This thread inspired me to look up some places I used to read and holy shit http://www.vgmuseum.com is alive and well and looks like 2003 never died.
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Too new for this thread?
I used to hang out on a nold website when I was a little kid that was one of those fansites, nintendoland. It was filled with fanfiction, choose your own adventure games, very early flash games. Tons of fanart, old sketches and scans from old game manuals and all kinds of trivia about the making of the games. It was dedicated to the first party nintendo parties only.
It closed down in 2003? I think.
I miss Solidsharkey.com. It was better when he was writing there on a weekly basis, and really funny. If you know me you know that Tim Rogers is a sham, and Solid Sharkey is The Real.
I also miss Archnacho and Tortilla Godzillaās Quality ROMs.
It was the very first emulation website I ever found on my own that wasnāt weird PD games on Zophars and stuff from the NESticle website. AN&TGQR had a curated list of games only, instead of offering every title for certain systems. Theyād write funny blurbs back and forth about each game they uploaded.
I remember they did not like Digital Devil Saga.
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I just found out Encyclopedia Obscura and Flying Omlette were down what the fuck
I used to spend a lot of time on this site too! It had a great look, very polished and colorful. I loved the flash trivia games they had on there, probably picked up a lot of random early Nintendo knowledge from those. Nintendoland was a great example of something you donāt see nowadays - an enormous, extremely popular, completely noncommercial website with nothing to sell and no way to make money.
I remember that it branched off into a ton of other websites too, there was a metroid centric one that was basically dedicated to just Samus the character (at a time when the only games were the first three)
I remember stumbling on it years later as a teenager and finding that it was still up, but that the webmaster left kind of a eulogy and said something about maybe running into people somewhere down the road.
Like the internet was always going to be this innocent thing filled with fansites, and yeah, maybe one day weād have our old webmaster back!
Screwattack?
No. maybe?
I remember that in the summer of 98 or 99, somewhere thereabouts, Nintendo had a āsummer campā on their website. Their ancient chatroom (this had to have been a java applet, right?) was set up like a backyard with rooms like the Gazebo and the Poolāthey even had a ādiving boardā room limited to like four or five people at a time, and you had a special button which would let you dive back into the Pool room. Iām pretty sure this was the first time I learned about emotes. On another occasion, they had a Starfox-themed creative writing event where everybody was invited to invent characters and locations on the different planets in the Lylat system on their primitive forum system. I remember being surprised that I won an award for my āKatina Cantinaā, which just felt like the most obvious Star Wars ripoff possible.
In 2015 I drove down the west coast with my wife. We spent one pretty bad day in Portland, but there were two highlights, and one of them was having lunch with Sharkey. His dynasty of forums and the select button community are together responsible for maybe 50% of all the words Iāve ever typed.
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iām glad someone else has heard of this. i first stumbled across it maybe ten years ago and it left a vivid impression on me. was really sad finding out what happened to the creator.
if youāre interested, some people (known to him?) collected together remnants of his life and creations left around the web: Reddit - Dive into anything
may need to check most of those links on archives at this point, though
Time Cube, one of the first viral pages of the Internet (dating back to 1997). I always thought of it was one of the permanent online fixtures, so to have it gone is definitely uncanny.
The other one that springs to mind was the r o t t e n . c o m /library, which was a wiki-style collection of pages jumping along all sorts of subjects, most which were āfringe-yā in nature; however, it was well-written and took a speculative-yet-somewhat-authoratiative tone about a lot of things that are not generally discussed. The page on Jakob Boehme was especially good.
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In my freshman year of high school, I had a giant crush on this gothish girl who introduced me to rotten . com, so of course I had to dive straight in. The worst way to get into the worst thing.
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yeah i miss a lot of shock sites that are either gone or just straight up porn now
I was just reminded of (and reminded how much I miss) Post Secret, only to realize that Iād incorrectly assumed the site was no longer active.
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A while after Google Reader went away, I realized that Post Secret was one of the things I still wanted to follow one way or another. These days, I only see it when I check Facebook. Which is less than ideal.
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Boy, looking back, I really titled the hell out of this thread.
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I have exactly one ādata and musicā CD from MP3.com. Since the included MP3 files are (of course) 128 kbps, Iāve always intended to rip the CD and see if it sounds like the audio tracks are higher quality. Somehow I doubt they are.
I did manage to track down the musician at one point and get permission to post the songs on my Web site, since they were otherwise impossible to find.
Edit: I just remembered that when I tracked down the musician he said he appreciated that I cared about his work and then he asked me if I wanted to play poker online. I didnāt know how to play poker and I still donāt, but it was nice of him to ask.
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For the past 3 years Iāve been planning on buying the Animusic DVDs and playing them at a meetup and I keep forgetting, I gotta get on that shit
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