Origins
The history of YoyoYoshi Hub stretches back to June 1999, during a very different era of the internet. Long before YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, or modern social media platforms, much of the Nintendo community lived on personal websites built by individual creators.
This site began as one of those personal websites.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nintendo fansites often functioned as miniature communities of their own. A single site might contain walkthroughs, reviews, fanfiction, forums, contests, rankings, newsletters, affiliate networks, and daily updates maintained entirely by individual creators.
What eventually became YoyoYoshi Hub started as a collection of small Pokémon, Mario, and Nintendo fan sites built by hand and updated whenever time, school, internet access, and aging computers allowed. The names changed constantly, pages moved between hosts, and different ideas, communities, and projects kept folding into each other over time.
Some of the oldest parts of the Hub’s history trace back to Nintendo 64 Paradise and Maroshimon World, which both originally began during that period before eventually growing into larger sites years later.
During the early 2000s, Nintendo 64 Paradise also operated as a major subsite within Nintendo Freaks, a larger staff-run Nintendo fansite network originally hosted at nintendofreaks.8m.com. Nintendo Freaks connected forums, reviews, walkthroughs, contests, fanfiction, chats, staff pages, sister sites, affiliate networks, and multiple creator-run Nintendo projects across the early fansite web.
By the standards of that era, Nintendo Freaks and Nintendo 64 Paradise had grown into fairly large independent Nintendo community sites. The online gaming web was smaller and more decentralized, and manually maintained sites with original content, active updates, affiliates, forums, and interconnected communities carried much more visibility than similar-looking sites might appear to today.
Over time, the smaller sites gradually evolved into Nintendo 64 Paradise, with Maroshimon World running alongside it. On July 6, 2001, Maroshimon World was officially merged into Nintendo Paradise, turning everything into one larger hub of guides, fanfiction, game pages, community experiments, rankings, and whatever else seemed worth building at the time.
Names and Identities
Much of the site was written under different names over the years, including Toad, Yoyo Yoshi, and Lugia007. They were all the same person using different identities across different phases of the site’s history.
Early Web Network
One of my earliest major side sites was MKATT, or Mario Kart Advance Time Trials, which I created before Mario Kart: Super Circuit had its finalized English title. The oldest surviving updates currently preserved on the site date back to August 2001.
During those early years, most of the site centered around the games and things I personally loved at the time, including Mario Kart 64, Pokémon, Nintendo 64 games, walkthroughs, forums, Nintendo news, fanfiction, rankings, events, reviews, newsletters, early community pages, and random side projects like basketball tournament simulations. A major part of the site during that era was fanfiction, especially the Yoshi Pokémon Adventure Stories.
A lot of the feeling of that era is still reflected directly in the updates themselves: GeoCities, FreeServers, AngelFire, affiliate buttons, AIM culture, manual HTML editing, forum communities, late-night updates, and constantly trying to keep sites running whenever hosting services broke or disappeared. Along the way, the site was briefly tied to Nintendo Freaks and Sacred Melon Realm while also surviving multiple hosting moves, hacking problems, broken layouts, lost pages, and repeated rebuilds.
Nintendo Paradise International
On October 6, 2001, I announced plans to expand Nintendo 64 Paradise into Nintendo Paradise International, or NPI, which was intended to become a much larger Nintendo fansite covering more than just Nintendo 64 content.
Only a few weeks later, on October 21, 2001, both MKATT and parts of the site were hit badly while my main computer was also dealing with virus problems at the same time. That period involved lost pages, broken layouts, damaged files, and multiple rebuild attempts across different hosts. Even during the chaotic stretches, though, I usually rebuilt things instead of abandoning them.
Throughout late 2001 and 2002, the forums and community side became a huge part of the site's identity. Names like DarkRush, Void, Ground Pounder, El Kabong, Evil Refrigerator Guy, and others appeared constantly throughout the updates and surrounding community during that era.
Walkthroughs, AWN, and Yoyo’s Island Paradise
By late 2002, walkthroughs and strategy guides had become a much larger focus. On December 14, 2002, I officially released the first public version of my Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire walkthrough after spending a huge amount of time working on it and continuing to revise it afterward.
Around 2003, I also became heavily involved in the Advance Wars community through AWN, or Advance Wars Net. From 2003–2005, AWN became a major part of my online life through forums, Design Maps, community interaction, walkthroughs, and broader Advance Wars-related community work.
The site itself kept evolving throughout 2003 and early 2004 with new pages, forums, Nintendo sections, and rebuilds before another major transition arrived in 2004. On March 20, 2004, the site officially became Yoyo’s Island Paradise during a GeoCities-era rebuild.
awRev and the Long Gap
After that came the original awRev era from 2005–2007, which grew into one of the larger independent Advance Wars community sites of that period of the internet. During the height of the Advance Wars: Dual Strike era, the site combined walkthroughs, guides, tournaments, Design Maps, forums, custom systems, strategy discussion, fan projects, and large-scale community participation across multiple interconnected sections and communities.
The original awRev era remains an important part of the modern Hub ecosystem, which now directly links to awRev while also reconnecting Design Maps and community continuity tied to both awRev and AWN.
After 2007, I gradually drifted away from active fansite work and eventually disappeared from most of the Nintendo site scene for a long time. For most of the 2010s, many of the websites, communities, guides, and creator projects that had defined the earlier era were no longer actively connected to each other.
The broader internet changed during that gap as well. Many personal websites, fan communities, and independent creator networks gradually disappeared or became inactive as forums declined and social media platforms became dominant. By the late 2010s, much of the earlier Nintendo fansite culture had largely faded from public view.
Even then, not everything disappeared. Walkthroughs remained available on GameFAQs, old pages survived in backups, scattered videos and records stayed online, and pieces of earlier projects continued to exist even when the larger creator ecosystem no longer did.
Modern Return
In 2021, I started my YouTube and Twitch channels, which became my first major return to long-form Nintendo creator work after many years away. Those channels eventually became a major part of the modern Hub, connecting live streams, full video playthroughs, walkthrough support, tutorials, multiplayer footage, and long-form gaming projects into the same wider ecosystem as the websites.
GameFAQs remained one of the most important continuity threads across the gap. Even when the websites were dormant, the guides continued to exist, reach readers, and preserve years of gameplay work. By the 2020s, new guide projects began reconnecting that older walkthrough history with the modern creator ecosystem.
In 2023, I won a GameFAQs FAQ of the Month award for my Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp guide. By the 2020s, the guide work had expanded far beyond the early AW1, AW2, Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal, and Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire walkthroughs from the 2000s. New and updated work now includes Re-Boot Camp, Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Mario Kart 64, Pokémon Red/Blue, FireRed/LeafGreen, Pokémon GO, Mario Tennis Fever, Life is Strange: Reunion, Mario Golf 64, and other guides, tutorials, and walkthrough projects across GameFAQs, YouTube, and the Hub itself.
In 2026, I won another GameFAQs FAQ of the Month award for my Mario Tennis Fever guide. Around the same period, the modern Hub expanded through full YouTube playlists, video walkthroughs, Twitch integration, competitive records, and new site sections that did not exist during the original 2000s run.
By the mid-2020s, the challenge was no longer creating new content. It was reconnecting two decades of existing work that had become scattered across websites, GameFAQs, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, old backups, and surviving pieces of the early Nintendo internet. The modern Hub grew out of that effort, bringing together projects, communities, guides, videos, competitive history, and creator work that had once existed separately across multiple eras of the web.
April–May 2026 Rebuild and Expansion
In April 2026, both YoyoYoshi Hub and awRev were rebuilt into larger connected hub ecosystems linking together walkthroughs, videos, Design Maps, guides, forums, older Nintendo web projects, AWN map history, retro-web sections, fanfiction, competitive history, and entirely new pages built decades later.
The relaunch was not only a return of old material. It also brought in major modern systems and projects, including Discord communities, Twitch streams, YouTube playlists and full video playthroughs, the Mario Kart 64 Switch Multiplayer Hub, rebuilt awRev Design Maps infrastructure, Elo rankings, searchable match history, player pages, quarterly snapshots, latest match pages, Discord and Twitch stream routing, modern GameFAQs walkthroughs, and new cross-site hub architecture tying everything together.
By May 2026, the Hub had expanded again with the Pokémon Hub and Mario Golf Hub. The Pokémon Hub brings together Pokémon walkthroughs, YouTube playthroughs, TCG Pocket videos, Pokémon GO tips, and long-running series memories. The Mario Golf Hub brings together the Mario Golf 64 beginner’s guide, Mario Golf 64 tutorial video, Super Rush videos, speedrun history, and series memories.
At the same time, awRev continued growing with restored guides, Design Maps community features, Discord, guide and fanfiction submissions, Battalion Wars material, Re-Boot Camp walkthroughs, full YouTube campaign and War Room playthroughs, Advance Wars: Dual Strike work, and expanded Advance Wars resources.
Nearly three decades after the first site was created in 1999, the modern Hub serves as a bridge between multiple eras of Nintendo creator history. What began as a small collection of fan sites evolved through Nintendo Freaks, Nintendo 64 Paradise, MKATT, AWN, awRev, GameFAQs, YouTube, Twitch, competitive gaming communities, and countless other projects across the changing internet.
Today, the Hub brings together those previously scattered pieces into a single connected archive of creator work, community history, guides, videos, competitive accomplishments, and Nintendo fandom spanning more than a quarter century of online history.