November 6, 2006. To the best of my recollection, this was the day that I first appeared here. We’d opened the place about a week, perhaps two beforehand. At the time that crazy cat Ash was still around, and we would speak often about the way things were running, constantly bouncing little ideas off each other regarding ways to improve the site and better its presentation.
Kingdom Hearts is something I don’t hold a particular connection to. I loved the first game, and think that much of Yoko Shimomura’s work in the music department is stunning, but ultimately my adoration of Square died the day the PlayStation 2 was born. Or maybe it was the day they merged with Enix. Either way, I was never 100% committed to the site’s content. If it wasn’t for Ash laying down the generic vision for where we would go and what we would report on, I doubt I would have continued my stint here very long. I was working at three other sites, and two of those entailed some rather large responsibilities – FF Insider was a huge place, and only continues to grow. The other site, which can not be named these days, was officially linked to Nintendo, and led to invitations to full-scale gaming conferences on the other side of the country.
Kingdom Hearts 3.us (known as ‘Kingdom-Hearts-3.net’ at that time, I think) was a blog site. There was no real money in it and we were numbering as few as a hundred readers a day in those early months. Yet, Ash continued to persevere, and through the constant support of Rey we continued to work towards dreams of creating something bigger, a few steps at a time.
We reached a thousand viewers a day, and we celebrated. We were planning a full-scale forum. Then Ash disappeared and left myself and Rey with the keys to castle. Months passed without communication, and it wasn’t until sometime in late 2007, more than six months after his disappearance, that he made contact with us again – he had moved to a rural area without any computer or internet access, and would be gone indefinitely.
To this day, we have barely moved from there. An excellent new design from Nova (Nero? What was his name again…?) was one of the final things that happened before we fell into this pseudo-hibernation. Yet my friendships with all the wonderful users in the comments section, and my respect, admiration and belief in the dreams that I shared with Ash led me to this point today.
So I would like to bid you all a hearty goodbye, a good luck! I’ll still be around every once in a while, and reporting (kind of) regularly at Final Fantasy Insider.
Other than that, I’ll ask you all to give a very warm welcome to our new man of the house, Jake, from our sister site Final Fantasy XIII.us! Jake will be running both sites now side by side – trust me, he’s great and knows exactly what he’s doing!
Talk to you all in the comments sections!
Many thanks for a wonderful three years,
Michael Garling
“GoldenEyeRa”
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