The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
We posted to the long-lived FFVI site (which a handful of old people may still think of as Final Fantasy III) Caves of Narshe a few days ago. In looking up stuff about it I ran across a few other sites too that I figured I might call out. Because while humans may read this site, Google reads it too, and if I can help those other sites somehow rank above the evil and exploitive Fandom sites, then I think I can devote a day’s post to that cause.
I am being hyperbolic when I say that video game sites used to be 10% of the internet by weight, but it doesn’t feel like it. And that used to be a good thing. Nowadays it seems like many of the people who were enthusiastic about both games and the internet also have strong opinions about Ethics In Game Journalism and 8chan. I don’t know if that’s true about the people I’m linking to now; I can only hope that it isn’t.
There’s Imzogelmo’s Final Fantasy III, who wrote game patches for the ROM, tools for examining it and investigations of how it works.
Hey, did you know you can BUILD A FREE WEBSITE OF YOUR OWN ON ANGELFIRE? Did you know thqt Angelfire still exists, and still uses 90s-era Geocities-style boxes on member sites to advertise their service?
Djibriel’s page Collapse of Heaven and Earth is hosted by Caves of Narshe, and bears information on FFVI, FFV and a couple of other games.
Also hosted on CoN is Master ZED’s list of FFVI (III) patches. These patches are useless to people playing the remakes of course: the ones for Playstation, Gameboy Advance, mobile (which I hear are gone now, good job SquareEnix), Steam, Switch and probably other platforms. There are some guides here too. One entertaining one, if you are entertained by the kinds of things that I’m entertained by, is SharkESP’s Low Level FAQ, a monument to breaking the game.
LordBBH has a most excellent website, of the style that those/old of us remember fondly, made out of plain hand-coded HTML scrolling down the finite-length page, with images and writing. Like |tsr’s classic NES site, and Gaming Hell’s current one. (A lot of the pages from our list of great gaming sites are like that!) Some days I fantasize about remaking Set Side B in that style, but we’re daily, I’m not the only one who posts here, and I don’t think Josh Bycer would appreciate it if I suddenly decreed that he write posts in raw HTML. Maybe some other time, or for some other site….
LordBBH is on Bluesky, but is taking a break from all social media right now, which proves his great wisdom and power. His site is still online, and hosts descriptions and information on several old arcade games, which as we all know are the best descriptions and information. One of them is on an SNK arcade game from the early days of the NeoGeo, The Super Spy.
Images from LordBBH’s site, used for the purpose of providing context and to convince you to go to the site itself and read it!
The Super Sky is of a small field of three arcade games, NeoGeo first-person brawlers. It wasn’t too popular when released, but its two followups, Crossed Swords and Crossed Swords II, did considerably better. You can think of them as like Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! series, but less pattern-basis, more scaling, and fighting more opponents at once.
It’s an ambitious game for an arcade format, it has non-linear explorable buildings and an experience system.
In The Super Spy, you’re the titular uber-agent. You know karate, and can also box, and you take your lethal hands and feet (and a knife and a pistol too) against enemy terrorists in a series of three settings. It’s behind-the-back first-person yes, but you can’t rotate your perspective; you’re always facing north. An array of icons at the upper-right corner of the screen show which directions you can move in, and it’s the only indication if you can go south, or “down.” There’s at least one secret passage in the game that’s hidden that way.
You have an array of moves that would make Little Mac proud, including multiple kinds of punchse, but also kicks and slashes and shots. Each building you explore is swarming with enemies, fist guys, ninjas, mini-bosses, bosses, and exactly one woman, who you know SNK’s team of graphics creators were very normal about.
Dammit SNK. This isn’t even the most ridiculous thing about her art, which is that, in the Japanese version, her panties are randomized each time you reach her.
It’s easy to make fun of The Super Spy, but LoadBBH asks us to take it seriously, and while it’s quite unfair in places he makes a strong case that it’s worth your time. He’s written one of my favorite kinds of web pages about it, and I recommend you taking a look of you like weird arcade games. Go, go! And hover the mouse over images on the site to read entertaining alt text about each one!
It’s April 1st again, and I’ve taken to doing a change of pace post on this day every year. Two years ago, it was a plea for returning to the old days of the web, or at least the good, rose-colored parts of it. Last year, well, I forgot last year.
I want to return to the subject of the OldWeb. It is certainly true that it was fairly exclusionary, the home of a lot of sexism, and a bit of racism (although, I think, not as much as recently, at least not overtly). But there was also the feeling that, if you just went out and created something silly and wonderful, that it would find its audience, somehow.
If you go out looking for lists of old websites, you might happen upon this one. Don’t follow it yet: it uses a word that it probably shouldn’t, and you shouldn’t take this link as an endorsement for that. The reason I link it is that it’s a big long list of fun websites.
I checked through the list, and something like 95%, 19-in-20, of them are broken links, completely different sites, or squatted domain names. There are a handful that survive, but they’re in the minority. So it goes. Someone who cares could possibly hunt up old archived versions from out of the mighty Wayback Machine.
Many of the links, well, not many people will weep for them, but there was one site in particular of which I rued the passing: the homepage of Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf. This guy:
Hey kids, it’s Furnitures! The Spongebob who never was!
Have you ever seen such a charming drawing? Don’t answer that: you probably have. But I think there’s a lot to like for this creature-thing. His coarse fur, his too-wide smile, and his vacant expression.
Furnitures is the star of a children’s show, called Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf. It is a show that doesn’t exist, has never existed, and unless the nature of the world changes substantially will probably never exist. Despite these facts, a person called Henry Stokes created a fansite for it.
Somewhere Henry called the show “slightly demented,” and that fits. In its backstory, an “anonymous philanthropist” found Furnitures (actually a sea mammal) in his travels, and was so charmed by it that he captured it and dragooned it into hosting a kids’ show, despite the fact that Furnitures is only vaguely aware of its surroundings.
Furnitures was last seen on the living internet in 2009. But… on the site was an email address for its creator. And I tried emailing that address. And surprisingly, I got a response. Henry Stokes is not only still with us but he answers his email!
I told him of my fond memories of the (very weird) website, and asked if I could revive it. And he said yes!
So I have. I have dredged up the files for the fake-fansite for fake-show Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf, removed the edits made by the Internet Archive, further modified them to (slightly) adhere to modern web practices, and put it all up on Neocities, a wonderful free host for silly little web projects like this one, in the mode of late, lamented Geocities.
If you want to have a look, just go here! You might enjoy it for a few minutes! Maybe the obsession will, like a contagious disease, leap from me to you, and the legend of Furnitures will live on! Someday, when Henry Stokes and I are gone, and Neocities has shut down, as it someday must, maybe one of you will remember this site, and revive it again. It’s already the first hit on Google for “Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf,” whereas before it was mostly sites selling housewares.
If we work together like this, Furnitures the Oaf may have a lifetime longer than any of us. This Great creature will grow and, have a reality greater than any human being, which would be an awesome thing for a totally made up being to be.
So please, follow my link, and let the invented Oaf and his friends live in your brain, as it does mine. Despite his size, he doesn’t take up much room.
Yetso the Fiend, a pirate, who has a baboon for a heart. (The character does, not the actor who plays him.)
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
It’s another ancient gaming site that, despite domain names and hosting being persistent charges that must be paid month after month until the site goes down, and not even being updated since the turn of the century, is somehow still on-line, due to the good graces, sheer orneriness, or forgotten bank withdrawals of the owner.
This time it’s this gaming emulation site, a subsite of cnspace.net by Ben Martin. Of all the pages linked from the main site, the game one is the only one with a broken link. The game link is the only one of them that goes to a subdomain, which never got fixed when the site structure was changed on February 13, 1999. Since they never repaired the front page link the site’s reach may be reduced, but considering the main page proudly lists a last update of only a couple of months later, I presume whoever is keeping the lights on doesn’t care much of reach.
From their page on Atari 2600 games.
Why do I point sites like this out? For one thing, there’s still some good info there. There’s a short essay on emulation in general, although I note that practically every hyperlink in it is dead or to a parked domain. The main site has pages on fractals, and some bespoke software for folk still running Windows 95 or 98. The philosophy, math and books pages are nearly empty. There’s a page of tributes to old games, with a guide to the Commodore 64 version of California Games.
A portion of their review of Impossible Mission. They seem to have had a fondness for Epyx titles. Good taste!
Where has the time gone? Don’t answer, I already know. There used to be thousands of pages like this. Nowadays, who can even find the few survivors? Google will do everything in its power to direct you to Youtube or Reddit instead of this place. Speaking practically, it won’t be a huge informational loss when they finally stop paying the bills, but it will be one more victory for the forces of entropy that tear away at everything in our world.
Chris Person on Aftermath (a site that, to warn you, sometimes blocks articles behind paywalls) gives us a big list of web forums that still exist, and are even popular, today. There’s many categories there, but indeed gaming is one of them. We have a vested interest in the survival of as many non-social-media sites as possible, so here is the whole list of gaming boards from the article:
That’s a lot! There’s a lo more links there too, including a big list of technology and compute forums. By all means, click through, to the article, for more!
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
Snafaru’s Wizardry Fanpage is a lot newer than most of the sites that get featured here under the Oldweb heading (see left/above), the earliest viewable version of the site on the Wayback Machine is from 2011, practically a baby at 13 years old. Yet it has some renown: I mentioned that I was playing Digital Eclipse’s wonderful remake, and someone on Mastodon pointed the site out to me. I then forgot about it, but then found it again through web search. Lucky! And it’s still being updated! If you keep your website up and updated for 13 years you deserve a PRIZE.
In addition to information on the original games, Snafaru maintains a scenario editor for Wizardry, and hosts a number of fanmade scenarios on their site. Wizardry is much older than even the blog, it was first published in 1981, 43 years ago. A game that maintains a fandom that long is amazing, even more so when its publisher went under so long ago.
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
It’s a little risky to post this, because it’s a joke video game page on Tripod from 2001 that still somehow persists on the internet in 2024. I have to imagine that Phred is in his mid-to-late 40s by now. There’s several long pages here from that site, and there’s always the chance that a racist or neo-nazi joke, from an age when kids thought lightly of such things, could be lurking somewhere in there. Please understand it as a product of its time. It’s an amateurish site, but it has a lot of energy behind it.
I think it’s still worth looking at as a reminder of that age of the internet, which had many bad things about it, but also a lot of good things. I don’t know which this is. It contains a number of pretty dumb graphics hacks for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and/or its successor released after Nintendo’s licensing deal with Tyson ran out. Those hacks can be found here, although the background (the words “Master Phred” in fancy letters) makes the descriptions and download links really hard to read. (Try highlighting the text.) If you follow a few links, you can find actual NES Punch-Out rom downloads, which it’s even more amazing to find on a website in 2024.
Among the hacked characters are a robot, Doc Louis and Zelda, sure
The characters page includes, among other hacked characters like Rick and Nick Bruiser from the SNES Punch-Out, a character named after the Wii Punch-Out opponent Disco Kid, which indicates this page has to have been updated since 2009. There’s a links page where every outgoing link, other than GameFAQs, is broken, and a secrets page where most of the secrets are fake.
Well there it is, Phred’s Cool Punch-Out. You’ve survived 23 years. May you live a hundred more.
GeoCities has been gone for fifteen years now, about as long as it was alive, and it’s still sorely missed. It was shut down by Yahoo, which seems to exist purely to kill good things during downturns. (See also: Yahoo Directory.) It’s just a “brand” now; the company formerly known as that changed its name to “Altaba,” and then itself died.
GeoCities was a place where anyone could make a static website, for free (although with frames and ads). This isn’t the place to recount the full story, but at the time it had kind of a reputation. Since anyone could make a site there, and having a site was a big thing in those heady early World Wide Web days, a lot of people did make them. It was their first site in a lot of cases; in many cases, it was their only site. And before social media and Google’s decay, you could even reasonably expect to find GeoCities sites, if they were good.
So a lot of web newbies made sites, and they perpetrated all kinds of design atrocities in the process. Back then we rolled our eyes and held our noses, but now that time is remembered with fondness.
There are multiple places where you can go back and explore old GeoCities sites, although with varying degrees of stability. Try checking Restorativland or Oocities. Or the Internet Archive’s GeoCities collection.
One of the most egregious of the many sins made by GeoCities users was the overuse of animated GIFs. GIFs themselves are their own throwback to the early era, and actually predate the World Wide Web. The image format was created at Compuserve in 1987, while the first web browser was released on Christmas Day, 1990. Now Compuserve is long gone, although their website, amazingly, is still up, offering an early 2000’s style web portal experience, and while it’s likely no one human is curating its links, some one, or thing, is still updating its copyright date.
I seem to be discursing a lot today, but I am actually closing in on today’s true subject, just with a flight plan best described as a wide, lazy spiral. Here we go. GIFs, that relic of ancient Compuserve, once the subject of an infamous software patent owned by even older pre-web tech company Unisys that threatened to strike the format from the internet, is the only thing of Compuserve that really thrives today.
There are other animation file formats. There’s MP4 and its progeny, of course. Google has a version of webp that has animation, but people don’t trust Google so much anymore. GIFs are also limited: it’s an indexed graphics format that maxes out at 256 colors. But there are many ways to make them, all the major browsers support them, many social media sites support them, and they doesn’t have Google’s sterile, chlorine-like stink about them, so they survive. Improbably, awesomely, people still make, use and view GIFs today.
Google Meetup(?)’s message input bar with GIF buttonDiscord’s message input bar with GIF button
Google Meetup, or whatever the hell they call it now, has an interface for searching for GIFs to use, and Discord does too. There’s a site, the slightly-incorrectly named GIPHY, that hosts them and lets you search for them. Arguably GIFs are more popular than ever. But the acknowledged Golden (well, maybe Tarnished Bronze) Age of GIFs was the Geocitiene Era.
Well, now the Internet Archive has an amusingly-styled site, GifCities, where you can search through an archives of the GeoCities site collection.
Comic Sans! A spinning rendered dollar sign! Party like it’s 200X!
It doesn’t seem to have a lot to go by when doing its text search? My “Nethack” search only turned up two GIFs, both found from the term’s inclusion in their origin URLs. These are them:
I don’t get that eye one, but the second one’s kind of snazzy, if not really that useful. Still-someone worked to construct each of them, and I like that their work is commemorated, and even available for others to use today. Most of the Old Web, by weight, is lost now, so let’s cherish what remains.
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
It used to be that the internet was full of thousands of tiny sites. Many of them might only have gotten a few visits a year, if that, but they were there, quietly and earnestly providing a resource for people who might be looking for it.
One of these sites was ionpool.net, which used to host a listing of classic gaming information. Here it is from its last archived version on the Wayback Machine from December 29, 2020. There’s a lot of links there, and the nature of the Wayback is, unless I check every one of those links, I can’t be sure if any of them will work. The few I’ve tried do, which is something at least.
ionpool.net in 2013, this is just the beginning of the list
There’s a lot of interesting documents there, presented in the classic List Of Tiny Links format. There’s far more there than I can summarize in a simple throwaway daily blog post like this one, but I particular point out to KLAX In Three Lessons, a series of Usenet posts written by Lyle Rains of Atari Games himself. In fact, those posts are so interesting that I might call them out in a later post….
Back to ionpool.net. The thing that saddens me is that the site still exists, but instead of providing the information that it helpfully offered back in 2013, now it’s just a black page with a graphic reading “END OF LINE.” This:
I can understand that even the slight resources necessary to preserve a website can, over time, become onerous. But I’d think it would be an equivalent cost to host an image like that, instead of leaving the old content up indefinitely. It was largely text files anyway.
Ah well. There is still the Wayback Machine, after all, slow and incomplete as it might be and difficult to sort through like it is. I can’t help but think that we should have more alternatives, though. The Internet Archive is not forever either.
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
I feel sometimes like the kid from The Sixth Sense. That reference probably dates me to an extent, it’s from 1999 which feels like practically yesterday. It’s pretty recent as my references go: I know who Kojak was, and remember M*A*S*H.
I feel like that kid because when I look over the internet, sometimes I see ghosts. The shades of dead games. When something disappears from the web, it’s really gone, there is no corpse and its server leaves practically no trace of its existence. But sometimes signs can be found, like archived client uploads, broken hyperlinks, site snapshots on the Internet Archive, or still-active fansites.
One of those ghosts that flickers into my hazy vision sometimes is the original Neverwinter Nights. Not the Bioware game by that name, which really has very little to do with it. The first Neverwinter Nights was a SSI-produced MMORPG on America On-Line, that lasted from 1991 to 1997, a contemporary of Island of Kesmai, and of WorldsAway,which I’ve brought up here before.
NWN might have been a MMORPG, but it was also a MS-DOS game, and it ran on a modified version of SSI’s Gold Box engine, and (I presume) used the 2nd Edition D&D ruleset. That may have been what doomed it in the long run, for the license expired, and AOL, TSR and SSI couldn’t reach an agreement that would allow the game to continue. It is worthy of note that of those three companies, two don’t exist now, and the remaining one is nowadays nearly a ghost itself. I’m not going to say it happened because they couldn’t reach an agreement on continuing NWN, in fact it probably wasn’t, but it’s a little comforting to think it might have contributed. Two things that are equally disposable, it seems, are old MMORPGs and the hide-bound corporations that ran them.
There is a fansite devoted to the AOL Neverwinter Nights, apparently continuous in existence from the days the game was live. It hosts a fan recreation called Neverwinter Nights Offline, which is not an exact recreation of the original but recreates a large portion. Of course, without other human players inhabiting the game’s world, it’s nowhere near the same. It runs in DOS, so Dosbox might be of some use to you.
There is also ForgottenWorld (no relation to Capcom’s arcade game), a fan-made recreation of Neverwinter Nights. The note on the fansite dates to 2004, but ForgottenWorld still survives, and even has a Discord. I haven’t tried it myself yet, nor the offline version of NWN linked above. That’s because I see ghosts like these all the time, and I cannot devote the time or energy to any of them that they truly deserve. But maybe, you can.
On Neverwinter Nights Offline, there is a series of Youtube videos where aulddragon plays it for four hours. The first video in the sequence follows. Check out that Gold Box combat style!
planet clue on Youtube posted a roundup of the many recreations of Disney’s defunct MMORPG Toontown Online, which range from strict remakes to expanded projects that add a considerable number of features to the original.
Fan-made MMORPG recreations and revivals, sadly, never manage to gain even a small fraction of the users of the originals. This is for several reasons, particularly the lack of ad budget, and a desire to stay partially under the radar, necessary to avoid legal reprisals from the original publisher–which, I remind you, in this case is Disney, the 2,000 lb. gorilla-mouse of lawsuits.
These F2P MMOs are a large part of many people’s childhoods though, and it’s inevitable that there be community interest in reviving them, if just to be able to visit old virtual stomping grounds once again. The people that I shed a tear for are those who played old Compuserve and AOL-era MMOs like Island of Kesmai (which exists in two fan-run forms, LOKFreedom and Lands of Kes) and, particularly, the original AOL-based Neverwinter Nights. But more on that tomorrow….
I think it’s possible that Disney will come to realize how many people have fond memories of Toontown Online, and also Club Penguin (which also has a fan revival), and bring them back after some time. They are not insensible to bringing in yet another revenue stream, and they’ve been open to revivals of other old video game properties of theirs like Ducktales Remastered. If that happens though, will they then launch their legal-nuclear missiles at the many fan remakes of Toontown Online? It remains to be seen.
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
Considering its longevity, I can almost forgive the broken image links in the right sidebar!
A brief but happy statement: the website Flying Omelette, dating back to 1998, is not only still online, but its most recent update was this past November, and it saw frequent updates throughout 2023. Rock on, levitating eggfood!
There’s a lot of things to find on the site, including collections of MP3, nine hosted shrines and a number of guides. Please show it some love, because you can be sure that Google won’t.
