Prior to the internet condensing into just 5 or so websites, what do you remember fondling about being online?

I remember winning a raffle contest on the old Terraria forums and getting to pick my own title (instead of just New Member, Member, Well-Known Member). Of course, since I was like 13, I picked a random collection of letters that only I knew was an acronym of my signature on said forums.

  • RadDevon@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 year ago

    When search was bad, finding something cool on the internet felt like finding buried treasure.

    I’ll always remember Illucia: The Town of Final Fantasy. It was a Final Fantasy fansite started by some college student (I assume since it was hosted on some university’s web hosting; maybe UC Santa Barbara?) named Tatsushi Nakao in the early 90s. The page greeted you with original art of a pixelated Final Fantasy style town. You could click on various buildings to go to sections of the site. It felt like a place, and it was fun to explore.

    I remember the Quake web community in the mid 90s — a bunch of web sites, sometimes linked together and sometimes not — all with Quake-related content. Large portal sites would organize around interests, and they would seek out smaller sites about niche parts of that interest, bringing them into the fold to offer hosting and services. PlanetQuake is the one I remember most around Quake. The PlanetQuake site was a place you’d go to get the latest Quake news, but then they also hosted more niche sites.

    The first practical “programming” I ever did was in Quake macros… and that’s probably a major part of why I have the career I have today. There was a whole site dedicated to Quake macros (probably hosted on PlanetQuake, but I can no longer say for certain) that helped me get started and even helped me along when I got stuck.

    I recall another site which I believe was called the House of Mouse which existed solely to extoll the virtues of the keyboard/mouse control scheme for Quake. When Quake was released, the prevailing way to control a shooter was with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Doom guy wasn’t able to look up or down, so the mouse wasn’t necessary. (You could control Doom with the mouse, but moving the mouse forward caused Doom guy to walk forward. It was a terrible way to play!) Hence the need to convince people to play with the mouse and keyboard.

    I miss the early web. Smaller communities like this, Tildes, and Mastodon give me those same vibes again.