Quote Originally Posted by James24 View Post
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.