Kingdom Hearts Ultimania is on ‘Silent Mode’

Back on May 3rd, 2004, I created Kingdom Hearts Ultimania out of a geeky passion to track and know everything I could about the then-in-progress development of Kingdom Hearts 2

I also wanted to create the best and most useful collection of Kingdom Hearts 2 information on the web. Every single image, video and storyline snippet.

As the site grew, other people volunteered to get involved, translating and sourcing images, videos and news direct from Japan before anyone else. We even once got hold of leaked content from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories resulting in an overnight cease & desist from Square Enix themselves.

After a few years of hard work, it paid off and we became the biggest source of Kingdom Hearts information on the Internet. The site received 80,000 unique visitors on the release date of Kingdom Hearts 2 – a number that astounds me to even today.

We also created a popular forum with thousands of passionate members who discussed, argued and theorised every element of each game – who is BHK? What did that secret movie mean?

Some members ended up making real-life connections, joining the moderation team and landing jobs in the video game industry.

What amazes me now is this was all way before Wikipedia, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook or Twitch either existed or were useful resources for Kingdom Hearts fans. Today, that’s where the community largely is – on those platforms.

I’m really proud of what the site became, how it’s progressed and the impact it made on my life alongside so many others.

But, it’s time to put the website on ‘silent mode’ – over the past few years (or really, ever since the release of Birth By Sleep), activity on the site has quietened down – moved on to other platforms or fantastic sites like KH13.com or credit it to it, KHInsider (the longest standing site in our community now) – and the effort put into growing the site has paused also.

Churro has kept us going, thanks to his incredible talent and contribution to the Kingdom Hearts community, but I’m officially ‘letting him off the hook’ so he can use his time elsewhere – better spent on more active communities.

Today, I run a digital marketing agency, called Kaizen, where we help businesses gain traffic to their website through techniques like SEO and Content Marketing.

To be clear, we will no longer be actively posting news and archive the forums.

I’d like to give my heartfelt thanks to Churro, Damien, Kupo Mog, Jiminy Cricket, SakuChan, Tidy, Declan, Yukeh, Tinny, Ryusuke, Mors, Ruby, Gaia, Shay, Ursula102, Aquarius, DDDB and the countless other contributors, moderators and members throughout the years – we would of never created the amazing community we did if it wasn’t for our wonderful teamwork.

Churro will be continuing to manage the Twitter and Facebook channels for now posting up the latest Kingdom Hearts developments and news.

Thank you, and goodbye.

Pete Campbell – @petecampbell
Founder of Kingdom Hearts Ultimania