About AnimeHistory.org
Written by Sarutobi — Webmaster — British Columbia, Canada
This site exists because I got nostalgic, got obsessed, and then got a server. In roughly that order.
▸ Where This Started
I downloaded Dragon Ball Z: Seed of Might - a fan remaster of the original Japanese broadcast source, fully color corrected from the original video. If you have only ever seen DBZ through the Funimation release, you have never actually seen Dragon Ball Z. The difference is not subtle. It is the difference between watching a film and watching a photocopy of a film.
That experience sent me down a rabbit hole I have not climbed out of. Fan restorations. Fansub groups. The history of how anime actually got to the West before there was any official infrastructure to bring it here. The IRC channels. The BitTorrent trackers. The one-person websites with MIDI background music and a hit counter. The community that built itself out of nothing because it wanted something that did not exist yet.
I wanted to document that. So I built a site.
▸ Who I Am
I go by Sarutobi. I am a developer from British Columbia who started writing code seriously on PHP 3.2 - back when PHP 3.2 was current. I predate WordPress. I predate HTML 2.0 as a standard most people cared about. I was matching keywords with regex before Twitter existed and before anyone had thought to call that kind of thing a "recommendation algorithm."
I built anime fansites in 2004 and 2005 - hand-coded, no CMS, no framework, no Stack Overflow. Just a text editor, an FTP client, and an unhealthy amount of time. Those sites are gone now. Most of the internet from that era is gone. That bothers me more than it probably should.
I drifted away from that kind of development for a while. Frameworks got popular. OOP became the default. Laravel happened. Everyone started abstracting everything until you could build a full application without understanding what the application was actually doing. There is nothing wrong with that - it solves real problems - but I missed something about the old way. I missed earning the logic. Knowing exactly why something worked because you built every piece of it yourself. That feeling of a system clicking into place that you designed from nothing.
This site is me getting that back.
▸ What I Actually Watch
I should be honest: I do not watch a lot of current anime. The golden era that this site documents - late 90s through mid 2000s - is where most of my genuine enthusiasm lives. DBZ, Naruto, FMA, Cowboy Bebop, Bubblegum Crisis. The shows that built the Western fanbase.
That said, I am not a complete fossil. When something exceptional comes along I pay attention. Dandadan is exceptional. If you know, you know.
I also watch live action. A lot of live action, actually. Anime is not a personality - it is one part of a broader interest in storytelling, world-building, and the kind of obsessive craft that goes into making something people will still care about twenty years later.
I listen to house music more than anime soundtracks, which probably disqualifies me from some kind of authenticity contest. I accept this consequence.
▸ Why This Site and Not Something Easier
I am not particularly artistic. My creativity does not go into visual design or illustration - it goes into logic, systems, and the architecture of how things fit together. Building a points economy that gates content behind genuine community engagement is, to me, more interesting than picking a color palette. The system IS the creative work.
I could have set up a Discord server. I could have started a subreddit. I could have made a YouTube channel or a Letterboxd account or any number of things that would have been faster and reached more people immediately.
I built a PHP fansite from scratch instead. Procedural PHP, hand-written SQL, a single router, no framework. The way I would have done it in 2004 - except better, because I know more now than I did then. That choice is deliberate. The friction of building something properly is part of the point.
The internet got very good at making it easy to consume content and very bad at making it rewarding to contribute to a community. This site is a small, stubborn argument in the other direction.
▸ What This Site Believes
Information wants to be free. Fan culture built something real before corporations figured out there was money in it. The people who stayed up until 3am translating scripts and encoding video files and seeding torrents did more for the international reach of anime than any streaming deal ever did - and they did it for nothing except the love of the thing.
That deserves to be documented. That deserves a place that is not optimized for engagement metrics or quarterly revenue. That deserves exactly this: a fansite, run by a fan, for fans, with a hit counter at the bottom and a forum where you have to earn your place.
No ads. No algorithm. No premium tier. Just the stuff.
- Sarutobi
AnimeHistory.org - British Columbia, Canada - 2026
Rebuke the Future.
