Aside from wanting to gush about how much I love the online puzzle community, I think this survey and article series spoke to me because I kind of haphazardly grew up on the Internet. Between lunch hunched over the desk in the newspaper classroom in middle school, frequent trips to the public library’s computer lab, and eventually getting a hand-me-down IBM box and firing up AOL, I constantly dug for content and people that spoke to me. Back then, finding content was more of a scavenger hunt than it is now. Searching and curated lists were the name of the game; today there’s a lot of subscribing and refreshing feeds hoping for a morsel of awesome between ads and whining.
So, at the risk of being pretentious or jumping on a bandwagon, I wanted to put together a list of some sites that have that vintage web feel and formed a vital part of my growing up on the web.
Castle Arcana
(Beware of music.) I’m not even sure what the purpose of the site is/was, but Castle Arcana is essentially a nifty, black and white fantasy world to explore. Lovingly brought to life in “Adobe PageMill 2.0 Mac”, it has dozens of weird secrets and dead-ends to explore without any of the frills of the modern web to get in the way.
SCP Foundation
Most folks will tell you “4chan was never good!” I’ve been known to retort “but it was less-worse” followed by an oft-ignored set of arguments about the boards that are not the infamous /b/. The /x/ board, dedicated to all things paranormal, often contained a variety of scary stories. While they were by no means novelistic, the varying quality of the writing paired with the informal and fleeting nature of the site resulted in a phenomenon known now as ‘creepypasta’.
The SCP Foundation is an archive and extension of one of the old standards of the board: a weird and disturbing image of what appears to be a sculpture made to look like a shy-but-menacing creature. The accompanying text further added to the lack of information by dubbing it ‘SCP-173’ and providing a scientific/militaristic background story with scarce details. Eventually, someone put two and two together and figured that something numbered 173 must have been preceded by 172 equally weird things, and the series of stories took off. Being a wiki, entries have been contributed by a variety of writers, and continue to be expanded to present day.
Daedalus
Boasting compatibility all the way back to Windows 95, Walter Pullen’s Daedalus maze generation program isn’t a web destination per se. Still, the old school homepage and declaration of the program’s status as “100% freeware with no registration fee!” belies a feature-rich application. It’s capable of replicating mazes from the early seasons of Survivor, generating mazes upwards of three dimensions, and with scripting it manages to build quite the retro-futuristic dungeon crawler.
Laff in the Dark
I think the next best thing to visiting a musty old amusement park and getting a behind-the-scenes tour of a fun house must be this throwback. Launched in 1999, Laff in the Dark wields meticulously-sliced table layouts, quirky animated gifs, and vibrant compositions of photos and documents to tell the narrative of each topic. Said topics include details of fun house ride experiences, their construction, biographies of innovators of the genre, and lists of former and current attractions. Albeit mostly cheesy, the old photos and ephemera combined with blurbs about safety enhancements both inspire nostalgia for this type of quirky corner of the web as well as a false sense of nostalgia for a hokier and more dangerous bygone era in the amusement industry.
X-Entertainment
Down for maintenance as of this writing, and superseded by the author’s new blog, Dinosaur Dracula, X-E was where I learned a lot of things about nostalgia for which I had no business yearning, and the offensive-yet-amazing combinations of foodstuffs which existed during the time when I was a fetus or a toddler. My strangest (and most obvious) memory was learning the horrifying details of the ‘nutrition’ information for a Hungry Man meal, and immediately wanting to try one for myself. I think Canada’s Worst Driver calls this ‘Target Fixation Syndrome’.
Not Fooling Anybody
Gone for a spell but finally back, Not Fooling Anybody is a chronicle of the subtle redecorating efforts put forth by new businesses. What used to occupy their spaces? You can probably figure it out somewhat easily.
Ridiculous Food Society of Upstate New York
How can I not love ridiculous food monstrosities by another man named Dave? Check out the various musings on the topic of Capital Region Style Hot Dog Sauce as well as Dave’s recipe for his take on it. Upon rediscovering the site for this post, I am eager to try the Velveeta fudge recipe myself.
…and many more.
This is getting quite long, so I’m going to cut off the list here. I’m happy to see many of these sites that I thought were dead are now either revived or reborn by the author at a new home. I encourage readers with spare time to go get lost in these.
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