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.
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."
I don't need things that bring me joy to be ruined by the most obsessive weirdos in the world.
(You can perhaps substitute “wasn’t so much” for some form of “in addition to”)
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.
Kids don't want to hang out with grown ups.
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...
Other Quake related sites that I remember:
Still looks how I remember it: https://web.archive.org/web/20010125112300/http://www.quake3...,
Such memories haha: https://web.archive.org/web/20050131033734/http://www.shackn...
The archive page has broken and misplaced images from the site's old design mixed into the new one, the real site looked much better when it existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20030212044233/http://rocketaren...
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.
Some examples: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page (Pokemon) https://minecraft.wiki/ (Minecraft) https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ (Old School Runescape)
..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!
Another one I still actively use that isnt a fandom mess (besides Warframe) is the wiki for Guild Wars, which is still hosted by the developer.
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.
https://metroiddatabase.com/old_site/m1/
It's still running now with a new design, but they went through several different styles over the years, each of them clearly made with love and care.
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
Of course we have modern solutions [0] nowadays but that sure seemed cool 20 years ago!
0: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192919/http://games.swir...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(1998_video_game)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20021208105428if_/http://www.nat...
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.
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).
I bet he's all-in on AI and no-code now. "Don't Make Me Code! 10 tips for building passive income without writing a single line of code"
I miss the Glitch/GameShark crews that were around. =Bi0= was one of the best ones around.
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.
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.
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 wish I could relive the golden age.
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.
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.
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.
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