About Soundwave's Oblivion
Soundwave's Oblivion began back in 1999 on the now-defunct GeoCities. What started as a basic list to keep track of my personal Transformer toy and media collection has evolved into a comprehensive archive for Takara tech specs, photography, and site history spanning over two decades.
The Evolution of the Site
At the time, there were very few Transformer-focused websites and certainly very few that listed toy releases. I decided to make one myself and moved from GeoCities to another hosting company in 2001, expanding my toy lists to include Takara's Japanese releases.
Alongside my toy lists, I created a sub-website for toy photographs—initially using a flatbed scanner until I bought a digital camera. Knowing nothing about photography or light tents back then, the early shots were rough! Due to GeoCities' strict 15MB space limit, I had to shrink file sizes and manage multiple GeoCities sites before eventually merging everything together so toy lists linked directly to character pages.
I set out to build a single repository for all Takara Transformer tech specs and bios. Sourcing box-art scans and bio cards through auction sites, Japanese websites, and my own collection, I transcribed and translated the specs by hand. Initially, I only provided English translations because older browsers required special plugins to view Japanese text—though today, the original Japanese text is fully included and continually refined.
I launched a blog to keep the site fresh and share information that didn't fit into the main archive. Around this time, I invested in a proper light tent and a new camera, while streamlining the site layout by phasing out individual character pages.
I moved the main site from its previous homestead hosting over to Blogger to streamline updates. Currently, all photo sets are hosted in organized albums on Flickr linked to the main toy archives (with legacy sub-site links actively being updated as time permits).
Transformers remains a passion and great escapism for me. While work and family commitments mean I can't spend as much time on updates as I once did, I intend to keep expanding and improving the archive whenever I can. Thank you for visiting and supporting the site over the past 20+ years!
