The Gaming Intelligence Agency
I just now learned the site was revived a few years ago and then shut down again. But like villain said, this one kind of doesn’t count because it at least exists as an archive. Is that the Web site equivalent of making a digital copy of your mind before you die?
Castle ZZT
I saved a copy of this at one point and uploaded it here. But part of the mystery of it was that the site would change periodically, kind of like
MP3.com
There’s something at the domain, but the site I miss is the one with music by independent artists. There are better sites now that perform that function, but some of the music that was there seems to be quite difficult to find now or lost forever (and probably doesn’t exist at a bit rate greater than 128kbps).
I also miss Web sites with unique designs instead of boring templates, personal Web sites in general that are not just Web logs, and those early chat rooms where you had to reload the page to see new messages.
Yes, I’d been meaning to bring this one up! Some time back in the day, I somehow came across some MP3s on there by an artist called E-System. There were three tracks on there. It was the first time I’d ever heard chiptune music outside of video games, so it really made an impact on me. Sadly, I lost the mp3s a few years later, and I haven’t been able to find any of that person’s music ever since. It’s a shame, I’d love to see how I feel about it now that I have, like, any music knowledge at all.
In college Audiogalaxy’s related music suggestions basically single-handedly made it possible for me to develop musical knowledge fast enough to socially position myself as some kind of erudite hipster rather than a basic suburban idiot who only listened to Pavement because Nintendorks* wrote about them a lot
it saved my life
*I was going to say Nintendorks was another lost website but… it somehow still exists? What the fuck
That was the first website I read regularly, dipping my toe past IGN64.com
At some point that transferred to PlanetGamecube and then Tim ranting about PlanetGamecube and then a decade after that, working with the proprietor of PlanetGamecube himself as our fuddy midwestern media manager. Still as much of a Nintendo fanboy as he ever was.
Website mascot His Cat, Louie passed away while I was working with Billy (he professionally goes by Billy) and I gave him a hug.
nearly every song on myspace uploaded more than three years ago is unplayable and only retrievable if the owner of the account the song was uploaded with knows their login, which is really unlikely if they even care about their old emo band at all
I used to spend hours and hours on this site. I actually have 2 CDs I ordered from the site, one from a gothic electronic band called Church of Selene and a Celtic-style band called Lothlorien. Ordering custom-burned CD-Rs from MP3.com in 1999/2000 is one of the weirdest things you could probably try to explain to a young person.
I reached out to Church of Selene and actually got permission from them to use in my VHS-taped half-hour fantasy comedy epic Supernatural Thing-Slayer, a project I was immensely embarrassed by as soon as we wrapped production. The band was super chill and I thought it was a huge deal, but I actually think it was probably just some Scandinavian dude who liked to play with synthesizers and was also probably in high school.
Speaking of MP3.com, I miss all the old sprawling MIDI archive websites. I don’t remember their names, but I trolled dozens of them and downloaded everything I could. I could find the names of their sites in old ZZT games I made where I thanked them on credits boards for providing inspiration/relief from boredom. You can find very few good renditions of 60s pop songs and 90s TV theme songs in MIDI form in the year 2018 and that is sad as hell.
This causes me to react like our hypothetical young person does to ordering CD-Rs from MP3.com. Maybe I got into PCs too late ('95, when I was 9, was our first PC) but the wild west of sound processing on PC definitively shaped things like game soundtracks for the worse next to tightly defined constraints consoles had.
My friends had a really sketchy roommate who was into blaring the 69 Boyz on his car stereo. He found a CD I had made of the weirdest MIDIs possible (including a custom one of Dillinger Escape Plan’s 43% Burnt from a guitar tab to midi converter) for one my friends, stole it, and reported back that “it bumps.” People kept talking about how he was driving around listening to MIDIs of unrecognizable songs at insane volumes for months after.
My oldest brother used to be a semi-prolific artist in the mid/late-90s tracker scene, but the only music of his I can find online are these 5 files (and he claims that the first one isn’t even his). As far as I know, all of the rest of his .it files have disappeared from existence. I do have a few more of his songs in .mp3 format but, I mean, it just doesn’t feel the same.
We got our first PC in 1994 when I was 11. I started using the Internet at libraries in 1997, where I would load as many shareware/free/demo games and MIDIs as I could onto a few floppies for enjoyment at home. We got the Internet in 1998 when I was 15, but I didn’t have broadband until I moved out of my mom’s house, so bandwidth was always terribly slow. I also had terrible taste and needed jazzy renditions of the Bewitched theme. This is my life. Is it my secret shame? No, it is my great pride.
Non-funeral alert: I am amazed that https://themushroomkingdom.net/ is still alive and kicking and honestly looking a lot like it did 20 years ago. I used to check this website for updates daily.
