Museum

The predecessor to NinSheetMusic was a freewebs site called Video Game Sheet Music which was started by DoKoCo (later known as G-Han). Sheets were mainly from Mario and Zelda games and were created using Noteworthy Composer. They were available to download as JPEG images (scanned from printouts!) and as MIDI files. Users could also email in to request arrangements.

As freewebs had a storage limit of 50 files for free users, it was not long before a new home needed to be found.

Almost a month after opening, the VGSM freewebs site was moved to a new host and a new domain name, and was officially relaunched as NinSheetMusic (NSM for short). A portmanteau of Nintendo Sheet Music, the name was also inspired by NinSprites (now known as The Spriter's Resource), a spriting website of which NSM was a sister site.

Over its first year, NSM had 20,000 page views.

The first NSM forums were hosted on InvisionFree and were a place for arrangers, pianists and video game music enthusiasts to gather. The growth of the community was key to NinSheetMusic's early success, especially as more arrangers started to contribute sheets.

Now in a striking red and black!

The site also moved to nsm.nl.tt for a brief period, before returning to ninsheetmusic.tk on the 16th of June 2005.

Set in the Legend of Zelda universe, the NSM RPG was started by enthusiastic members of the NSM community and took on a life of its own.

An update to the red and black layout featuring a new banner by G-Han.

The new layout was based on the forum theme at the time and featured a set of banners made by Aquanistic which were displayed at random. Update entries were styled to look like forum posts.

Scroll away and back again to see the banner change!

Thanks to a few months of work by Jamaha, the site was completely rewritten in PHP (managing a database as dozens and dozens of plain HTML files was quite unwieldy!). The main visual change was the addition of sidebars, with news on the left sidebar and affiliates moved from their own page to the right sidebar. Sheet music was no longer a tab, but its own row and a sheet counter was also added.

The banner was also replaced with a new one (also made by Aquanistic) that melded better with the surrounding areas.

In addition to a new domain, the site also moved to a new host with improved capabilities. There was also a new news system powered by WordPress and a self-hosted forum. The site also got a slight makeover with the removal of the left sidebar and all the franchises now being listed in a row beneath the banner.

To celebrate the launch of the Nintendo Wii, NSM held Wii Month. With a shiny new banner, a plethora of new Wii sheets, and a race to see who could record the most tracks from the latest Zelda game, Twilight Princess, so that they could be arranged, there was plenty of excitement!

The names of the arrangers now appeared alongside each sheet in the archive.

A grey background, a new banner by Aquanistic, hover highlights when browsing the sheet archive, and the return of the sheet counter.

The site got a makeover with a new theme by Dekudude, a new banner by Aquanistic, and a big, bold sheet counter!

In just over 3 and a half years, NSM reached the 1000 sheet milestone.

For the first time since its launch, NinSheetMusic opened up submissions to music from non-Nintendo consoles. At the time the news received a mixed reception, but non-Nintendo music now makes up a significant part of the archive.

Following a site crash earlier in the year, NinSheetMusic returned. Unfortunately, a number of sheets were lost, pushing the total number back to below 1000. The forum also needed to be reinstalled from scratch and all of the old posts were lost.

It seems a change of direction was in order...

This time for good!

The site also got its first favicon . It was initially supposed to be temporary but it stuck and ended up being used for years.

The community kicked off the first of a series of customized social deduction and elimination games. Since then, the forums have hosted well over 100 games!

After being at the helm of NSM for over 4 years, G-Han stepped down and handed over the running of the site to long-time server admin, Jamaha.

Following the expiry of ninsheetmusic.net and unsuccessful attempts to renew it, the old domain was snapped up leaving NSM without a domain. Fortunately, a temporary home was provided at a subdomain of Drshnaps Productions, a gaming and spriting website.

Sheet updates also stopped following the loss of the .net domain as the old method of updating via FTP was no longer viable.

Having taken refuge for half a year at Drshnaps Productions, NinSheetMusic once again had its own domain.

After months of anticipation and frustration, the new sheet uploader was finished, allowing updates to resume. The first long-overdue update took place a week and a half later, breaking a 9-month update drought.

Up until now, the submission process revolved around submission threads per arranger. Each arranger would mark two of their arrangements in the opening post as being ready for submission. When it came time time to do an update, an updater would sweep through all the submission topics and either accept or reject the submissions.

To make things easier for the updaters, a new submission process was devised whereby an updater would make a single topic for the next update. Arrangers would then make a single post with their submissions, which would be edited with feedback from the updaters.

Encouraging everyone to follow the formatting and submission guidelines was not always easy and sometimes the updaters had to resort to some rather creative measures:

READ THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO A FLUSTERED CANARY.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO CHIHUAHUA WITH KIDNEY STONES.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO AN INCREDIBLY DEPRESSED RING-TAILED LEMUR.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO A LEFT-HANDED CHAMELEON.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO AN AMBIDEXTROUS CHAMELEON.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO A SALAMANDER WITH AN EVIL TWIN.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO A HAIRLESS CHINCHILLA.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO A VOLUPTUOUS WOMBAT.

READ ALL OF THIS OR I WILL FEED YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO AN EXCEEDINGLY METICULOUS GIRAFFE.

The old banner had been in place for a long time and also featured the old .net URL, so a competition was held to design a new one and the winner was Silva4520.

In response to community requests, PDFs were added as a download option for sheets. A project was also started to convert and upload PDFs of all the existing sheets. With almost 1600 sheets on the site, there was a lot of work to be done!

This one only happened once! Everyone present also had the distinction of surviving the "NSM Y2K".

This update also marked the culmination of the PDF conversion project, with all on-site sheets now being available as PDFs.

Arrangement Contests are an opportunity for arrangers to flex their creative skills as they complete wild and wacky challenges, such as reversing the mood of a song, re-arranging a song to be in an odd time signature or creating a theme and variations.

The Community Video Project was an opportunity for arrangers and performers to work together and combine their talents. After the series was chosen by community poll, performers were invited to claim which songs they wanted to perform. It was then up the arrangers to make sure that the performers had sheets to play from. The inaugural project featured the music of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, which were chosen by the community.

The site took on a distinctly Finnish flavour.

Now you can see which sheets everyone else likes too!

In addition to series, users were now able to browse arrangements for a specific console or by a particular arranger. Arrangements for Piano Four Hands and Two Pianos could now also be browsed separately.

To make the submission review process easier for everyone, a custom submissions system designed by Jamaha and The Deku Trombonist and Jamaha was integrated into the forums. With the addition of the NSM Panel, each submission has its own dedicated thread to discuss feedback on, and files are supplied directly to the system itself with automated functionality to update the site when a batch of sheets is ready to go.

After having a URL that looked like a shortened link for a number of years, the site finally returned to having a full URL!

Functionality to sort by release date (in addition to alphabetically) was added, making it easier to navigate through series with a long list of sheets.

In addition to the forums, the NinSheetMusic community has used several different chat platforms throughout the years. At this time, the Discord server was opened up, and it is still in use today.

With a healthy amount of sheet submission and review occurring after the introduction of the NSM Panel, the site hosted over 3000 sheets for the first time!

On this unsuspecting day, the first of hundreds of incarnations of NSM Guess-That-Melody Quiz was posted. Over the years, members have had maddening fun trying to identify various video game melodies from tiny snippets of sheet music.

After nearly a decade of overseeing site upgrades and operations, Jamaha handed the baton over to Latios212, an updater with several years of experience being involved in the site's and community's inner workings.

The staff shared the most amazing discoveries from the inaugural NSM archaelogical expedition.

And to think that in all those years no-one noticed the wrists were missing...

To celebrate NinSheetMusic's 15th birthday, a new layout by The Deku Trombonist was unveiled! With a new mobile-friendly responsive design, a new bright colour scheme and handier navigation via sub-menus, the site received a makeover worthy of the milestone.

4000 sheets! That's like 2000 sheets, but twice!

Selected from several user-submitted pieces of artwork, the site received a fresh new banner, favicon, and general-purpose profile picture from users KC Symphony and Sir Bone!

The site's colour scheme was changed to match the banner and consoles were listed alongside games in the archive, in addition to other improvements.

For each update, a list of new sheets on the main site is posted (and sometimes cross-posted to other social media channels as well). Starting here, a YouTube video for each update is uploaded as well to highlight excerpts from newly added sheets!

Our sheets might be be top quality, but our art is even better! See for yourself.

Scroll away and back again to see a different piece of art!

20 years after NinSheetMusic was founded, the archive expanded to hit 5000 sheets! This museum also opened up for the first time.