Today, 20th April, is the anniversary of the Fire Emblem series–its 29th one to be exact. To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d dig up a slice of Fire Emblem history that’s been partially lost to the sands of times: the various official Fire Emblem websites.

Now, as you’re probably aware, the Internet is an incredibly fast-moving landscape. One year of the Internet can feel like a decade–and decades, centuries. So when you try to look back at websites from long ago, it can be extremely hard to find them again.

Thankfully, there are “time machines (or capsules)” such as the Wayback Machine, which hold archives of many old websites. For this article, I’ll be relying a lot on those archives. But even archives can be incomplete, especially for more complicated media like videos and flash files.

Our first destination on this historical tour is the website of Intelligent Systems, the developers of Fire Emblem. Presently, their website mainly links to the Fire Emblem websites hosted by Nintendo. Although they do have pages for recent merchandise, soundtracks and events.

However, long ago, between late 1996 and early 2002, Intelligent Systems hosted their own Fire Emblem hub page. The design was fairly amateur and perhaps quintessential of the time period. There was a plain repeating background, chunky navigation buttons and a nostalgic visitor counter.

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