Nine years ago this weekend, one Billy Berghammer created a website called PlanetN2000, and dedicated it to bringing its audience all the Nintendo Dolphin news it could lay its hands on. Since then, we've transitioned to being the leading GameCube news site in Planet GameCube, and now the largest independent Nintendo news and information site on the Internet in Nintendo World Report, keeping tabs on everything Wii and Nintendo DS.

It's kind of hard to believe we've been around this long, hasn't it? This is the second time I've given the birthday speech as Director of the site, and it's also hard to believe that it's already been a year since the last one I've given. I've been thinking about how long I've been dedicating myself to the business of informing Nintendo fans (nine years now, more or less), and how quickly the six years I've spent at PGC/NWR have literally just flown by. I know that everyone else who gives these kinds of speeches says things like that, too. But it's completely true! Time does fly.

I guess all the hard work makes you forget about the concept of time. It is a lot of hard work to do what we do here, and I appreciate all of those who are doing it for us now and that have done it before to get us where we are today. The work going on behind the scenes never ends here at NWR, and if you're a an astute reader of the site (of course you are), you will have noticed a few changes with the site.

The first, and most obvious change, was the addition of the brand new NWR Forums. The old forums, while functional, didn't serve our purposes anymore. The new forums were to be installed after we converted our current database over to a faster one, but a security problem appeared—one that may or may not have been leaked and exploited by a certain Community Manager who shall remain nameless—that caused us to accelerate our plans on that front. All in all, I'm glad we got it over and done with sooner instead of later. If you haven't been to the forums lately, you should check them out!

We've also had a few changes in the staff roll. Long-time staffer Mike Sklens is leaving the site after seven years of service. Former site Director and Reviews Editor Jonathan Metts has decided to semi-retire from the site. Jonny was simply too busy with his real life to write and edit for the site on a daily basis. While he'll still be the host of the Nintendo World Report podcast, Radio Free Nintendo, and will write the occasional game review, for the most part he's looking to do as little work as possible. Please let both of them know how much you appreciate all they've done for the site over the years!

Replacing Jonny as NWR Reviews Editor is aptly named Jonathan Lindemann. Lindy is another guy who has been here seemingly forever, and has picked up the reviews torch without missing a beat. You probably didn't even know he was the new Reviews Editor until now, didn't you? That's Nintendo World Report efficiency at work.

The new forums and staff changes are the first of several steps we're taking to bring you a Nintendo World Report that's better, faster, and stronger than it was before. All of the issues with the site being down and strange server errors that have been sporadically occurring over the past couple of months, for which I apologize profusely, are unfortunate growing pains that have come with our move to a brand-new server. You may have noticed sometime ago that pages have been loading faster and the general performance of the site has improved considerably. That's the new server at work. We aim to work out the kinks completely before not too long, after which the site should be loading so fast you'll wonder how you (and we) ever browsed NWR before.

The new server and new forums are pieces of a larger project going on behind the scenes at Nintendo World Report, which will culminate with a brand-new site with lots of new features that I can't talk about right now. Long-time readers of Planet GameCube/Nintendo World Report, and there are many of you, know that we really haven't changed our basic site layout since the "PGC Green" design years ago. We aim to change that to update the site to some more modern and a lot more useful for everyone. We're currently nearing the final design phases of the project, so hopefully I'll be able to bring you more information on it as soon as I can.

I would like to thank everyone who has been apart of our nine-year history, and am here to say that our tenth year will be our best ever. I'm super excited about the new stuff we've got lined up for everyone, and want it to get done as soon as possible. The work going on behind the scenes isn't going to affect our daily coverage of everything Nintendo, though, so you can rest assured that we'll bring you everything you need to know, every day.

Bring on year 10!