Yesterday, I was casually browsing Bluesky and came across this delightful thread:
Man, I love late-’90s/early-’00s websites, don’t you? The simplicity. The goofy fonts. The visitor counters. The personality! That whole thread is gold, truly, not just for the retro vibes but also for the sheer hilarity that is seeing websites that are massive, corporate-owned mazes today in their primaeval forms as personal blogging spaces about marriage, growing older, religion, travel, and other humdrum human activities.
The thread above canvases earlier incarnations of sites including doordash.com, hulu.com, slack.com, x.com (not nearly the worst place on the web!!!!), and more. But it made me curious: what about video game websites? Were any of the popular game websites we know today originally something else? Perhaps something more personal, or silly?
Using the good ol’ Internet Archive, I started with some big AAA gaming companies. Unfortunately, most of the ones I looked up were only ever websites for those companies, as opposed to once being someone’s blog. Still, it’s not all bad. Let’s stroll together through a brief tour of what major gaming websites looked like 20-30 years ago.
Here’s EA, circa 1997. The little squares around “welcome to ea online” flip-flop back and forth between different images. Deliciously retro. I had to look up what “Jane’s” was (Jane’s Combat Simulations). The Bullfrog website is pretty funny too, especially the “Your Browser Window Should Be Set To This Width” line, whose recommended dimensions only take up about a third of my monitor space.
Now let’s go see what Ubisoft is up to around the same ti-wow! “the pod GAME SERVICE IS HERE!! Download it Now!!” is perfection. Oh, and look, Ubi Soft products will be on display at E3! I bet that’ll be good!
Here’s what GameFAQs looked like at the end of 1996. Remember when websites were updated by just like, one person, who could go on vacation whenever?
Here’s Nintendo from 1997, when it was still focused around the Nintendo Power magazine.
It’s easy to forget that Blizzard’s Battle.net has been around since the Stone Age or so. The oldest versions of that site aren’t much to look at, but Blizzard dot com in 1996 is pleasantly retro. And look, there are employment opportunities available!
But not all game-related websites have been around that long. Let’s take a look at some that were really different once.
Most games media websites either have nothing archived from that long ago, or already existed, but I did find the old Polygon dot com website and, you know what, you’re right, I’m not sure I have the right Polygon!
EpicGames dot com in 1996 certainly does seem to be a purveyor of video games, though I’m not sure you can find Fortnite here. However, these games ARE on the Games Sampler 2 for Windows 95!
This next one is what really convinced me to do this post, and I think only works because “Discord” is such a common word but the product is relatively recent. Back in ’96, Discord dot com belonged to someone who was really into MUDs, the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sondheim musicals, and The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Good taste!
Along the same lines, my search for other gaming-related websites that haven’t been around that long but have pretty basic names led me to search for “elgato.com”, which is now the website of the streaming accessories maker. Around 1996, I was expecting something cat-related. I was not expecting a cigar shop:
And finally, I couldn’t not go look at Kotaku dot com. Its earliest archives are just an expired domain, unfortunately, but here it is in October 2004, in all of its glory:
Huh! Okay!
