What "lost" web page would you like to find again?
What was your favorite web page back in the day that you would visit religiously and tell all your friends about but have since lost? Did it shutter permanently or did you lose the bookmark when switching computers never to find it again?
Back in the days of printed web page yellow pages and search engines you had to submit your page to be reviewed before it was listed, I had found a page about movie easter eggs, errors and insider information. It had factoids about nearly 1000 movies ranging from obscure facts, mistakes in editing, anachronisms, funny on-set stories and the like.
It was fun to read that this character was named after the art directors niece, the stunt car is visible losing 8 hubcaps in the main chase, etc. It was amazing to read how different movies would interact (IIRC, Kim Bassinger's gasp/jump reaction to opening the door in "Batman" was real due to them having a xenomoprh from Aliens there instead of Jack Nicholson since they were filming at the same time). It was also cool to read that certain characters made cameos in other movies (most people caught that Randolph and Mortimer Duke from "Trading Places" were in "Coming to America" but there are so many other not as obvious blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos). I never would have noticed the car visible in the background of Johnny Cage vs Scorpion in the orchard fight in "Mortal Kombat" without this page--and now I can never unsee it when I watch it.
I don't know if I lost the bookmark or if the page shut down so I deleted it but any search I've undertaken for this page in the last few decades only seems to return listicles like "21 obvious anachronisms in modern movies!" but not my all comprehensive target.
Honorable mention to Damn Interesting (although I did find that one again after a few years). Although it's underwent some turbulance and changes since I first disovered it, I would often reread the articles and gleefully looked forward to each new article when I was younger. With article names like Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom it was hard not to be intrigued.
This isn't exactly a "lost" web page. Cartoon Network still has a site that exists. This just isn't on it.
They used to have a multiplayer deck builder game system called gToons. The quick version is that there would be a color and a theme for the cards and you would play and try to cancel out the opponent cards to nullify both of your cards or try to stack points yourself.
As an example, if you collected all of the characters from Ed, Edd, and Eddy and placed them next to a Jawbreaker then you would get a ton of points, but if your opponent played a Jawbreaker then the rest of the characters were quite low value. You would want to have some point builders in your deck but some defensive plays just to hamstring the opponents.
It was by no stretch the most complex game in the world, but it was fun to my 9 year old self. They had a trading system where you could buy and sell the cards and buy packs of cards. I think you got currency by navigating around their site every day.
I have found a few screenshots over the years but not a full lost of the cards. One day I would like to host a remake of the game for the six people on the planet with this particular piece of nostalgia. It would not be very hard to program, I just want to get all of the rules correct.
Edit: Poking around a bit this morning thanks to the kick from this post, I did find a remake of the game. Very excited to play a few rounds and get stomped by everyone else.
Ah, some of the games that have been lost..
My friends got into playing a game called Acrophobia that was a complete blast. So many laughs out of that game. Amazingly some funny "drama" from that game too when I somehow gained a stalker/enemy for being good at the game. I see in the bottom of the wiki article that there are some similar games listed. I will probably give them a try with my kids.
I sometimes think these are the things overlooked in modern games. Is it fun? Is it unnecessarily complex? To me games don't need cutting edge 3d game engines with trillion pixel models or arcane, seemingly random game mechanics with an incredibly low chance to succeed to be fun. There is certainly a place for games that have those things, sure, but it seems like games are getting more complex for the sake of being considered "modern." I know it is all preferece, but I'd rather play "easy to explain but difficult to master" type games like Tetris or Starsiege: Tribes over games where 30% of the keyboard is a keybind or you can only craft this basic quest item in this zone during this weather event on a Tuesday that is an odd number day of the month, etc. (Maybe for the best gear in the game, sure but not a randomly needed quest item).
I loved Acrophobia! I could play for hours, and as you said, it got ridiculously hilarious.
Man I remember that, it was a fun game but I don't remember much besides CN and trading cards.
My lost game from CN is a toonami game where you explored a spaceship filled with aliens and robots. I remember it playing like pokemon mystery dungeon. I don't remember enough to put together a decent Google search to find it though.
IPGX?
https://toonami.fandom.com/wiki/Lockdown_(T.I.E._Game)
Is this it? Pardon the fandom link.
I don't remember this card game, but I do remember Cartoon Network games. There was one that was Kids Next Door and trick or treat themed.. Another that I played a ton was like a Summer Camp. You had to walk around and trade stuff to different characters to progress through the puzzle. Eddy has the comb that Johnny Bravo wants, but he won't give it to you unless you get him something that Dexter has.. But Dexter wants... And so on.
I remember having a notepad next to keyboard where I had just scrawled everything down so I could follow this ridiculous chain..
I remember that trading one! It was on a beach resort or a beach town. I played it so many times, but I doubt I ever actually finished it.
OP, are you thinking of eeggs.com? It doesn't look too different from what I remember it being twenty years ago.
OMG I think that's it! Thank you so very much, friend. I remember being frustrated since it had a relatively easy name too.
There goes the rest of my work day.
Finding old forums I used to frequent is the closest I can get to reading journals from my past self. Most of those forums are gone now, save for two. I'm frankly surprised one - heavengames - is still around and clinging to relevance, but the other is being kept up and maintained because the dozen of us that still keep together like it as a nostalgia piece.
We communicate over discord now, and it still amuses me my oldest friends (20+ years) are the ones I met online there.
I googled and old e-mail address I had when I was 15-16. I discovered an old guitar tab website I used to contibute a lot to.
Teenage me was a beast on his bass, turns out mid-30's me is good as well.
Was wonderful to find those.
Excuse me while I play Green Day basslines with the gain turned all the way up until the neighbors' fillings fall out.
"Yeah, American Idiot is still a banger"
... or is it just historically accurate?
American Idiot is what you jam when you're a 14 old playing guitar and the album just dropped. Longview is what you play when you're a drunk 16 year old playing bass in your friend's basement.
Those are some wonderful memories you've unlocked.
Heavengames bring me back. I used to frequent both Medieval 2 Total War, and Rome Total War forums. Learned how to do some basic modding on both those games from then. Made my own units, even started creating a faction in Rome. Man, that was such a wonderful time. Thank you for reminding me of it.
Kinda similar, seeing cringe YouTube comments I made from like 14 years ago. What was I even thinking back then :)
My first forum was for a fairly obscure half-life mod called existence. No idea why that was the one I decided to join when I was playing 10 different mods on and off. It ended up having a really cool little community and I hung it there for years till the whole thing shut down.
I would pay a ton of money to go back and read all my old highschool comments.
I had a similar experience on flyffworld.com. so much time spent there as a 12-13 year old.
Ugggh... reminds me of the time I came across a bookmark for an old forum I used to frequent in high school some 13 years previously, only to find that the forum host had shut down all their inactive boards and wiped the content... three days before I visited it.
It's closed down, as opposed to lost, but I'd just love to find a cache of my (and friends) whole profile of old posts on The Experience Project.
I never meet anyone who remembers it, but for a few thousand of us, it was a magic time and place in internet history.
Does this work for you?
Hey thanks, I'll give that a try this weekend!
Oof, that's one that should've been archived. It wasn't a hangout for me, but I remember it being The Internet Thing that drew in lots of non-geeky people and brought them together.
It's funny you would say 'non-geeky', because that is an extremely accurate description, ha!
The early web forums were so heavily skewed towards geeks and nerds and otaku that the Experience Project stands out in my memories as someplace very much for what we could now tongue-in-cheek call 'normies' because it was all about real life things instead of hobbies/fandoms. I think I wound up on it a few times because someone linked a thread here or there, but otherwise it was an area of the web I steered clear of since reddit and Tumblr served much of my 'Does anyone else' needs, and the few times I stumbled onto there it was like a foreign land.
Definitely true, although there were a large percentage of confused cross dressers there in those days.
My dad showed me a website as a kid that was an early encyclopedia of Mario characters. It had every bad guy with an illustration and bio with other weird facts. I saw it in the 90s and we printed off pages of our favorite characters but I never found it again.
I would love to see that website since it was my first or one of my first experiences online.
So.Many.Printouts. LOL.
In the days if dial up, I found a handy little web crawler/scraper that would download whole web sites based on different settings (download x links deep, only download pages on (insert domain).com, allow downloading of images not hosting at (insert domain).com, etc) That was a super fun and handy utility--especially on pages with tons of file downloads. I still have those pages on CDs stored in a binder.
Good Lord, you were on a completely different level back in the day! That is a ridiculously clever way to get around dial up speeds. Meanwhile my kid-self was just watching the AOL guy move across the screen..
The tool that you were likely referring to - there were many, many of these back then - would be front-end tools to command line utilities like wget and/or curl. So, if you want to look for a modern tool that does the sasme, you might want to conduct searches on some combination of terms like "wget front-end", "downloader wget based UI", etc. While wget and curl are still widely used (especially by devs and folks who are partial to command line), nowadays, i hear that lots of people use ArchiveBox (https://archivebox.io/) or similkar tools.
Funny enough, there seesm to be a resurgence of these "downloader" tools for people to both archive fun stuff but also to read content offline (which helps diminish ads pain, etc.)...Even though nowadays collectively internet access/speeds are so much better...but people still like downloaders. :-)
A similar site was one of the first things I looked up too, when I was a kid and we got internet for the first time I spent a lot of time searching through the web portal for fan sites related to stuff I liked -- specifically I remember going to a Yoshi fan site.
Some of the most memorable ones, though, were Dragon Ball/Sailor Moon websites because they'd show stuff that had already aired in Japan.
Probably not it but this site is obsessively detailed:
https://www.mariowiki.com/
Like, check out the article on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The game has a dizzying amount of content and they systematically list all of it. Including stats tables for all the drivers and vehicle parts (that’s where I know it from, lol).
I can't even remember enough details to search for it, but once upon a time many years ago (upwards of three decades, probably), I came across a webpage with what I think was communal fiction. I remember worldbuilding that I vaguely recall including bipedal birdlike alien mounts-- there was at least some excellent artwork, and the creatures were quite weird. I think a lot of focus was on travel across a maybe-medievalish world. I think the world name might've started with a V? Vo-, maybe?
I wish I could coax more than that out of my brain, I just recall the impression it gave me, of particularly rich and unusual world development.
Not lost per se. Just an era that won't happen again. PCGameWorld and CCPlanet (cheatcode planet) were websites I visited many many times during my times as a teenager. Rumaging through pages and pages of codes to find out cool ways to unlock stuff.
CCPlanet... Now that is a name I haven't heard in some time. Back then, I would just print the entire webpage, headers, banner ads and all, lol. Took me a while to realize I could copy and paste into Notepad or Word.
This so much haha, I did that too! On the good 'ol HP LaserJet IIIP!
Instructions on how to find all the hidden packages in Vice City is how I lost printer privileges.
LOL same here, but think of how cool those bonuses were! IIRC I managed to unlock the Apache helicopter, so it would spawn at my house.
I remember meticulously documenting all the Cheatplanet sourced guides for the N64 games I owned in a Word document. Unfortunately the document has long since been lost, but the process of scouring the web for cheat codes and in-game easter eggs that I could also share with friends was always a lot of fun.
There was a site I used to love in the early '00s that was an artist who drew on the backs of business cards. That's literally all I have to go on. Back then I wanted to get an original of one but couldn't afford it. Now I can and I can't find him anymore.
Hugh Macleod?
https://jamesclear.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IgnoreEverybody-by-HughMacleod.jpg
That's him! Thanks. Searching for drawing on business card came up with a whole bunch of stuff but never hit on that one. Thanks again!
Stick Figure Death Theatre!
Just like it sounds, it was a website that hosted all kinda of hilarious cartoons featuring stick figures. They were mostly made in flash and the website no longer exists. A scant few of them can be found on YouTube but most seem to be lost forever. Last time I checked the website was now a porn site.
I remember that page.
I wonder how well some of those would translate to today. I remember stick figure Romeo and Juliet while it's still funny, it certainly didn't age well by today's standards..
Is this is the same thing as the Don Hertzfeld cartoon? Rejected Cartoons
Was this the one that would get more and more elaborate as the creators tried to one up each other? I remember one of the last ones I watched was Matrix/Old Boy/Raid homage with the main stick figure fighting through hallways and floors, complete with sick executions, slo no, bullet time, etc.... essentially John Wick before John Wick
The old flash cartoons. I know there's efforts to save them but I think many have already been lost. One creator in particular I haven't been able to find. I think they called themselves Bullfrog. They had a few different series running on their site. One I recall was a Crocodile Hunter parody.
Not really lost, just a website I miss: Orisinal, Ferry Halim's personal website featuring 62 games by Ferry Halim. They were all so beautiful! Unfortunately they were made using Flash, so they're no longer available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orisinal
This youtube playlist shows off the gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1Y-3N6ia8I&list=PLSKYADo_SYXitE9FN5pz9zDn15D-u--xd
I spent so much time playing these games as a kid! Happy someone else remembers them.
Here's a tip for you: download Flashpoint here and search for Orisinal. Have fun!
Yay happy to find someone else who remembers these too 😊 Oohh I'll check that out! Thank you for sharing!
We few internet elders...Orisinal was peak indie gaming.
Years ago as a kid, I somehow stumbled on a page with a long story from a guy who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and left with the power to manipulate weather. Yes, it sounds insane and ridiculous, but within the post itself it didn't feel like it was ripped out of a comic book.
He didn't remember the abduction clearly, only pieced it together later while gradually discovering his powers. I remember him describing standing on a rooftop in Arizona or New Mexico, somewhere desert-y, and laughing with his son as storm clouds rolled in. It was used to end a section, as the post was VERY long. At the "climax", he proved his abilities to the government by sending them a letter with the path of a hurricane that he would redirect to go off-course and hit New York. I remember looking up the hurricane, and it did indeed hit New York.
I don't remember many other details. As a kid, it was just fascinating to read and I probably believed it a bit when I first read it. Obviously I know it's not real, but it's still an interesting memory for me and I'd like to find it again for nostalgia sake. That, and also because I'm surprised I can't find anything about this guy given the fact he apparently had something of a following.
The page was on some kind of forum or something similar, because there were replies below by people asking questions. One of the commenters said it was an excerpt from a book by a guy who had died, and would occasionally get shared online by people who believed him. That's why I'm so surprised I can't find anything on it. I'd expect there to be some posts from his believers if they'd post parts of his book on random forums.
If any such posts and pages still exist, they're probably buried in the old web and won't show up on Google anymore.
I wonder if this was just an old cult of personality that died with the old forums, or if this was an early internet version of 4chan meets Goncharov.
I figure that might be the case. It was likely a pretty niche thing, and got buried with time as the internet grew and more interesting things appeared. Since the guy had apparently already died, that also meant there wouldn't be any "new" information to maintain active interest. It's been probably around 15 years since I stumbled on it, more than enough time for him to fade into obscurity amongst all the other crazy people.
I genuinely have no clue how I stumbled on whatever page that was. I don't even know if it was a forum or a posting board more similar to 4chan. Around the same time I also found a site about people's ghost stories, which I assume is gone since it was pretty niche and I haven't found it since then. You just don't find sites like that anymore on Google, it's always SEO-boosted big sites.
Suck.com.
A very sharp and witty daily news digest.
There was this South Park fan site that had 3d recreations of the characters. It was something like sweeet.com.
Nothing special really but it has always bummed me out that I wasn't able to find those pics again.
I remember this one, it had desktop wallpapers and stuff.
It seems that the wayback machine was some snaps archived!
https://web.archive.org/web/19990427234244/http://sweeet.com/
There was a website written by a guy who ran a computer or gaming store, and he told very sarcastic stories about his customers. Can't remember enough to find it. ...Actually, typing this out made me remember his name, and I just found it. Acts of Gord.
There was a website about a robot muddling through life, and it was fully illustrated with photos of a person dressed up (poorly) as a robot getting into various predicaments. I thought it was called Frank the Robot but when I've tried to find it with that, I've had no luck.
I miss having favorite websites like this. And they were full and complete websites. No having to subscribe or pay to see the full content. No having to follow links to get the full story. No ads or pop-up videos jumping all over your screen and making it difficult to actually read it. It was a pleasure to just sit and read to your heart's content.
Not a particular website, but I was very active on several forums in the past and all of them have died at some point.
It's not the same without them really. I keep trying to look for more but they're never active enough. Tildes is the only one that comes close.
I also forgot what it's called now, but Yahoo had their own community-ish message board ish kind of thing? But they sent you emails or something instead. I keep wanting to look it up but can never remember what it's called.
I used to use it for really slow roleplay. It was a fun time.
Yahoo Groups?
Likely not what you're referencing, but you've made me think of Yahoo 360 (kinda similar to Facebook at the time and blogging) and wow, did I ever spend a lot of time on that!
Avidgamers.com?
On the early web, there was a trend of fan-made Final Fantasy towns. My favorite was called Illucia and it was by someone named Tatsushi Nakao, who I believe was somehow affiliated with the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The web site went through a couple of iterations, but the one I remember most fondly was in the style of the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. It was later changed to mirror the style of Final Fantasy VII, so I suspect the iteration I enjoyed would have been around sometime before that game's release in 1997. That puts this around 1995 or 1996, I would guess.
The web site presented the user with a colorful pixel art image of the fan-made Final Fantasy town of Illucia. The image was a server-side clickable image map. This meant it was a single image that could be clicked in different spots to visit different URLs. Being server-side meant this particular image map worked by the browser sending coordinates back to a server-side script which would then serve up the correct page based on the destination assigned for those coordinates. (I'm not sure on the inner workings in any more granularity than that.) None of that is super consequential, but I still find it fascinating.
Anyway, you would click on a building in the town, and it would take you to a page that made sense thematically with that building. I can't remember any of the specific mappings, but I'm sure there was an inn and probably a shop. I believe there was a bulletin board in the town that took you to a page listing updates to the site itself. It was so much fun to explore and click around, look at all the cool art, and read the Final Fantasy content.
I did some searching a while back and found the original URL of this site: http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~nakao/fftown.html
Here's the Internet Archive page for it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~nakao/fftown.html
Yet, as far as I can tell, none of the snapshots are usable. I feel like I've used them in the past — maybe 10 years ago — but they don't seem to work now at all. The site is long since gone from its original location. I found one article that references it, but that's all I can find. It appears to be lost to time.
Also, I feel like I've posted basically this same message on a half dozen threads here and on other communities over the past couple of years, so please forgive me if you've seen it before and are sick of hearing about it. 😅
Some of the fan-made pages were stunning in their creativity and/or depth of knowlege. You could tell that they were all labors of love. There was so much obscure information for obscure titles out there and coming across a well maintained and well designed fan page was felt tantamount to discovering a lost city or shrine.
Yeah, exactly! And the popular town theme of the Final Fantasy fan sites in particular just kept that metaphor going.
I loved those! I never saw the FF ones but I remember some that were way more basic, and the sense of wonder that came with clicking on all the little houses.
There used to be a forum and associated guide, I can't remember if it was called CrazyMeds or CrazyBoard. Regardless, at the time it was one of the few bastions of true community and reliable information in the mental health space, where users shared their experiences navigating mental illness and prescribed medications. Unlike the rather alarmist and unhinged health-oriented message boards of today, there was quality relatable and well-researched information that was far superior to the poor messaging around psychiatric medications at the time. It was a godsend for me at the time as I navigated my treatment path, and it was a big reason for why I stuck with medication despite the weirdness and side effects that only people with personal experience were aware of at the time. Today, tachyphylaxis (poop out), discontinuation syndrome/brain zaps, and the possibility of SSRI induced mania are well-known and published phenomena, but at the time CrazyMeds was on the cutting edge.
That sense of community drove many of us to think of the internet as one step closer to information utopia, I believe. If local BBSs were "good" then a world wide BBS was going to be fantastic! Knowing that people could share their own pieces of the puzzle for everyone to see the picture was pretty much the expectation of the early web.
I'm not sure at what point it switched from a meritocracy to a BSocracy but even the gaudiest of GeoCities pages seemed much more.... earnest?.... than just about everything out there today. Maybe it was because the early internet was like a protoplanetary disk where the FAANG "planets" hadn't formed yet so you could bounce from place to place without the algorithms guiding your engagement..
I remember when I would just browse the internet yellow pages or search for random stuff to discover all sorts of wild and wondrous new things. It's like back then everything was its own website. Now it's all aggregated under one umbrella or the other, and moderated or censored accordingly. (Not that I miss stuff like goatse, or the thousands of dodgy porn pages, but it did feel like you were more free to be weird or non-conforming online than now.)
RIP Crazymeds. That site and forums were great. Jerod Poore. Man, he poured so much into that site and the results were spectacular. I learned so much and it helped me so much.
You can still scrape up some dregs of it online (and I have at various times, when a particular med is suggested to me and I want the straight dope on it) but of course, it's not easy and lacks any info on many meds now available.
When I was in college I found this website that was like a paranoid fever dream describing a unified theory of everything based on really weird interpretations of the Bible. It was crazy, just a combination of every ancient alien conspiracy theory. It was fascinating reading, and I have no idea where it was.
It wasn't Time Cube, was it? Fuckin love Time Cube lol. Big fan of fever-dream-unified-theories-of-everything, too, in case you find the one you mean and wanna share it with a stranger.
It wasn't that one, but definitely a similar level of self-assurance. If I ever find it, I'll share it for sure. Also, if weird theories of everything appeal to you, I have to recommend Unsong, which is a very fun story set in a world where coincidences have magical powers.
The interpretations of the bible bit doesn't really fit, but good ol truthism.com is certainly a unified theory of everything.
Wow, what a work of art that one is. Still not my white whale, but gorgeous all the same. I'm getting quite the collection now.
I loved Timecube and consider Gene Ray a web 1.0 celebrity.
But this has to be great www.greatdreams.com, right?
Wow, that's quite the site. Still not the one I'm remembering, but fun to look at nonetheless. Thanks!
Im not sure if I really wish to visit it again, but some people don't believe me when I tell them about the hellhole that was rotten.com I spent way too much time on that site in my high school years. Fuck, I'm old.
I had a friend who got me a few times with images from that site, two of which still upset me to this day... Like 23 years later. He thought the shock value was funny so he'd be sat at his computer working and randomly say to me, "Hey, Jane?" When I'd look his way, of course I would also see his screen.
Ugh.
OP, I know it's not the same, but I bet that pretty much all of that trivia is on the IMDb pages for those movies. It requires a little more manual work to comb through many movies instead of just having it all on one handy web 1.0 page, but there are plenty of trivia and goofs on those pages. I'm willing to bet there are probably several pages that still exist with a bunch of older movie trivia that aren't SEO-optimized either.
I think you hit another reason why it made such an impression I'm talking about it nearly 30 years later. It was a simple "web 1.0" page. It was literally one page. One LONG page, sure, but it wasn't a bunch of database entries where dynamic pages are created for 1000 entries, all filled with ads that take forever to load. Navigation were simple inline calls which took you to the sections based on alphabet letters in a simple text document. These pages were fast and responsive even on a 14.4k connection.
On the other hand, IMDb, while rich with information, is simply a chore to move around movie to movie to movie. The ads always load first, then the tons of graphics and finally the actual "meat"--the text--will load. While it seems like a first world problem (and it is, I admit) it took ~30 seconds to load the Braveheart IMDb page after the initial imdb.com landing page started blasting some preview trailer at me while I typed in the search box. This is on a new computer running Chrome that hadn't visited the site before on a cable modem. I estimate it would easily take at least 20x as long to read the same information that was on my lost page on IMDb even though every tool I use now is bigger, better, faster.
It may have literally been an early iteration of IMDb. It started out as a text post on USENET all the way back in 1990 (meaning it technically existed pre-WWW), and grew from there.
This post just triggered a memory of a game called Elements. But I just "found" it. This game is a simple card game where you played against a computer, https://elementrevival.sparklmonkeygames.com/ and leveled up your deck. Later on you could also play against other players if you wanted to, but i mostly just played against the bots.
Looks like it has been recreated from flash, so its available again. I guess I'm not going to be productive for the rest of the day...
Hey, I spent a good few months playing this game too. The community forums were pretty lively as well back then with regularly hosted tournaments. I remember my favourite deck being a rainbow one that used Novas for mana and Gravity Shards.
I was so excited to see this, it looks amazing!
Not exactly user friendly though, no idea what to do even on training level!
A whole forum. In Thailand there used to be the forums of pramool.com, an auctioning site where the forums became rapidly populated with all sorts of juvenile 90's and early 2000's content. Mostly it was teen stuff and online video gaming, and "horror" threads that actually had porn inside instead.
Many people of my age are connected to this corner of the Thai internet culture.
Unfortunately, the webmaster (when the term used to matter more) died, so the site got shut down.
RIP Webmaster Webmaster. (it's a tradition that we do not mention his nickname -- because he once put a filter on his own name to quell troll wars)
Simply put, the prodigy maze game. I spent HOURS playing that.
I wonder how it ends.
Edit: OMG IT EXISTS!
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze/
SQUEEEEEE!
The first ISP that I ever had was CompuServe. We got it when I was in elementary school in the early '90s. In a way, I grew up on the CompuServe Forums. The Sci-Fi Fantasy Media forum being my favorite. I use to comment on every episode of Deep Space 9, Voyager, and X-Files.
I'm almost positive I also talked about the games X-Wing and TIE Fighter on that forum. (If not there, somewhere else on CompuServe; but I don't think they had separate forums for games.) There was a huge trend of writing fan fiction for both games, called POVs, and associated fighter pilot squads. I wrote a ton of them. I ended up cofounding a squad for TIE Fighter called Delta Wing.
We left CompuServe for cable Internet around 2001, but I would love to see the old forums. Supposedly, they were kept around until 2017, but I don't know if it included all of the content from the '90s. Honestly, though, if I found my old posts, I would probably die of cringe.
That one guy that wrote funny articles and wore a pickle hat.
Backburnerforums.com for me. That was our old haunt for everything to do with gaming, playstation mods, etc. It ran on VBulletin and phpBB at different times. It's closed for good. I know this as I now own the domain names. It would be great to know what happened to Funky, the old admin. I know he lived in the UK, down Dorset/Cornwall way. He had the domains for about two decades.
Maybe one day I'll spin it back up and recreate using snapshots from waybackmachine. It'll be a ghost town, but at least I could leave my contact details to try and get some of the old band back together. I know one guy was arrested for copyright theft and distribution, another for hacking. Ah. The joys of old school high sea sailing before VPNs and proxies were a real thing.
There was a simple Web 1.0 site dedicated to the song "Being Boring" by the Petshop Boys. It was a deep dive into every bit of BTS and trivia you could imagine and methodically made the case for it being the perfect pop song. As a big fan of the song myself I enjoyed learning about it and following the link to all of the many different versions and covers of the song. From time to time I have made some attempts to find it but I think it is gone for good. I just remember the care and obvious love that went into making an entire site dedicated to one singular thing.
If anyone remembers ff0000.com, it was this webgame chatroom, similar to VR chat, where you could log in, pick an avatar, and hang out in this ever scrolling area you could walk and fly around in.
Looking at the source code for that page was very nostalgic. Clean, simple html code with no css or scripting that could be hammered out in notepad..
I remember finding all sorts of different levels of amazing to crazy pages in the back of magazines and subsequent rabbit holes that followed, lol. They, too, inspired my imagination and introduced me to new topics in my formative years.
Notpron.com - this was an online riddle I found on a school computer and it ate up so much of my time trying to solve each level, I miss hidden gems like this on the Internet
perfectcell2.tripod.com
It was a website dedicated to a strange pen and paper dragon ball game. They used BeSeen chat rooms for combat, had a ton of pages for loot, and you'd message the moderator what your character is doing that week. He'd update the character locator to show who is on what planet at the time and what they were doing.
It would be crazy to run into one of the guys from back then here.
When I first discovered roms and emulation, the big faceless rom sites with thousands of games for dozens of systems didn't exist yet. The sites that did exist were smaller and more curated, which was pretty cool. The one I remember using the most was called The Cult of Kefka, and it had a few dozen SNES roms on it, each with a lengthy review from the guy running the site. I think there was another one I used that I can't remember the name of, but it was a pair of guys doing reviews. A line from their review of Alcahest has stuck with me all these years: the review had a blurb saying "Alcahest: A time for drunken horses," and then the first line of the review was them explaining their own dumb joke (apparently "hest" means "horse" in whatever their native language is, and the alca- part sounds like alcohol).
Weird, borderline unrelated to the game they were reviewing, but very human in a way most of the internet no longer is, let alone illegal rom sites.
So many fanfiction and fansites. RIP A SailorMoon Romance. RIP the entire FictionAlley fansite network. And the dozens if not hundreds of mini shrines dedicated to the OTPs you never expected to become canon but thought were fun anyway. RIP Geocities and Xoom and Tripod and Angelfire, you gave us weird nerds free places to proclaim our weirdest and wildest fan theories and share our usually terrible fanart.
More mainstream: RIP the Television Without Pity forums, the dirty details and gossip you shared have yet to be replicated and may never be in PrimeTimer and IMDB trivia.
GeoCities was the true wild west of the internet. From fan pages to fan hate pages to..randomness. Some real fun pages were the prototype meme pages like the "Mr. T vs Everything" pages. Talk about rabbit holes.
Edit: I just looked at some of the "Mr. T vs " and sadly the only ones I could still find weren't as good as others I remember (like most memes I suppose, lol).. I miss the ones like Mr. T vs Star Trek where he's cruising around in space in his van and ends up throwing the Enterprise "hella far"
Back in the mid 1990's a guy named Chris White had a newsletter/website called topfive.com. He invited people to contribute humorous suggestions on a topic to create a David Letterman-style top ten list daily. It must have been one of the first instances of crowdsourcing via the internet. It was generally always good for a laugh or two
Back in the early to mid-2000s, there was this one interactive flash animation with music. I don't remember what website it was on, or what it was called (something related to adagio or a similar classical music term).
It was a black-and-white animation of 3 dancing stick figures drawn in a sort of scribbly style. The music was a looping stringed instrument piece, classical sounding, and when you interacted with each of the stick figures, a different layer of string music started to play.
I really loved the song. It was very pleasant and calming, and I wish I could hear it again outside of my head.
I vaguely remember an image board (not 4chan style) years ago, maybe in the mid to late 2000s, early 2010s, invite-only but publicly viewable I believe.
The only differentiating thing I remember about it was that it had a logo or something like "[+]".
Think reddit but without text posts, I think it was a white background with black text and blue accent colours here and there. Big focus on sharing images, must have had comments/replies available on each image. That's about all I can remember.
I have no idea how to google that, I've asked people in the past if they knew it and didn't get anywhere. I'm really curious to see if its still around, or if this is some delirious memory from days past.
edit: ACTUALLY, there's another thing I've been trying to find for ages:
A simple HTML-based game from the very early 2000s (think 2001, 2002), where you like, navigate a sanitarium or something. You progressed through the sanitarium (or whatever) through a series of web links to different pages (this was pre-Ajax). It was comical and not realistic. There were pictures involved, but not of real people or anything, maybe done using a magazine-cut-out style. You could play a bit of it for free, but had to pay to play the rest I think.
I have no idea how to describe this, this was 20 years ago, I barely remember the details, but it would be cool to see it again. It seemed like a real neat idea to 10-year old me.
Reddit's /r/tipofmytongue subreddit used to be great for this sort of thing.
I recently was trying to remember the name of a music video I saw on TV as a kid, and after hours of googling and looking through playlists on youtube of music videos from the time, the only lead I could find was a post on tipofmytongue of someone describing the exact same music video and trying to find it -- no responses :(
I used to be very active on a modded MW2 community called alterIWNet that eventually got shut down by Activision. It was a version of the multiplayer that had things like dedicated servers and custom maps.
While the original forum isn't around anymore different projects succeeded it afterwards, and the latest iteration is still around although it seems to be on its last legs (and also got a C&D apparently). It's pretty fun to see that if people want a certain thing to exist enough to pass on the torch, even a multi-billion dollar company will be unsuccessful in killing it.
Additionally, the guy who originally wrote it also created FiveM for GTA V which was pretty popular, so it was fun to occasionally stumble across his name over the years as well.
What was it about the original modded community got the C&D from Activision?
The early mod scene was a wild time. I remember when the game mod scene was new and really picked up steam. Some companies were ultra cool about it and embraced them, others went full nuclear. Some of the early total conversions and mods were better received than the original game (which I'm sure bruised some egos and contributed to C&D letters I'd wager).
On the other end of the spectrum you had mods that brazenly stole assets to use in their mods. They were obviously slapped down. What I never understood were the mods (or even games) that used stolen assets but were otherwise fun or really good. I never understood why someone would take such time and effort to make something they knew would run afoul of corporate and then just fold as soon as they got a letter. Why not turn your Sonic clone that you've already made into the next Jazz Jackrabbit? More recently it is cool that more of the mod teams have went on to develop games.
Well the original C&D was fair enough because what the mod essentially did was to supply a separate executable for the multiplayer part of the game, this meant that you could use a pirated version for it. So you had all the assets from the original game with identical gameplay, but instead of the P2P matchmaking you had a server browser and dedicated servers (like older CoDs) and a few other features.
Later versions had some sort of check that made sure you used a legitimate version though (maybe you had to sign in through Steam, but I forget), and considering the walled garden approach to their games after CoD4 that made modding really difficult, I think they just didn't like somebody modifying the game in the first place.
Regarding this making a mod and an entire game is another ballpark, I think often people just mod a game because want to improve something they like or do something for the technical challenge (like in my example). I get not wanting to put in the effort to make custom assets into a game, especially if you have to organize other people to do that.
One of the first websites I ever remember coming across was Earthwatch.co.uk, a slick UK promotional site for the animated sci-fi movie Titan AE. They crafted it as an in-universe news hub full of satirical far-future stories, weather reports, even horoscopes. I think you even submit your own content. Unfortunately the whole thing was built in Flash, so none of it survives on the Wayback Machine. Best I could ever find was a short discussion of the design process for a webdesign textbook written around that time.
Coke used to have a game/chat room called Coke Music. It was so much fun.
They had a really simple track mixer thing where you could make your own 30 second "songs" and you'd go to clubs and play them, and people would vote on them.
You built up money and used it to decorate your music studio.
Wasted hours on that site.
That..sounds amazing. Is there anything like that currently?
There was an interesting underground type website I discovered around late 90s early 00s which was a sort of anarchist website. It had posts explaining how to do all sorts of illegal stuff like how to hack a vending machine to get free stuff, how to cook meth or grow weed, even things like how to make bombs. I forgot the name over the years but I'm sure it's not around anymore due to the sort of content that was on there.
That sounds an awful lot like the "Anarchist Cookbook" or "The Big Book of Mischief" .. The vending machine "hack" was spitting or shooting salt water into the dollar bill reader, right?
Both were really popular in the BBS days and early internet.
Yes most likely the website was just a collection of articles taken from those books but I still can't remember what the name of the website was exactly. It wasn't anything like anarchistcookbook.com, was something else.
I remember there being many different proposed techniques for the vending machine hack, the salt water method sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't know for sure since it was quite awhile ago and I never tried it out myself.
Obviously, IMDB still exists, but I miss the discussion forums that used to exist on every movie's page. I used to love watching a movie and then joining in on the conversations people were having about different aspects. A few alternatives tried to fill that space when the forums got nixed, but nothing was quite successful. A few subs on reddit came close, but if you watch an older movie the likelihood of any active conversation is low. I miss those forums.
It's time for us all to realize once again that WE ARE THE MAN NOW DOG!
I'm of course talking about: https://yourethemannowdog.ytmnd.com/
It's shut down now, but it's in the library of congress. I miss the good days of the internet before it was too accessible to everyone.
Those were the days, the memes (image macros and 4chan scumming) were hot and WOW was really good with TBC being released. It all lies in ruins and nostalgia bait now.