While the complete history of DDN goes back to 1999, It was one year ago that Velcor and I started Dark Diamond as the site it is today. Tired of only consuming entertainment and news from the Internet we decided to start our own site, and oh boy its just been more awesome as every day passed. Click the jump for some words on our first anniversary!

365 days, 1050 posts, 71,355 spam comments and 223,616 visits later I can proudly say DDN has a loyal readership, filled with awesome people who I thank from the bottom of my heart for every visit they make to the site. And its not been easy, many many hours of writing, image editing, frustrating coding and scouting parts of the Internet no one should have to ever visit simply so that the next morning you checked the site you found a brand new post (of varying quality) waiting for you. Whatever your opinion is about our update rate, always know that every post you see on the site is done with love.

And I couldn’t have done it alone, many many people are behind what DDN is today and yes, this is the shoutout part. I would like to thank Velcor, Blanc, Django, Pootie Chang, Fadsy, Luminous Path, FBINinja, and every other writer who has contributed to DDN. Also a great big shoutout to those from another blogs that made a big contribution to our growth: Brian Ashcraft from Kotaku who is responsible for a big chunk of our traffic, thanks a lot man, you are awesome! Faith Naked from The Girl Gamer, Destructoid, and many other places, for sending us news tips and linking us back then, James of Japan Probe for giving us some link love. Also the guys from Overtime Comedy, simply for being so great. Other people who I should thank are unnes, who’s sincere advice and critique kept us going through tough times, TwinDuct who also gave us support, Cheve the unofficial 3rd founder of DDN, all of the crew at our forums and of course YOU, the reader, we do this for you after all.

So happy birthday DDN! Here’s to many more years and many more awesome readers! I love you all!

-Ivan ‘Nahu’ Lozano

P.D. Celebrate in the comments and don’t forget to check our forums, where surely some sort of celebratory post will be started.