest Classic devs, as well as deadnaming several of the ZQuest Classic developers in the process. The handling of the entire situation by the AGN devs was disappointing and frustrating to say the least.

You declared us "complicit" after the PureZC staff held a poll in regards to pre-emptively banning you from the website - a poll that ended with the majority of PureZC staff voting *against* the ban. You had access to the moderator forums as a show of good faith courtesy of being a ZC dev, and in response you leaked remarks around your own ban poll, as well as other internal discussions. As a result, the website was DDOS'd out of spite for three weeks by another member of the community.

While the work they have done should be recognized, PureZC does not agree with everything the ZQuest Classic dev team have done. Frankly, we've had our share of frustrations with them. However, our priority is the community; one that is currently in a state of decline accelerated by the entirely unnecessary monetization proposal from the ZQuest Classic devs, the repo pull, as well as the fallout between them, AGN, and the wider community.

Finally, for the sake of clarity, while PureZC will not platform accusations of malicious intent toward the current developers, we maintain our stance as a neutral party regarding ownership and the status of the repo. We acknowledge AGN's contributions towards Zelda Classic, as well as what is now ZQuest Classic. We just want to grill, man.

[Gleeok]

Do you have some examples of these sites? I've heard nothing about any such effort, and find it unlikely given how little outreach the ZC community has had. We're pretty isolated and have barely put in any effort to advertise the program to the greater internet or even other Zelda fan sites lately despite declining interest. So I'd be surprised to hear if someone did put in that effort.

I'm also kinda surprised that PureZC actually removed the AGN link on their about page. Pure is one of the slowest moving sites I know and they got on that change with unprecedented speed. I'd have figured they'd just forget it was there. There's probably more links buried in the forum's many old pinned topics that they have forgotten. In fact...Yup, there we are.


Are you at liberty to share anything about the planned direction for the AGN repo and what cruft is being done away with? Understandable if it's all being kept hush-hush for the moment, just curious how the two versions will differ and why users would want to pick one over the other.

Ask and ye shall receive Moosh, ask and ye shall receive:

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Zelda_Classic

To further show that intent is clearly evident we don't even have to look further than the initial correspondence after the incident:

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So who is this Connor fellow anyway? Does anyone even know? He is the only one that refused to even have a conversation at all, and couldn't be bothered to give me or anyone else the time of day when confronted. If any past dev contacted me for any reason, even one I have never personally talked to before, I would reply and give a helping hand if need be; it is simply common courtesy. What kind of sociopath commandeers a 25-year project like this after just over a year of working on it and claims that "it's for the greater good" while the actions in and of themselves create more toxicity and division than what he perceives based on 3rd-hand information of past events he has no direct knowledge of (and I assure you he doesn't know the half of it). In his mind he thinks to be a giant, but only by standing on the backs of others - such as Phantom Menace, Dark Nation, DarkDragon, to name a few - has anyone been able to enjoy the view from that height. These people, and many others, have done more for this community than he ever will. By claiming "because Zoria" and throwing everyone else into an "all of agn" box, he can then just point to this lowest common denominator 'box', which is nothing more than a projection of his own ego, and justify his actions to turn himself from a villain to a hero. It is absurd!!! What nonsense! And here too I shall remind people that words have meaning: 'justify', from Latin means to 'make just', or 'make right'. In other words, in this context it can not be, as to 'make just' something which was unjust in the first place is impossible.

So yes, we are not hiding anything as anyone can plainly see. So who is hiding then? Maybe it's time to bring everything out into the light and cast out the darkness.

[Gleeok]

Hey Gleeok, hope you're doing well. Speaking on behalf of the PureZC Staff here.

We just wanted to touch base around a few things you have stated around PureZC's involvement - and us being "complicit" around the ZQuest Classic devs and their moving of the repo.

First off, an apology - while we did scrub most links to AGN at the time, removing acknowledgement of AGN's contributions to ZC development was a mistake. We have decided to restore those acknowledgements on our About page.

In the days after the repo pull, you approached us regarding the status of the repo ownership - David and I agreed with you about moving it back. We began conversations with the ZQuest Classic dev team to try to intermediate and facilitate a return.

I do appreciate you putting Phantom Menace and AGN back in the credits, and I will take that as an olive branch. But unfortunately this matter is not settled. While I am glad you realized you made a mistake and saw fit to remedy a part of it, on the purezc main site "Zelda Classic's Homepage" still links to zquestclassic and AGN is no longer an affiliate even though VG music and spriters resource is? It's a joke. Also your account of events is disingenuous still (see below):

In the meantime, you posted the "Announcement regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development" thread on PureZC. This thread served nothing more than to agitate the community further in the wake of the monetization proposal from the ZQuest Classic devs, as well as deadnaming several of the ZQuest Classic developers in the process. The handling of the entire situation by the AGN devs was disappointing and frustrating to say the least.

I came to you and the other site admins on September 14th after every effort to reach out to the other devs was met with failure, or worse, as was the case when War Lord and Emily were on the agn zelda classic discord discussing the situation when Tim "decided to break ties with agn completely" and deleted the zc server.

This correspondence ended on your end on Sep. 19th, where I showed a bit of urgency and tried to get you guys to get somewhere in the next two days, and yet I waited a whole week until Sep. 25th for you guys to try and effect what you said you were wanting to help with. I initiated additional messaging to the zquest devs during this time after the 21st, and again was met with no desire to negotiate, or respond in the case of Connor. So whatever intermediation you did at that time was obviously a failure.

Then Sep. 26th came which was two weeks after the incident and we decided to make it public so the community could be informed. You see Russ, that was the last-ditch effort to try and get someone to come to the negotiating table. We don't go around banning users willy-nilly and threatening devs. We always try and treat everyone working on the project as family. Personally, I think half of the zquest devs would of rather preferred to stay on agn going forward and eventually working with new and old devs had they not been forced to deal with the aftermath of the Connor repo transfer, even though some might of dealt with it badly as a tribal sort of thing.

So again, Sep. 19th was the last I ever heard from you or another admin on the topic. And my last three messages went by with no response. To claim this was "in the meantime" and it interrupted anything you were doing cannot possibly be based in reality. How can you even claim this?

You declared us "complicit" after the PureZC staff held a poll in regards to pre-emptively banning you from the website - a poll that ended with the majority of PureZC staff voting *against* the ban. You had access to the moderator forums as a show of good faith courtesy of being a ZC dev, and in response you leaked remarks around your own ban poll, as well as other internal discussions. As a result, the website was DDOS'd out of spite for three weeks by another member of the community.

I just have to say first and foremost that your "pre-crime" staff threads are a step too far by any accounting. This is simply me speaking as staff myself and hoping you will try and end this type of behavior.

That's a nice story, but unfortunately it's just that, a 'story'. I'm not some random staff member that gets triggered by trivial matters such as getting "hurt feelings" from drama or anything of that nature. Look at every single one of my posts on purezc since 2007 and find me a single one that will give credence to any such claim. It doesn't exist.

And again, for the DDOS I had nothing to do with that. If you don't know why purezc was 'attacked' then I don't know what to tell you. You might want to try and talk to some members or even ex-staff outside purezc. I'm sure they will be happy to tell you. Someone might even be so kind as to post it in here for you to see.

As for the kangaroo courts you run, well it's already a meme at agn! and I wasn't even around during those years for any of that.

The handling of the entire situation by the AGN devs was disappointing and frustrating to say the least.

I don't know about anyone else, but I was nothing but friendly and cordial to yourself and the purezc staff. If you want to make up stories to try and make yourselves look good then you can only fool the low hanging fruit. In reality you are not fooling anyone.

The lies have to stop. Seriously. The community deserves better than this tit-for-tat bullshit he-said she-said nonsense. You're not going to make everyone look good on the purezc side, and I'm not going to make everyone look good on the agn side either. The sooner you understand that purezc is not as innocent as you make it out to be, the sooner we can make progress on any front.

The lies must end Russ. The lies must end.

[Moosh]

Ask and ye shall receive Moosh, ask and ye shall receive:

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Zelda_Classic

Ah yes, it's this. Someone else also sent me this page after I asked, so I figured that'd be one of the sites. Your post indicated there were multiple. Anyways, if you take a look at the edit history, this page was both created and edited by the other dev team in the past prior to the removal. So it fits the pattern of removing the link from their other sites. Fortunately for you, it is a wiki page. You can uh...you can edit it back. Or better yet, instead of starting an edit war, you could dispute the changes with ZeldaDungeon and have their moderation make the call and lock the page from further changes. I'd recommend doing that if this is something you actually care about.

I'm ignoring the email exchanges as it's all old news at this point, however...

So yes, we are not hiding anything as anyone can plainly see. So who is hiding then? Maybe it's time to bring everything out into the light and cast out the darkness.

Is the AGN development server not private while the other one is open to all? I'd love to see what progress you've all been making, but when I asked Nightmare (only AGN member I'm in any sort of contact with currently) about the dev server, he made it sound like I wasn't welcome there. Fair enough. I've made no friends over here. I dare say our relations are casually hostile. But what I care about most is ZC. So I'm asking again: Why not sell me on what you're doing? What kind of program are you developing here? What are your features, what's your focus, and why should I care? I would gladly cooperate with my worst enemy for the greater good of the program. What do you actually think the greater good looks like?

[BFeely]

Is the AGN development server not private while the other one is open to all? I'd love to see what progress you've all been making, but when I asked Nightmare (only AGN member I'm in any sort of contact with currently) about the dev server, he made it sound like I wasn't welcome there. Fair enough. I've made no friends over here. I dare say our relations are casually hostile. But what I care about most is ZC. So I'm asking again: Why not sell me on what you're doing? What kind of program are you developing here? What are your features, what's your focus, and why should I care? I would gladly cooperate with my worst enemy for the greater good of the program. What do you actually think the greater good looks like?

Yes, in fact the ZQuest Classic repo is completely public, and can be cloned by anyone, and forked and PRs submitted by any GitHub member.

As for the Zelda Dungeon wiki, I created the Talk page for the wiki page and made a few edits.

[Gleeok]

Finally, for the sake of clarity, while PureZC will not platform accusations of malicious intent toward the current developers, we maintain our stance as a neutral party regarding ownership and the status of the repo. We acknowledge AGN's contributions towards Zelda Classic, as well as what is now ZQuest Classic. We just want to grill, man.

Look Russ. I'd really just like for this to be settled so we can move on. I'm sure everyone here has better things to do, and I know I do. I really meant it when I said the community deserves better than all this nonsense that should of been avoided with some simple common sense, and I meant it.

I don't see what the problem is. If you want to support the zquest devs you just put up links to their stuff on your site. I already told you in September that we like people working with forks, and we also have no problem with the zquest devs working on a parallel project, and as matter of fact I already wished Emily best of luck with their project. What does this have to do with removing all the Zelda Classic and AGN links? These are two separate things. If you were really 'neutral' as to Zelda Classic you wouldn't have removed them in the first place and just added new zquestclassic links as I already stated. So again, what is the problem? It's really not that complicated. If any new ZC fan site popped up I'm sure it would do the same. Can you please just fix your mistake honestly so we can be done with it. This has been dragging out for far too long already.

[James24]

Here's my two cents on this whole issue. Its relevance will become clear to this whole issue of betrayal as you read it but please bear with me for the opening. Zelda Classic was only a success in its early days thanks to one thing - the marketing and the money put in by Nintendo to sell NES Zelda to the children of the 80's. When those children grew up and became young adults in the early 2000s, they made what they idolized in their childhood - Zelda. NES Zelda. And NES Zelda was a near perfect emulation of the original NES Zelda that everyone grew up with and loved dearly - myself included. Therefore its success was virtually guaranteed. And boy was it successful. I still remember vividly the early days of Zelda Classic when it was first released in 1999 and 2000 as do you I'm willing to bet. A smash hit success.

Time passed. The children of the 80's grew old. Over the years, Nintendo released new Zelda titles with new themes and tastes. Collectively, I call these new themes and tastes type A. Sadly, type A is incompatible with the NES Zelda of old which was more challenge and combat focused (type B). A new generation of type A Zelda players emerged and saw the success of Zelda classic. Wanting to emulate it for their own type A interests, they signed on to become devs of Zelda Classic hoping to make a program that emulated their type A vision of Zelda.

Whilst it is relatively cheap and inexpensive to emulate NES Zelda, the same is not true of modern type A games. It is much more expensive to emulate a modern type A Zelda game than an old NES retro game simply because a lot more time and resources need to be spent programming the most exhaustive and expensive list of features. A fact that is manifested by the monetization drive that the 2.55 devs have started. Also, numerous people I've encountered have told me privately that money is a key reason that hinders their contributions. Zoria and P-Tux have publicly acknowledged this in the past as well as numerous others who wanted to keep their names private.

I've been keeping tabs on the 2.55 devs and their monetization and according to Patreon, it's around $80 US a month. Tell me - what kind of time can you devote to something that pays you $80 a month?? But let's just imagine a hypothetical world where the 2.55 devs magically managed to get massive amounts of fanbase funding. You know what would happen then? Nintendo would rush to shut the whole thing down faster than you can say "copyright infringement". So the only hope is that someone silently sponsors them. Someone rich who loves Zelda Classic and wants to see it prosper. One such person was me. But I refused funding on the basis that the community would be making type A quests in the eventuality they were really able to get a workable type A Zelda Classic program working. They banned me over this. Of course, they will deny this and make their usual excuses but we all know the real truth behind pure's "courts".

My bottom line to you Gleeok is this - my funding ban on type A is going to kill pure's type A community sooner or later. More devastating than any DDOS attack. Unless there's some other wealthy benefactor willing to silently rescue type A, death is extremely probable. At least you can rest assured in the knowledge that I avenged this betrayal and that type A and pure are "currently in a state of decline" as Russ puts it. They won't get far.

You and I are old type B dinosaurs from the 80's Gleeok. Now you see the true colours of type A and what they really think of us. They want to wipe out any and all trace of type B out of fear it will detract from them gaining more type A support and popularity. They fear that if new players see old type B dinosaurs they will abandon their new type A Zelda and that is the real reason why they delete all links and acknowledgement of AGN and Zelda Classic. Whilst I have a funding ban on type A, my wallet is definitely open to type B and to any children of the 80's who idolized NES Zelda.

[bigjoe]

Here's my two cents on this whole issue. Its relevance will become clear to this whole issue of betrayal as you read it but please bear with me for the opening. Zelda Classic was only a success in its early days thanks to one thing - the marketing and the money put in by Nintendo to sell NES Zelda to the children of the 80's. When those children grew up and became young adults in the early 2000s, they made what they idolized in their childhood - Zelda. NES Zelda. And NES Zelda was a near perfect emulation of the original NES Zelda that everyone grew up with and loved dearly - myself included. Therefore its success was virtually guaranteed. And boy was it successful. I still remember vividly the early days of Zelda Classic when it was first released in 1999 and 2000 as do you I'm willing to bet. A smash hit success.

Time passed. The children of the 80's grew old. Over the years, Nintendo released new Zelda titles with new themes and tastes. Collectively, I call these new themes and tastes type A. Sadly, type A is incompatible with the NES Zelda of old which was more challenge and combat focused (type B). A new generation of type A Zelda players emerged and saw the success of Zelda classic. Wanting to emulate it for their own type A interests, they signed on to become devs of Zelda Classic hoping to make a program that emulated their type A vision of Zelda.

Whilst it is relatively cheap and inexpensive to emulate NES Zelda, the same is not true of modern type A games. It is much more expensive to emulate a modern type A Zelda game than an old NES retro game simply because a lot more time and resources need to be spent programming the most exhaustive and expensive list of features. A fact that is manifested by the monetization drive that the 2.55 devs have started. Also, numerous people I've encountered have told me privately that money is a key reason that hinders their contributions. Zoria and P-Tux have publicly acknowledged this in the past as well as numerous others who wanted to keep their names private.

I've been keeping tabs on the 2.55 devs and their monetization and according to Patreon, it's around $80 US a month. Tell me - what kind of time can you devote to something that pays you $80 a month?? But let's just imagine a hypothetical world where the 2.55 devs magically managed to get massive amounts of fanbase funding. You know what would happen then? Nintendo would rush to shut the whole thing down faster than you can say "copyright infringement". So the only hope is that someone silently sponsors them. Someone rich who loves Zelda Classic and wants to see it prosper. One such person was me. But I refused funding on the basis that the community would be making type A quests in the eventuality they were really able to get a workable type A Zelda Classic program working. They banned me over this. Of course, they will deny this and make their usual excuses but we all know the real truth behind pure's "courts".

My bottom line to you Gleeok is this - my funding ban on type A is going to kill pure's type A community sooner or later. More devastating than any DDOS attack. Unless there's some other wealthy benefactor willing to silently rescue type A, death is extremely probable. At least you can rest assured in the knowledge that I avenged this betrayal and that type A and pure are "currently in a state of decline" as Russ puts it. They won't get far.

You and I are old type B dinosaurs from the 80's Gleeok. Now you see the true colours of type A and what they really think of us. They want to wipe out any and all trace of type B out of fear it will detract from them gaining more type A support and popularity. They fear that if new players see old type B dinosaurs they will abandon their new type A Zelda and that is the real reason why they delete all links and acknowledgement of AGN and Zelda Classic. Whilst I have a funding ban on type A, my wallet is definitely open to type B and to any children of the 80's who idolized NES Zelda.

I am a child of the 80s who idolized NES Zelda. I just have a somewhat fractured mindset about it. I never boiled it down to a black and white, one or the other type dealio. I tried to make experimental quests that were challenging and caused players to improve without throwing the full weight on their back. I compromised on one too many occasions and my quests suffered in their vision for it. Take Triforce Knight. Level 5 was going to be my crowning achievement. But someone ragequit and i thought to myself "is this what I want from my player base?" Now, I have a somewhat laughable quest out there. Yet in all of its escapism there is a desire to reboot it. Or to make it more true to its roots.

Although in the past Ive had a stark distrust of you comparing my game design capabilities to that of a dog, I find myself more and more appreciating the clever way you perceive Zelda Classic.

[James24]

Yes, I remember trying Triforce Knight a long time ago. I think I got stuck somewhere and then quit. But I don't recall that it was challenging. Maybe it was like that when level 5 came around but I couldn't get that far. As for engaging with the audience and making compromises with them, I'd advise you to read my three laws of quest making. Basically, you should never do this unless the audience is paying you substantially. No compromise without cash. Ask yourself - have they ever compromised their type A difficulty to suit type B??

Finally, if anything truthful and frank criticism should increase trust - not decrease it.

[Hergiswi]

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