Oct. 19, 2014

In 1995, Jennifer Diane Reitz, Dov Sherman, and Stephen Lepisto joined forces to create a new web site. This web site, dedicated to software influenced by and related to Japanese anime and manga, was hosted on happypuppy.com. As this new site grew, it became clear it was going to go places. So, in 1996, the three registered the domain name, otakuworld.com.

OtakuWorld was initially centered around Dov's Big Kiss Page, which was dedicated to the art of Kisekae, or paper dolls, on the computer. Jennifer and Stephen added a number of other areas, including Kamishibai (a program for telling stories in the Kamishibai fashion but on a computer), Otaku Mascots, and the ever-popular "Toys", featuring games and screensavers, among other things. Other areas came and went over the years.

The site was initially free for access since it was supported by happypuppy.com. When OtakuWorld got its own domain name, it was supported by advertising and remained that way for almost five years. Then the dot-com bubble burst and ads no longer were enough to support the site. In 2001, OtakuWorld imposed a subscription to keep the site on the web. This worked for many years and we continued to update the site.

OtakuWorld has been on the web for over 18 years. For a variety of reasons related to this process some call Life, each of us has moved on to other interests. As site updates grew less and less, subscriptions fell off. This is to be expected, of course. As of today, there will be no futher site updates (of course, there have been no updates for almost two years, but I'm making it official as of today).

For those of you who subscribed in the past and who contributed content over the years, thank you. Thank you for keeping this delightful site on the web for so long. I know many of you grew up with this site and are even surprised the site still exists, largely unchanged, since you were young(er). We are each happy that we could create something that was a part of your life, even if it was a small part. Thank you.

Also as of today, I have removed the need for subscriptions to download anything from OtakuWorld. If you choose to link to anything on the site, please link to the page the download comes from. Please be aware that the programs on OtakuWorld were written for (considerably) older versions of various operating systems and might not run well - if at all - on modern operating systems. We are sorry, but we cannot help you overcome this. The Web is a vast resource of knowledge that might help.