6 ms·

Video Game Websites in the early 00s

196 points by klaussilveira 10mo ago

jdmoreira 10mo ago
Peak civilization
tsumnia 10mo ago
I think <map> should make a comeback [1]. Then we could go back to having sick looking art pages [1] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp
- codepoet80 10mo ago
  I mean, its still in the spec. Go for it!
- Klonoar 10mo ago
  Map wasn’t really the thing that enabled all of those designs, even though it was certainly often used to build them. We just didn’t have a million and one layouts and device sizes to handle back then and so you could get really creative with available space. Even CSS Zen Garden later on had designs that worked much better on the limited screen sizes of that era - which don’t work well today. Flat design trends killed off the rest of it I think.
- jihadjihad 10mo ago
  I remember having to do an image map as part of a web design project in school, circa 2005. True to 2005, the image was one simple rectangular banner at the top of the page, with text for different pages like About and Portfolio etc. placed along it. It felt like a (cool) hack that you could define regions for the text to route to different pages on click. Of course we have modern solutions [0] nowadays but that sure seemed cool 20 years ago! 0: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?West https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
languagehacker 10mo ago
I miss Newgrounds so much
- jszymborski 10mo ago
  It's still around!
jszymborski 10mo ago
I loved MiniClip. HeliAttack 3 rocked.
yunnpp 10mo ago
It does put into perspective how phones fucked it all up. That Nintendo 2k1 is looking really good, with high information density without being overwhelming, and an overall nice design to just look at.
- jakejohnson 10mo ago
  Nintendo 2k1 website [1] was god tier slicing with the curved layout, inset menus, and sprites for the corners, edges, buttons without transparency. The pixel backgrounds, fonts, buttons, shadows looked great on a CRT. Tried to replicate it myself back in the day with HTML tables. [1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/nintendo-2001 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/nintendo-2001
  - amatecha 10mo ago
    Nice! As someone who built hundreds of sites using the whole "slice a PSD into a table-based layout with 1 or more arbitrary content regions" technique in the early 2000's, I totally agree this is a really nice design indeed! Though I notice it appears to be pretty inflexible .. I imagine the content areas don't expand or anything. Not that that matters, it's still a super cool design!
- barbs 10mo ago
  That's probably what I miss the most in web-pages and software generally - information density.
markus_zhang 10mo ago
PlanetQuake and PlanetHalflife were my gateway drug into level design and modding back in the early 00s. Good time.
- eterm 10mo ago
  I'm gutted PlanetHalfLife isn't listed/shown here, I used to visit that site religiously around then.
  - markus_zhang 10mo ago
    Yeah HL introduced me to modding :) I used to visit it everyday waiting for the next chapter of They Hunger to get released.
    - eterm 10mo ago
      I'd completely forgotten about that! They Hunger was a masterpiece. Not one I'd ever want to re-visit though, because nostalgia is best left not closely examined. But a golden age, of txt file walkthroughs downloaded from gamefaqs with news mods and patches off PCGamer discs to explore because there's no way I was ever downloading those on a 56k modem.
      - markus_zhang 10mo ago
        I think the older games and mods are still pretty playable if you can get over with the slightly janky control. I recall TH has nasty jump traps which almost turned me away back then. I wish I could relive the golden age.
        amatecha 10mo ago
        Heck yeah. Remember when new games came out and you were actually genuinely surprised/impressed, over and over? For years in a row? Those were great times indeed. Sure, there were a lot of crappy games, but overall there were so many crazy awesome moments. Newer stuff is very iterative by comparison, IMO.
lanfeust6 10mo ago
Fond memories of SC Legacy, the old IGN and various message boards
Lammy 10mo ago
Needs moar Happy Puppy https://web.archive.org/web/20000827164040/http://www.happypuppy.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000827164040/http://www.happyp... https://web.archive.org/web/19961023005340/http://www.happypuppy.com/games/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961023005340/http://www.happyp...
- axus 10mo ago
  I was looking for Blues News, but its heyday was really pre-2000
SunshineTheCat 10mo ago
Ah yes Flash. I had just started learning how to build static HTML sites and was going down the road of learning flash instead just as I saw Steve Jobs came out in opposition of it. I decided to turn back to regular HTML/CSS and then PHP. Turned out to be the right move but I still kinda to miss those old flash sites.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  Standards wonks love dancing on Flash's grave, but overlook the massive dent in culture that we lost. Maybe vibe coding will unlock a similar indie ethos for a future generation, but the frameworkification of the web and centralization of the App Stores has been bad for the last 20y of creativity.
grugdev42 10mo ago
The variety in design is so inspiring. No constraints... just do what looks cool.
- orthecreedence 10mo ago
  And make it look good in IE5!! :'(
- sublinear 10mo ago
  I don't think so. Most of these are based on the box art. I'm not saying web design is the same thing or easy, but I am saying the major elements of the design were decided on already and there's little chance it was done without those same people involved.
Klonoar 10mo ago
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an era.
- tsumnia 10mo ago
  Here's one from my old AOL days. We originally just used email, AOL message boards, and a scheduled weekly chatroom, but once the Web took over it merged into Starmen.net [2] Since we're on a "reminsence about legacy Internet" trend right now, here's the opening to [1]: "What most people forget to remember is that it’s not just about the game. It’s about the people, it’s about the newsletters, it’s about the discussions, the trivia, the polls, the websites, and the meetings. Everything that was a part of the club was a part of the community, and there was so much involved that it was almost too much to handle. Who had the time to be a member of some 15 Online clubs? I can distinctly remember sending out invitations to join Moonside and receiving replies along the lines of “Sorry, I’m already in like 5 of these things.” Now, I wish there were more clubs and to any of you who have one: I will readily join. The only last great, recently active club I can think of now is the EarthBound Gang, arguably the greatest Online EarthBound Club ever. In early 1999, a lot of the clubs started dying out. I know that mine began to slow down, only to be restarted in the fall of 99’, and again in the summer of 00’. But as a whole, the EB clubs were never restarted, which is a shame, because some of them were downright fun." [1] https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html [2] https://starmen.net/ https://starmen.net/
  - psunavy03 10mo ago
    The problem is "fandoms" as a whole have now become such toxic hellscapes I'd rather just enjoy the game/movie/TV series myself and completely ignore what anyone else's opinion of it is. I don't need things that bring me joy to be ruined by the most obsessive weirdos in the world.
debugnik 10mo ago
These remind me of the sites that Japanese studios are still publishing for new visual novels and small games. Also of some artist portfolio sites (in layout, not art quality).
zoklet-enjoyer 10mo ago
Web design has become so boring
hnlmorg 10mo ago
I don’t know if it’s pure nostalgia talking here, but games sites back then were made to look fun like they were part of the game. Verses now when they’re a dull and corporate.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  So many websites look like someone spent 10 minutes in Squarespace
- asukachikaru 10mo ago
  The manuals as well. Loved the WarCraft III and Diablo II ones. They were legitimately part of the game experiences as lore was told there. Now the publishers don’t even bother to include a single sheet.
  - amatecha 10mo ago
    Heck yeah, when WC2 had just come out (and I didn't have it yet because I had a Mac, and the Mac vers came out like 8mo later), I remember poring over the manual and getting all up to speed on the game while anticipating the eventual Mac port. I was enough of a geek to scan some of the awesome artwork from the manual (we had a 300dpi scanner!) and print it out and then color it with felt pens. I still have my colored Death Knight kicking around somewhere (this artwork: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Knight_(Warcraft_II)?file=Death_Knight.png https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Knight_(Warcraft_II)?... )
- danaris 10mo ago
  And these days it's worlds easier than it was back then to make sites with complex designs and game-like effects and animations.
- password54321 10mo ago
  When I first started learning about web design, I came across this popular book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think And essentially you are taught to go against a lot of things you see in these examples and design things in the way modern websites are designed e.g. big call to action button, search bar on top and center, little clutter. Modern websites are meant to be more "simple" and "easy" as the web is now meant to be "accessible" to everyone rather than just for nerds.
arkaic 10mo ago
My favorite one was a fansite for the original NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy. Wonder if it's still up
asukachikaru 10mo ago
http://classic.battle.net/war3/ http://classic.battle.net/war3/ still works. Every time I need to check some OG WC3 data for nostalgia or any other reason I use this instead of fandom.
jedberg 10mo ago
Ah, the good old days when everyone was on a computer using a screen between 640 and 1024 pixels wide. :) I think a lot of the reason web design is more boring now is because you have to make it work on all sorts of different screen sizes with responsive design. There are a lot of tools to make this easy, but you still need start with a simple base so it looks ok on the smallest mobile screen.
water_badger 10mo ago
I think we underestimate the creative downside of forcing responsive design on everything
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
miguel_martin 10mo ago
It's sad that RuneScape is not on this list, yet it is on their site - https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?s=runescape https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?s=runescape
- webdesignmuseum 10mo ago
  Thanks for letting me know. I've already added this website.
massifist 10mo ago
I have fond memories of Planet Quake and also Blues News (for the latest scoop). I remember it spawned a whole bunch of other planet sites. I think some of them became part of GameSpy (or its parent company). I probably moved on by then.
- roskelld 10mo ago
  Blues News is still very much alive https://www.bluesnews.com/ https://www.bluesnews.com/ I only recently rediscovered it and it was such a nice surprise to see that it still looks pretty much as I remember back in '96.
LetsGetTechnicl 10mo ago
I miss the official Nintendo forums every day. I was a dumb kid back then but I really got my online sea legs on those message boards, and other ones related to Pokémon fan sites.
aquova 10mo ago
It's not quite as stylish as these, but my personal favorite video game site was the Super Smash Bros. Brawl blog site, which had its heyday around 2007 or so. https://web.archive.org/web/20071001132450/http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071001132450/http://www.smashb... It was the first time I had ever seen pre-release information about a game, and I checked the site religiously. The game director himself wrote all the posts, and it felt like a revolutionary way to get me excited about the game.
- _--__--__ 10mo ago
  That blog definitely established character reveal drip feeds as the way to build hype for a fighting game (or similar genres like hero shooters), even today when it involves stupid things like announcing Ronaldo for the new Saudi-funded Fatal Fury.
milchek 10mo ago
Looking at many of these now they definitely appear dated. At the time, of course, these would have been “cutting edge” I think one clear thing we can see is a trend toward more homogenized UI on web in the last 20years. I worked as a web dev in ad agencies in the early 2000s and built a lot of Flash sites, banners ads, and games that - like a lot of the sites showcased here - were quite unique in their design and aesthetic. Slowly over time these started to disappear as people embraced web design trends and techniques that meant everything started to look the same. I think a large part of this at the time was due to Flash being killed off, trends like “flat design”, frameworks, jQuery, and Wordpress becoming popular. Marketers and designers became more savvy to what “works” online and everyone copied each other in a race for attention.
- sublinear 10mo ago
  I think at least we have gradients and less muted colors coming back. We also have way better typography than 20 years ago, and I think that's what truly makes older designs "look old". They were restricted to web-safe fonts and had to put stylized text and wordmarks into low resolution images. We have better browser support for SVGs too.
hoten 10mo ago
XGen Studios belongs on this page. Spent a lot of time mucking around on their interactive homepage, and even more time playing their flash games or on their forums.
Dachande663 10mo ago
So many of these have… designs. Take the buttons, they have texture, they fit into a larger design element. They’re not a rectangle with rounded corners and maybe a gradient.
tombert 10mo ago
I remember spending hours and hours on FreeArcade.com, playing a lot of Java Applet games. I seem to remember my favorites being "Wiz3" and "Tailgunner", but there tons on there. Once I was fourteen or so, I discovered Newgrounds and (along with SomethingAwful) that ended up being where I spent most of my time online. Even though a lot of the games were kind of crap, I still thought it was cool that people made these games. Not big, heartless corporations, but just regular people who thought it would be cool to make a game. Newgrounds is still around, and there's no reason I couldn't go on there, I guess I've grown old and curmudgeonly enough to not even think about it anymore. Maybe I should change that.
- phillsav 10mo ago
  Never played FreeArcade, but me and quite a few of my University friends used to go the the Uni Library with every intention of doing a full days work and end up spending half the time on mousebreaker. Those were the days!
spankibalt 10mo ago
The outstanding Wing Commander CIC [https://www.wcnews.com https://www.wcnews.com] was the first one I discovered. Guess it gets more updates than Star Citizen, lol.
turbocon 10mo ago
I really thought this was going to those sites that's had a collection of mini games, like shockwave.com used to be.... Man I played so much donut boy
Zaskoda 10mo ago
A lot of this work was done by Walter |2| Costinak. He was an absolute legend and he's still doing a bit of design work today. I know because he did the branding for my last company and product. I worked with him a lot at Gathering of Developers back in the day. Together we rebuilt the website for Take 2 Games and they used our work for well over decade before doing a redesign. If you like this style, I recommend you reach out to him. Here's his website: https://2design.org/ https://2design.org/
Peacefulz 10mo ago
I know it's mostly nostalgia, but this was the best time online for me. I was just a teen exploring GeoCities, tripod, and dot.tk directories. I found a lot of good friends in that time. I miss the Glitch/GameShark crews that were around. =Bi0= was one of the best ones around.
Fnoord 10mo ago
Utopia [1] [2] by (back then) Mehul Patel's Swirve. Apparently it is still going on. Same with NationStates! [3] [4] Max Barry's book Jennifer Government is also decent. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192919/http://games.swirve.com/utopia/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192919/http://games.swir... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(1998_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(1998_video_game) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20021208105428if_/http://www.nationstates.net:80/cgi-bin/index.cgi https://web.archive.org/web/20021208105428if_/http://www.nat...
reactordev 10mo ago
No GameStorm? (http://gamestorm.net http://gamestorm.net) I know EA shut it down in 2001 but c’mon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStorm
phillsav 10mo ago
More than 20 years later, fans of Championship Manager Season 01/02 are still actively maintaining it: https://champman0102.net/ https://champman0102.net/
oliwarner 10mo ago
Now I feel ancient. Thanks. Many of these were regular visits. The Planet Quake site structure is a timeless classic. Also, isn't it sad how little we design websites now. All but a couple of these sites spent time with artists before being chunked up into tables or image maps. Frameworks have improved the accessibility of websites no-end but we've lost a lot of flavour and creativity.
jslakro 10mo ago
Looking at these designs, it seems they were heavily inspired by the print industry, magazines in particular. The approach was taken a literally empty canvas. I think later, hypertext and the semantic web reclaimed their territory and killed a lot the experimentation present on that era.
serf 10mo ago
it's fun getting old and forgetting about what you forgot about. seeing those screenshots from planetquake and the gameshark site it feels as if mentally it was just yesterday, but I wouldn't have given them a split second consideration had I not happened upon the gallery linked today. Such a strange feeling, like nostalgia for something you hadn't even considered was long gone.

196 points by klaussilveira 10mo ago

Peak civilization

I think <map> should make a comeback [1]. Then we could go back to having sick looking art pages [1] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp

codepoet80 10mo ago
I mean, its still in the spec. Go for it!
Klonoar 10mo ago
Map wasn’t really the thing that enabled all of those designs, even though it was certainly often used to build them. We just didn’t have a million and one layouts and device sizes to handle back then and so you could get really creative with available space. Even CSS Zen Garden later on had designs that worked much better on the limited screen sizes of that era - which don’t work well today. Flat design trends killed off the rest of it I think.
jihadjihad 10mo ago
I remember having to do an image map as part of a web design project in school, circa 2005. True to 2005, the image was one simple rectangular banner at the top of the page, with text for different pages like About and Portfolio etc. placed along it. It felt like a (cool) hack that you could define regions for the text to route to different pages on click. Of course we have modern solutions [0] nowadays but that sure seemed cool 20 years ago! 0: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?West https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

languagehacker 10mo ago

I miss Newgrounds so much

jszymborski 10mo ago
It's still around!

jszymborski 10mo ago

I loved MiniClip. HeliAttack 3 rocked.

yunnpp 10mo ago

It does put into perspective how phones fucked it all up. That Nintendo 2k1 is looking really good, with high information density without being overwhelming, and an overall nice design to just look at.

jakejohnson 10mo ago
Nintendo 2k1 website [1] was god tier slicing with the curved layout, inset menus, and sprites for the corners, edges, buttons without transparency. The pixel backgrounds, fonts, buttons, shadows looked great on a CRT. Tried to replicate it myself back in the day with HTML tables. [1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/nintendo-2001 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/nintendo-2001
- amatecha 10mo ago
  Nice! As someone who built hundreds of sites using the whole "slice a PSD into a table-based layout with 1 or more arbitrary content regions" technique in the early 2000's, I totally agree this is a really nice design indeed! Though I notice it appears to be pretty inflexible .. I imagine the content areas don't expand or anything. Not that that matters, it's still a super cool design!
barbs 10mo ago
That's probably what I miss the most in web-pages and software generally - information density.

markus_zhang 10mo ago

PlanetQuake and PlanetHalflife were my gateway drug into level design and modding back in the early 00s. Good time.

eterm 10mo ago
I'm gutted PlanetHalfLife isn't listed/shown here, I used to visit that site religiously around then.
- markus_zhang 10mo ago
  Yeah HL introduced me to modding :) I used to visit it everyday waiting for the next chapter of They Hunger to get released.
  - eterm 10mo ago
    I'd completely forgotten about that! They Hunger was a masterpiece. Not one I'd ever want to re-visit though, because nostalgia is best left not closely examined. But a golden age, of txt file walkthroughs downloaded from gamefaqs with news mods and patches off PCGamer discs to explore because there's no way I was ever downloading those on a 56k modem.
    - markus_zhang 10mo ago
      I think the older games and mods are still pretty playable if you can get over with the slightly janky control. I recall TH has nasty jump traps which almost turned me away back then. I wish I could relive the golden age.
      - amatecha 10mo ago
        Heck yeah. Remember when new games came out and you were actually genuinely surprised/impressed, over and over? For years in a row? Those were great times indeed. Sure, there were a lot of crappy games, but overall there were so many crazy awesome moments. Newer stuff is very iterative by comparison, IMO.

lanfeust6 10mo ago

Fond memories of SC Legacy, the old IGN and various message boards

Lammy 10mo ago

Needs moar Happy Puppy https://web.archive.org/web/20000827164040/http://www.happypuppy.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000827164040/http://www.happyp... https://web.archive.org/web/19961023005340/http://www.happypuppy.com/games/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961023005340/http://www.happyp...

axus 10mo ago
I was looking for Blues News, but its heyday was really pre-2000

SunshineTheCat 10mo ago

Ah yes Flash. I had just started learning how to build static HTML sites and was going down the road of learning flash instead just as I saw Steve Jobs came out in opposition of it. I decided to turn back to regular HTML/CSS and then PHP. Turned out to be the right move but I still kinda to miss those old flash sites.

bsimpson 10mo ago
Standards wonks love dancing on Flash's grave, but overlook the massive dent in culture that we lost. Maybe vibe coding will unlock a similar indie ethos for a future generation, but the frameworkification of the web and centralization of the App Stores has been bad for the last 20y of creativity.

grugdev42 10mo ago

The variety in design is so inspiring. No constraints... just do what looks cool.

orthecreedence 10mo ago
And make it look good in IE5!! :'(
sublinear 10mo ago
I don't think so. Most of these are based on the box art. I'm not saying web design is the same thing or easy, but I am saying the major elements of the design were decided on already and there's little chance it was done without those same people involved.

Klonoar 10mo ago

Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an era.

tsumnia 10mo ago
Here's one from my old AOL days. We originally just used email, AOL message boards, and a scheduled weekly chatroom, but once the Web took over it merged into Starmen.net [2] Since we're on a "reminsence about legacy Internet" trend right now, here's the opening to [1]: "What most people forget to remember is that it’s not just about the game. It’s about the people, it’s about the newsletters, it’s about the discussions, the trivia, the polls, the websites, and the meetings. Everything that was a part of the club was a part of the community, and there was so much involved that it was almost too much to handle. Who had the time to be a member of some 15 Online clubs? I can distinctly remember sending out invitations to join Moonside and receiving replies along the lines of “Sorry, I’m already in like 5 of these things.” Now, I wish there were more clubs and to any of you who have one: I will readily join. The only last great, recently active club I can think of now is the EarthBound Gang, arguably the greatest Online EarthBound Club ever. In early 1999, a lot of the clubs started dying out. I know that mine began to slow down, only to be restarted in the fall of 99’, and again in the summer of 00’. But as a whole, the EB clubs were never restarted, which is a shame, because some of them were downright fun." [1] https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html [2] https://starmen.net/ https://starmen.net/
- psunavy03 10mo ago
  The problem is "fandoms" as a whole have now become such toxic hellscapes I'd rather just enjoy the game/movie/TV series myself and completely ignore what anyone else's opinion of it is. I don't need things that bring me joy to be ruined by the most obsessive weirdos in the world.

debugnik 10mo ago

These remind me of the sites that Japanese studios are still publishing for new visual novels and small games. Also of some artist portfolio sites (in layout, not art quality).

zoklet-enjoyer 10mo ago

Web design has become so boring

hnlmorg 10mo ago

I don’t know if it’s pure nostalgia talking here, but games sites back then were made to look fun like they were part of the game. Verses now when they’re a dull and corporate.

bsimpson 10mo ago
So many websites look like someone spent 10 minutes in Squarespace
asukachikaru 10mo ago
The manuals as well. Loved the WarCraft III and Diablo II ones. They were legitimately part of the game experiences as lore was told there. Now the publishers don’t even bother to include a single sheet.
- amatecha 10mo ago
  Heck yeah, when WC2 had just come out (and I didn't have it yet because I had a Mac, and the Mac vers came out like 8mo later), I remember poring over the manual and getting all up to speed on the game while anticipating the eventual Mac port. I was enough of a geek to scan some of the awesome artwork from the manual (we had a 300dpi scanner!) and print it out and then color it with felt pens. I still have my colored Death Knight kicking around somewhere (this artwork: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Knight_(Warcraft_II)?file=Death_Knight.png https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Knight_(Warcraft_II)?... )
danaris 10mo ago
And these days it's worlds easier than it was back then to make sites with complex designs and game-like effects and animations.
password54321 10mo ago
When I first started learning about web design, I came across this popular book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think And essentially you are taught to go against a lot of things you see in these examples and design things in the way modern websites are designed e.g. big call to action button, search bar on top and center, little clutter. Modern websites are meant to be more "simple" and "easy" as the web is now meant to be "accessible" to everyone rather than just for nerds.

arkaic 10mo ago

My favorite one was a fansite for the original NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy. Wonder if it's still up

asukachikaru 10mo ago

http://classic.battle.net/war3/ http://classic.battle.net/war3/ still works. Every time I need to check some OG WC3 data for nostalgia or any other reason I use this instead of fandom.

jedberg 10mo ago

Ah, the good old days when everyone was on a computer using a screen between 640 and 1024 pixels wide. :) I think a lot of the reason web design is more boring now is because you have to make it work on all sorts of different screen sizes with responsive design. There are a lot of tools to make this easy, but you still need start with a simple base so it looks ok on the smallest mobile screen.

water_badger 10mo ago

I think we underestimate the creative downside of forcing responsive design on everything

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

miguel_martin 10mo ago

It's sad that RuneScape is not on this list, yet it is on their site - https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?s=runescape https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?s=runescape

webdesignmuseum 10mo ago
Thanks for letting me know. I've already added this website.

massifist 10mo ago

I have fond memories of Planet Quake and also Blues News (for the latest scoop). I remember it spawned a whole bunch of other planet sites. I think some of them became part of GameSpy (or its parent company). I probably moved on by then.

roskelld 10mo ago
Blues News is still very much alive https://www.bluesnews.com/ https://www.bluesnews.com/ I only recently rediscovered it and it was such a nice surprise to see that it still looks pretty much as I remember back in '96.

LetsGetTechnicl 10mo ago

I miss the official Nintendo forums every day. I was a dumb kid back then but I really got my online sea legs on those message boards, and other ones related to Pokémon fan sites.

aquova 10mo ago

It's not quite as stylish as these, but my personal favorite video game site was the Super Smash Bros. Brawl blog site, which had its heyday around 2007 or so. https://web.archive.org/web/20071001132450/http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071001132450/http://www.smashb... It was the first time I had ever seen pre-release information about a game, and I checked the site religiously. The game director himself wrote all the posts, and it felt like a revolutionary way to get me excited about the game.

_--__--__ 10mo ago
That blog definitely established character reveal drip feeds as the way to build hype for a fighting game (or similar genres like hero shooters), even today when it involves stupid things like announcing Ronaldo for the new Saudi-funded Fatal Fury.

milchek 10mo ago

Looking at many of these now they definitely appear dated. At the time, of course, these would have been “cutting edge” I think one clear thing we can see is a trend toward more homogenized UI on web in the last 20years. I worked as a web dev in ad agencies in the early 2000s and built a lot of Flash sites, banners ads, and games that - like a lot of the sites showcased here - were quite unique in their design and aesthetic. Slowly over time these started to disappear as people embraced web design trends and techniques that meant everything started to look the same. I think a large part of this at the time was due to Flash being killed off, trends like “flat design”, frameworks, jQuery, and Wordpress becoming popular. Marketers and designers became more savvy to what “works” online and everyone copied each other in a race for attention.

sublinear 10mo ago
I think at least we have gradients and less muted colors coming back. We also have way better typography than 20 years ago, and I think that's what truly makes older designs "look old". They were restricted to web-safe fonts and had to put stylized text and wordmarks into low resolution images. We have better browser support for SVGs too.

hoten 10mo ago

XGen Studios belongs on this page. Spent a lot of time mucking around on their interactive homepage, and even more time playing their flash games or on their forums.

Dachande663 10mo ago

So many of these have… designs. Take the buttons, they have texture, they fit into a larger design element. They’re not a rectangle with rounded corners and maybe a gradient.

tombert 10mo ago

I remember spending hours and hours on FreeArcade.com, playing a lot of Java Applet games. I seem to remember my favorites being "Wiz3" and "Tailgunner", but there tons on there. Once I was fourteen or so, I discovered Newgrounds and (along with SomethingAwful) that ended up being where I spent most of my time online. Even though a lot of the games were kind of crap, I still thought it was cool that people made these games. Not big, heartless corporations, but just regular people who thought it would be cool to make a game. Newgrounds is still around, and there's no reason I couldn't go on there, I guess I've grown old and curmudgeonly enough to not even think about it anymore. Maybe I should change that.

phillsav 10mo ago
Never played FreeArcade, but me and quite a few of my University friends used to go the the Uni Library with every intention of doing a full days work and end up spending half the time on mousebreaker. Those were the days!

spankibalt 10mo ago

The outstanding Wing Commander CIC [https://www.wcnews.com https://www.wcnews.com] was the first one I discovered. Guess it gets more updates than Star Citizen, lol.

turbocon 10mo ago

I really thought this was going to those sites that's had a collection of mini games, like shockwave.com used to be.... Man I played so much donut boy

Zaskoda 10mo ago

A lot of this work was done by Walter |2| Costinak. He was an absolute legend and he's still doing a bit of design work today. I know because he did the branding for my last company and product. I worked with him a lot at Gathering of Developers back in the day. Together we rebuilt the website for Take 2 Games and they used our work for well over decade before doing a redesign. If you like this style, I recommend you reach out to him. Here's his website: https://2design.org/ https://2design.org/

Peacefulz 10mo ago

I know it's mostly nostalgia, but this was the best time online for me. I was just a teen exploring GeoCities, tripod, and dot.tk directories. I found a lot of good friends in that time. I miss the Glitch/GameShark crews that were around. =Bi0= was one of the best ones around.

Fnoord 10mo ago

Utopia [1] [2] by (back then) Mehul Patel's Swirve. Apparently it is still going on. Same with NationStates! [3] [4] Max Barry's book Jennifer Government is also decent. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192919/http://games.swirve.com/utopia/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192919/http://games.swir... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(1998_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(1998_video_game) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20021208105428if_/http://www.nationstates.net:80/cgi-bin/index.cgi https://web.archive.org/web/20021208105428if_/http://www.nat...

reactordev 10mo ago

No GameStorm? (http://gamestorm.net http://gamestorm.net) I know EA shut it down in 2001 but c’mon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStorm

phillsav 10mo ago

More than 20 years later, fans of Championship Manager Season 01/02 are still actively maintaining it: https://champman0102.net/ https://champman0102.net/

oliwarner 10mo ago

Now I feel ancient. Thanks. Many of these were regular visits. The Planet Quake site structure is a timeless classic. Also, isn't it sad how little we design websites now. All but a couple of these sites spent time with artists before being chunked up into tables or image maps. Frameworks have improved the accessibility of websites no-end but we've lost a lot of flavour and creativity.

jslakro 10mo ago

Looking at these designs, it seems they were heavily inspired by the print industry, magazines in particular. The approach was taken a literally empty canvas. I think later, hypertext and the semantic web reclaimed their territory and killed a lot the experimentation present on that era.

serf 10mo ago

it's fun getting old and forgetting about what you forgot about. seeing those screenshots from planetquake and the gameshark site it feels as if mentally it was just yesterday, but I wouldn't have given them a split second consideration had I not happened upon the gallery linked today. Such a strange feeling, like nostalgia for something you hadn't even considered was long gone.