My name is Zack, and I first created Saiyan Warrior back in 1997, shortly after buying a book on HTML and CSS. I was a kid at the time and the Internet was a much, much different place back then compared to today. You can browse WayBackMachine to get a glimpse of what it was like, but this doesn’t quite capture the experience of what it was like to manage a website and to interact with the other similarly-aged fans of everything Dragon Ball back then.
To put it into perspective, there were probably only between fifty and one hundred actual Dragon Ball fan websites when I first started. Yahoo and its kid-oriented search engine, Yahooligans, were extremely popular ways to discover new websites. There was no Google, there was no Facebook, but there was a special sense of community among us that pings my nostalgia meter every time I think about it.
I was part of a community that was discovering the Dragon Ball universe for the first time when you couldn’t just look information up on Wikipedia. There was tons of misinformation, tons of rumors, but I loved every second of it.
By the time 1998 rolled around, Saiyan Warrior appeared above even the official DBZ website on Yahooligans, which was awesome news for kid-me. The site averaged around 100,000 hits/month and I was overwhelmed from an average of 100 emails a day from fans asking questions about the DragonBall series or content on my site. Even to this day, I’m in awe over how amazing the DB community is, and though maintaining a website was difficult as a kid, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
Around 2000, I gained some amazing help from a friend and fellow aspiring website developer, Justin. We met after I overheard him talking about DragonBall Z after Tae Kwon Do class and I was amazed that someone else had heard of the show. Though he’d helped me several times before with web design advice, it wasn’t until 2000 that he official became part of the site and gave the site a badly needed makeover and content update. It’s hilarious to the two of us now, but at the time, we had constant issues with finding a reliable place to host our website. Hosting in general wasn’t nearly as accessible then as it is now, and if you were a broke kid, that meant bouncing around from free hosts like Angelfire or Homestead, or making deals for a spot on someone else’s web server. If you ever read the archives of our old updates, you’ll see that several of our posts deal with migrating the site or asking if anyone had a lead on a place to host our site.
Here are some of the earlier design incarnations of Saiyan Warrior, cringe-inducing updates and all.
Though it had always been a struggle, school and other activities meant I didn’t have time to update the site as often as I liked, and constantly hopping from host to host lost its charm. As a result, I closed the site down and let the domain name expire. Though it saddened me to close that chapter in my life, I always hoped to one day open it again…Though I had no idea it would be well over a decade before I acted on that dream.
After finishing up my degree at graduate school, I decided it was time. With a mixture of nostalgia and excitement for the future, I relaunched Saiyan Warrior in 2016 with the hopes of reconnecting with the amazing community of which I was a part so many years ago.
