Koopa Keep Turns Ten

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - So I'm at least 10 years old, right?

Welcome back to KoopaTV, y'all. Back at the start of this wonderful site I mentioned the Enlightenment Movement, and said I started an organization called Koopa Keep in 2004. That time in 2004 happens to be March 6, 2004. So it has now been ten years since that time on the Nintendo NSider Forums when the "Koopa Base" thread was made on the Power On forum. That's Nintendo of America's official forum.

I'm not really sure how to present that it's the ten-year anniversary. I feel like no one is interested in a history lesson. So if that's the case, then I'll leave this here from last year for your enjoyment. Read on for history anyway. And... lessons!

Koopa Base was the organizational thread for the pro-Koopa side in NSider's early Koopa-Yoshi war. As you know, I'm a mayhem-maker. So I was known as Ludwig the Yoshi Killer. It was my "thing". Kind of a jerk thing, but you know, King Dad's orders. And it's not like the Yoshis ever cared when they killed Koopas back.

So obviously I was outnumbered because the prevailing logic is that Yoshis are cute (look at the thumbnail in the video above) while Koopas are those evil dudes you're meant to squish. But we quickly grew in members. I signed off, and then the next day, there was a "Bowser's Castle" thread made by NINTENDOGAMEMASTER who was a higher rank than me (ranks were based off amount of posts. While I joined NSider three days after it was formed on November 24 2003, he posted a lot in chat threads) and he proclaimed it the sequel to my thread. Well, okay, I was still in charge!

So the Yoshis decided to finally organize themselves. Yadda yadda yadda, we had some wars, got other stuff involved, and I basically brought military roleplaying to NSider. We made a lot more friends (and non-Yoshi enemies), and one day Nintendo admins said "no more roleplays in Power On we're making Power On (RP)." Since obviously we started a trend. You know, copycats.

It was when we were on Power On (RP) that we used the name "Koopa Keep". Before then our sequel thread names were like "Koopa Palace" and "Koopa Island". Koopa Keep stuck, though. And NINTENDOGAMERMASTER kept making our threads. Koopa Keep was... like, our 9th thread or so. And we actually stayed in it this time.

It was on Power On (RP) we had the traditional story-based RPing going on, based on trying to go after those evil plumbers ruining the world. We tried things innovatively, though. Back before the Internet matured to its current state, image uploading services weren't as widespread and image editing tools weren't either. And the ability to print screen was considered a rare skill (many people learned what the PrtScn button was then). NSider had this cool HTML Graphical Editor thing and I basically made maps out of that using coloured letters and spaces that were updated frequently on our progress of going from Point A to B. Good times.

The next thread was Koopa Keep 2. Something about revolutionary stuff. And we stuck by that name until Power On (RP) closed and roleplays were banned from NSider. You know, heavy-handed Nintendo admins are a thing whether it's the Nintendo NSider Forums or Miiverse.

We internally called ourselves by Koopa Keep, and so did everyone else. So that's what we went by. Along the way, we made our own forum (Planet Koopa, which is now KoopaTV's Intranet site) and sponsored the intellectual movement, the Enlightenment Movement.

Perhaps our most enduring contribution is also our most private one: Our [Koopa Keep] AIM Blast! Once described as a years-running talk show between myself and Rawk, it's now going through a bit of turbulence considering that whole leave-of-absence thing. But turbulence isn't necessarily a bad thing given all the talk we've done on KoopaTV about staying in an echo chamber and how that's bad. We can have our childhood traditions, but the world is changing with or without us. Is the world's "progressions" a good thing? I think having that anchor is important.

I consider Koopa Keep to be my most successful community development project (sorry, everyone else, but you know, I'm Ludwig, Prince of Koopas). So my management style was pretty much guided laissez-faire. That's how things should be in general. NSider strongly influenced how I approach forums, and Koopa Keep strongly influenced how I approached NSider and running things.

I imagine most people reading this have no idea or don't care about this type of thing. That's okay, you wouldn't know. It's okay if you don't. But you probably have something that's parallel to Koopa Keep to me. I mean, it was pretty much my first leadership experience for anything. It might be a bad thing that it's my most successful example of my leadership because that means I haven't done anything as successful in ten years. But again, that's okay. It's hard to top that.

Koopa Keep hasn't Brawled yet tonight, which is the last opportunity to ever do that. We're going to though.


KoopaTV itself turned 10 in 2023.