Otaku Project is the brainchild of shadycrzy.

In 2006, shadycrzy cooked up the idea as Amish Otaku when he and a bunch of other anime, gaming, and comic nerds all lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or thereabouts. The name originated from the location (a lot of Amish communities live in and around Lancaster) and from the Japanese word which—in the present day in the United States, at least—describes anime and manga fans, and can often extend to video game and American comics fans as well.

On January 1, 2007, the first print edition of Amish Otaku was released simultaneously with its website counterpart (which is now defunct). Between January 2007 and October 2008, AO staffers managed to write pretty regularly, but interest had leveled off. After that, the print version was sacked and the website was updated irregularly until July 2010, sometimes with months between posts. By that time, shadycrzy and his writers had taken a long hiatus while they worked on other projects.

In March 2011, one of shadycrzy’s writers, V.E., asked him what had happened to the Amish Otaku website (it had been taken down) and mentioned that she was still interested in writing for the publication if he was still interested in running it.

Finally, in April 2011, Otaku Project rose from the ashes. All of Amish Otaku‘s archives have been moved to OP and we’ll continue to write about anime, manga, comics, and gaming as long as we have a keyboard and a mage to resurrect us when we aggro all the baddies and are completely overwhelmed.