While a couple of people have volunteered to be a counselor so far, more help would certainly be welcome!

Counselor

The responsibilities of a counselor boil down to moderating your cabin blog and your cabin chats. You’d basically be periodically checking up on your cabin during the day and ideally there will be at least 2 counselors to a cabin so that you could work in shifts if need be or just help each other out in general.

Amphitheater

Counselors aren’t all that’s needed though. Camp Hyrule vets may remember the Amphitheater that hosted Q&A sessions with Nintendo employees. This year, the plan is to make the Amphitheater an askblog featuring various Nintendo characters. If you feel like you’re able to fill the shoes of a Nintendo persona, that’d be a big help!

The plan is for it to be an askblog that responds with pictures. You don’t have to be a wiz at art, just as long as it’s recognizable and it’s something you’d enjoy doing. If this idea doesn’t pan out that way, it could be reconsidered to just settle for less art-intensive posts.

Contact

And those are the major things that need volunteers right now. You don’t have to be a counselor if you just want to help run the askblog or vice versa, and if you want to help out with both that’d be fantastic! Either way, send a note if you’re interested.

Status

Main goal is to have 10 counselors. And we have plenty! Thanks for you help everyone!

There are now at least 5 people helping out with the Amphitheater. This is a good minimum, but we’re definitely willing to take in a few more volunteers.

wariofan63:

Camp Hyrule Maps 05 & 06

And we continue down Camp Hyrule memory lane with the next two years.

2005 was Twilight Princess inspired and took place on a literal map! This year Camp was cursed by the shadow of the Twilight Realm which deviously turns everything into sepia tone. By recovering the elusive and mysterious Stumpy Stones over the week did we finally give life back to CH, only for it to be tragically ruined by a fire. We just can’t win!

2006 took cues from Super Mario Galaxy and was all space-themed. This time around camp hotspots were spread over various “sectors” so there was some extra navigation involved this year. The big problem? The Camp’s Gravity Generator busted and caused various camp hotspots to float away! Recovering generator parts restored camp bit by bit, and it was actually neat how this time around more chatrooms would open up every day. Now its not Camp Hyrule unless something goes wrong on the last day, so what happened this year? A blackhole opened up and time warped camp all the way back to 1998! Camp Hyrule’s destruction was itself!

Luckily, nothing went wrong in ‘98 the first time around so campers were sent home safe and sound and incidentally 8 years older!

What did these two years in common? Both were based on games that wouldn’t be out for another year. Especially in 2005’s case because Twilight Princess was delayed during Camp Hyrule! Talk about bad luck, that probably hurt worse than the fire!

If you want funtimes like in Camp Hyrules of yore, you should sign up for a new one I’m hosting!

wariofan63:

Camp Hyrule Maps 03 & 04

The maps for the next two years of Camp Hyrule!

In 2003, every day a part of the camp would be ruined and then by the next morning after it was “fixed”, a whole other part of camp would go down. On top of that the electricity to all the cabins were out all week and it took the counselors four days to get them up and running again! On top of THAT, a crack was gradually forming throughout the week which cumulated in a giant earthquake. It was, without a doubt, an incredibly rough year.

And if you visited the Final Fantasy Library on the cliffside there and solved a mini-game, you’d get access to a secret map! It was just more chatrooms but it was a thrill to just have this second map of CH around. Amazingly, it was immune to that year’s chaos!

2004 started normal enough, although it doesn’t show it in this photoset, this year the solar panels at the top of the DS Factory were broken. Yes, Nintendo decided to host a summer camp around the one factory that makes DSes. And it just so happened to be solar powered. When they finally fixed all the panels, wouldn’t you know it, a ginormous rainstorm happened and flooded the entire camp. We just can’t catch a break!

Oh but you want to know a cool thing? Some very amazing people managed to archive these maps as they were during Camp! Do you know what that means? It means you too can see what it was like to explore the maps of Camp Hyrule Past!

Seriously check it out! I mean none of the links work but check out those Flash skillz!

Explore CH ‘03

Explore CH ‘04

If you want Camp Hyrule to be a thing in your life, you should sign up for a new one!

wariofan63:

Camp Hyrule Maps 97-02

I was originally gonna do these isolated but I figured a photoset would be better.

Anyway This is what Camp Hyrule maps looked like from 1997-2002. You can see early on they had a realistic lookin camp going before switching to a cartoonier art style in 99.

2000 is when they started having fun with it and doing little storylines. That year they had the Moon crashing down cause Majora’s Mask was about to come out. I remember there was secondary plot that year where Waluigi stole the Camp Tennis Tournament Trophy or something like that. And then he used the apocalypse as a distraction for his neferious schemes.

2001 was all about the Gamecube’s blueprints being stolen! That’s right, apparently Nintendo entrusted top-secret plans of their upcoming console to a summer camp. You had to play little mini-games based on Luigi’s Mansion and Pikmin to “win” them back. As it turns out the fiend who stole the blueprints and ripped them up was Wario! At the end of last day he let Bowser loose and the entire Camp was on fire. 

2002 was backwards and actually STARTED with a mess! And being all Super Mario Sunshine-based, day-by-day campers gradually restored it back into it’s former glory. I mean yeah ok we spent the whole camp cleaning but dangit if it wasn’t fun! The culprit was Shadow Mario which actually turned out to be one of the counselors. He got to see first hand what happens to people who defile Camp Hyrule by being sentenced to camp jail. Nasty places those virtual prisons.

Side note: I really like how 99 and 00 have similarities. That kind of continuity is rarely seen in Camp Hyrule! Then again when camp is destroyed practically every year I guess it has not choice BUT to move right?

Side Side note: Finding pictures of 97, 99, and 00 proved really tough and it was thanks to the archival efforts of a friend of a friend that I can post them here today. Enjoy that!

If Camp Hyrule sounds like funtimes, you should consider signing up!

It’s a free virtual summer camp where video game fanatics can become immersed in the world of Nintendo!

At least it used to be.

Camp Hyrule was an annual summer event held by Nintendo of America for one week every August from 1995 to 2006. It consisted of chatrooms, daily contests, cabin competitions, flash games, an interactive map, and even interviews with some bigwigs at NoA.  In later years, there would be a fun little story attached that would usually be related to an upcoming Nintendo thing, like the Gamecube blueprints being stolen or the camp being covered in graffiti.

Cabins would compete with each other every year to win a prize which ranged from posters to T-Shirts. Points were awarded simply by participating in the daily activities such as writing a theme song, photoshopping a camp counselor, or even just submitting a flag idea for your cabin. Even if you weren’t in the winning cabin, you still had a chance to be drawn for a grand prize that was usually the new hit console or game that year.

In 2007, Nintendo held the last Camp Hyrule but all the community aspects were taken out. No cabins, no chatrooms, no daily activities, no goofy plot. All that was there was a sweepstakes to win a big Link statue and some of the classic flash games. After that Camp Hyrule was kaput.

5 years later, I thought I’d take a shot at reviving Camp Hyrule right here on tumblr! The Cabins and contests and activities will be handled with tumblr blogs and the chatrooms will most likely be hosted on IRC.

If you’re interested then all you have to do to sign-up is follow this account! This year, Camp Hyrule will be held from August 6 to August 12. So if you want to participate, make sure you’ve followed by then.

Hope to see you there!