Last year the anniversary of AnimeSuki past unnoticed, but I decided not to let the same thing happen a second time. It is on this day, "second Christmas day" (in the Netherlands), otherwise simply known as December 26, that AnimeSuki as you see it was created, now two years ago. Unfortunately that time hasn't been without it's ups and downs. Allow me to tell me the story of how AnimeSuki started.

In the beginning
I registered the domain name AnimeSuki.com actually approximately 3 years ago (in 2001), quite a while before the site really got going. I registered it with the intention of putting a anime related site on it at some time, but oddly I didn't know what kind of site I would put on it yet.

Fast forward to October 2002. It's about this time I first got in contact with BitTorrent, when looking for episodes of Star Trek Enterprise in SVCD format (800 Mb/episode). After reading about the principles of BitTorrent, I figured it would be ideal for distributing anime fansubs as well. So I decided to start a site to distribute anime through BitTorrent.

Unfortunately, as lazy as I am, I didn't really get it off the ground. So near the end of November 2002 it was not my site, but a site called wirebrain.de (now: scarywater.net) run by "mxs" that hosted the first fansub on BitTorrent (as far as I know): Hikaru no Go 53 by Real-Fansubbers.

Still lazy, I didn't start my own anime BitTorrent site, but rather started to collect anime BitTorrent links in the forum of an emulation site that I own (The Emulator Zone). Eventhough the forum has been "reset" in the meanwhile, I've dug up an old backup. Click here to see how the thread looked like. Please don't mind my "clich?" avatar of that time.

After a while though managing that thread became to much to handle, so I decided it was better to put all links into a database and put them on a site. And since up until that time there was nothing on AnimeSuki.com anyway, I decided to put the database on it. So on December 26, 2002 the site was born. Click here to see how it looked like on that first day.

Note that at time I hadn't decided upon banning licensed anime off the site (as you can see by the Ghost in the Shell torrents). But that decision was made very quickly though after receiving a email about it - just two weeks later the links were gone. Click here to see how the site looked like about 2 weeks later (and how much new links there were already).

The popularity of the site quickly skyrocketed. While unfortunately the stats counter I had at the time is now gone, I can remember the site went from a few hundred visitors a day to a few thousand a day in just a few weeks. Popularity continued to grow after that and by today probably around 100,000 people visit the site daily.

Since then the list of torrents has grown so large it would be very impractical to list them all on one page. In fact a few months ago the AnimeSuki staff celebrated release 10000 in our database. Other trivia: the oldest torrent still alive in the database is St. Luminous Mission High School 13 and the oldest one still alive & seeded is SD Gundam MkI 1.

I should also mention that I couldn't have done this all by myself. From March 14, 2003 I have been aided by a great group of people, who by now pretty much do all of the work of adding new torrents to the site. A few of them who have been there since the beginning are warnold, xris and anime_layer. Later also NightWish and NoSanninWa joined the staff. However most torrents are added by JustAnotherFan these days and other staff hardly get the chance . I thank you all!
(I apologize for not mentioning any staff member who is no longer an active contributing member, you have my gratitude as well!)

Misfortunes
As I said before however, the past 2 years haven't been without it's downs as well. As many of you may know, in 2003 the site was plagued with many DoS attacks. My providers at that time didn't like this, requiring me to change providers several times. I must thank everyone who supported me through these times. Near July 2003 I got so fed up with it, that I decided to split up the site in mirror sites.

One of the people who offered to host a mirror also offered to host the main site, despite the possible problems this could bring, in exchange for putting banner advertising on the site. Since then there have been no major issues with hosting, at least none that I had to worry about personally. Thanks Mb81!

Then of course just this month there was the "MFI incident". I probably won't need to explain this to anyone anymore, but if you want to read about it, you can find the original article here. Unfortunately I fear that if AnimeSuki will have more misfortune in the future, it will be of this kind.

The Future
Will AnimeSuki still be here two years from now? Quite frankly I don't know. The fact is that both the kind of files listed on the site as well as their distribution method (BitTorrent) lay kind of in a gray area. But let's not get depressive about recent developments. For as long as it will be possible (forever hopefully) AnimeSuki will continue to bring you with the latest unlicensed English anime torrents!

Then there is another detail: you may notice the design of the site hasn't really changed much the beginning, nor have there been any other major improvements for over a year. For this I apologize. I am working on something new, but: please don't ask about it or wait for it, no ETA has been set and I don't want to make promises I can't keep.

GHDpro
Admin, AnimeSuki.com

Discuss
If you want to discuss this article, see this thread on the AnimeSuki Forums.