Yesterday I was casually browsing Bluesky and came across this delicious thread:
Man, I love websites from the late 90s and early 2000s, don’t you? Simplicity. Crazy fonts. The visitor counter. Personality! This whole thread is truly gold, not only for the retro vibes, but also for the sheer hilarity of seeing websites that today are huge corporate-owned mazes in their primitive forms as spaces for personal blogs about marriage, aging, religion, travel, and other mundane human activities.
The thread above features earlier incarnations of sites including doordash.com, hulu.com, slack.com, x.com (not the worst place on the web at all!!!!), and much more. But this piqued my curiosity: what about video game sites? Was one of the popular gaming sites we know today originally something else? Maybe something more personal, or silly?
Using the good old Internet Archive, I started with large AAA gaming companies. Unfortunately, most of the ones I looked at were just these companies’ websites, instead of once being someone’s blog. However, it’s not all bad. Let’s take a quick look at what the major gaming websites looked like 20-30 years ago.
This is EA, circa 1997. The little squares around “welcome to EA Online” alternate 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 line “Your browser window should be set to this width”, the recommended dimensions of which only take up about a third of my monitor space.
©Electronic Arts Now let’s see what Ubisoft is preparing in 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 it will be good!
©Ubisoft. Or, I guess, UbiSoft? This is what GameFAQs looked like in late 1996. Remember when websites were updated by a single person, who could go on vacation at any time?
©GameFAQ This is Nintendo from 1997, when it was still focused on Nintendo Power review.
©Nintendo It’s easy to forget that Blizzard’s Battle.net has been around since roughly the Stone Age. The older versions of this site aren’t very interesting, but Blizzard dot com in 1996 is pleasantly retro. And look, there are job opportunities available!
©Blizzard Entertainment But not all gaming-related websites have been around that long. Let’s take a look at a few that have been Really different once.
Most gaming media websites either didn’t archive anything long ago or already existed, but I found the old Polygon dot com website and, you know what, you’re right, I’m not sure I have the right Polygon!
©Polygon??? EpicGames dot com in 1996 certainly seems to be a video game provider, although I’m not sure you can find Fortnite here. However, these games ARE on Games Sampler 2 for Windows 95!
© This is the next one that really convinced me to do this post, and I think it only works because “Discord” is a very common word but the product is relatively new. In 1996, Discord dot com was owned by someone who really loved MUDs, Alfred Lord Tennyson poetry, Sondheim musicals and The Dragon Riders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Good taste!
©… someone? On a related note, 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 streaming accessory maker’s website. Around 1996, I was expecting something to do with cats. I wasn’t expecting a cigar store:
©El Gato Cigars And finally, I couldn’t not check out Kotaku dot com. Its first archive is unfortunately just an expired domain, but here it is in October 2004, in all its glory:
©Kotaku Eh! All right!