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.
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."
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.
That's easily solved by turning off comments or forcing every comment to be approved by an admin before it was displayed; much easier back then as there simply weren't that many people online. The "Web 2.0 read/write web" of XBL lobbies, Battle.net and Discord perverted gaming culture to a point of no return.
Sites back then had benevolent dictators that curated an experience for fans. I think in many ways it worked better than the democratized communities we have today.
It wasn’t so much “benevolent dictator” as it was “you’re in my house, so quit being a dick”. Toxic fans certainly existed but this approach usually led to them splintering off to create their own thing that’d inevitably wither away.
(You can perhaps substitute “wasn’t so much” for some form of “in addition to”)
While I agree with current "Top-Level Internet" as I call it, the blurb is referring to the '99-'00s era when we were still very much disconnected. Those clubs had a forum on AOL and that was it.
I think Discord is where the "New Internet" is forming, because that's where this generation of kids are hanging out. We were in the Nintendo chat rooms, and they're in the modern day equivalents. We just think they are on Twitch and Kick because that's where the grown ups are playing games, but remember there's a reason Roblox is popular.
I think there was also planetquake. Loved these sites and frankly, they are beautifully designed. It shows the age, but apart from not being accessible and not being able to scale, the UI was really structured and easy to navigate. I miss these communities.
I still have around 20 PSDs of all of the different Quake clan / gaming ladder sites I put together back in the day.
I think that's why these sites all looked unique. The design started with a blank image in Photoshop because you used to slice up the PSDs into images and stitch it together in code afterwards.
Today you can easily design a site without ever touching an image editor since it can be all CSS rules.
The wiki format has indeed become ubiquitous for fan sites, but many fan wikis are fairly elaborate and ad-free (-ish, at least). Often the case for popular gacha games at least, e.g. https://bluearchive.wiki/.
The problem is that Fand*m makes finding results from the decent wikis unreasonably hard, I end up having to use extensions like https://getindie.wiki/.
Also, Discord all but killed the concept of a video game fan site...
The generic, ad-ridden wikis are everywhere, unfortunately, because the terrible service they provide is free. However, there are also lots of passionate people who pay to host their own MediaWiki servers, and then communities that populate it with accurate information! I think they deserve special applause for providing a really cool service that we mostly take for granted.
..only after I started putting together the list, did I realize that a lot of them are hosted by the same individual or community (https://meta.runescape.wiki/w/Weird_Gloop). Interesting!
This is the fault of Wikia (now "Fandom") which jam-packs every wiki full of ads and auto-playing videos they'll helpfully reopen for you if you accidentally close them.
Along with Breezewiki, which was specifically designed to combat Fandom/Wikia.
An another note it's always struck me as extremely presumptuous that the company thinks it can just call itself "Fandom" like the word hasn't existed in generic form for nearly a century and a half before they ever did. The lack of willingness to fend off what should be unenforceable trademarks and copyrights is creating a snowball that's going to get too big to stop in the next decade.
Oh, on the other hand I'm actually totally surprised there was a new post on the homepage as recently as Dec 14th! Huge kudos to everyone still keeping the awesomeness alive.
I can think of at least one. gamefaqs.gamespot.com
gamespot itself is definitely different than it used to be but the gamefaqs subdomain has remained nearly identical to how it was in the late 90s early 2000s
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
Blues News is still very much alive 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get why most modern sites are designed the way they are. I wouldn’t want my bank nor government websites to be cartoony.
However game websites are going to be used heavily by people familiar with the game. Also, if the game UI is unfathomable then people aren’t going to like the game anyway. So you would expect any website that borrows from the game UI to also be discoverable.
Personally I think a large part of the change was due to the shift to responsive websites. Back when everyone was using a 5:4 monitor you could get more creative and use things like absolute positioning. These days everything needs to be distilled down to the lowest common denominator because you cannot make any expectations about resolution nor aspect ratios.
Add to that how the mouse cursor have been replaced with fat fingers, and you now require the site to be tolerant with input devices that cannot navigate fiddling controls.
You could see the contrast back when sites first started doing a mobile versions of their site (before Google threatened to give poorer ranking to such sites).
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.
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)?... )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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