the depths

[rtil]

share obscure stuff that has been lost to time on the webzones

in 2001 i got my first real-ish website - as in one i was paying for - after years of using free hosts like angelfire, geocities, tripod, homestead, etc. basically i wanted more than 20MB of space as that was pretty much all you could get for free.

the host was called spaceports, and they have been gone for at least 15 years now. it piqued my interest because of the space theme of the website - how it worked was that after you picked a package you could pick a planet to have your site on, with names of all kinds of planets and moons in our solar system. mine was on the planet cirrus, so my website was something like cirrus.spaceports.com/~rtil. unfortunately it was never archived, but lots of other ones were.

they had a forum, an irc chat, and a sense of community that you definitely would not find at a webhost these days. i made a lot of friends there back then and i have a lot of good memories of it. here's some good screenshots from archive.org:
the landing page
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they had a page for the most visited sites, updated daily. "top sites" were huge back then, so this was a necessity. most of these are archived, so if you want to visit them you still can.
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ye olde forum
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[nuac_]

I hate sayin this, so I'll just refer to it briefly.
There was a ton of drama where the webmaster for the main fansite of the mmo KBM and I used to play got nuked; the webmaster had his fill after getting hacked like twice and being harassed on IRC daily for just being himself.
So one of the webhosting services everyone had a look at briefly on the IRC chatroom was SPACEPORTS.
I think it was either too expensive or didn't match the bandwidth the fansite used to get on telefragged.

>SPACEPORTS
>20GB Bandwidth

looooooooooool



Telefragged turned into atomicgamer and then disappeared in 2015???

[nuac_]

You were a fan of DDR at one point?

How about Nexon's BEATDANCE????



https://en.namu.wiki/w/%EB%B9%84%ED%8A%B8%EB%8C%84%EC%8A%A4

Obviously this game did not make it out of the private BETA, but it had the fanciest promotional website trying to get users onto it. It failed to find an audience pretty fast and did not survive.

I think I only found out about this game cuz my PC was utter crap and I wanted to try something new. It wasn't listed in PC Gamer or whatever.

Also the game controlled differently; you moved your mouse over the arrows and hit space, instead of hitting Directional Keys to the music like in Flash Flash Revolution or the Original DDR

[nuac_]

There's a game on steam called "Hypnospace outlaw"

You are basically an admin for something that looks a lot like AOL online; you flag user websites and look at old stuff that looks like it belongs on Compuserve idk. I was really entertained by this but I didn't play it myself. Eventually the 3rd or 4th act of the game opens, and they have their own version of webarchive in it.
It was pretty entertaining; this is pretty faithful to how everything ran back then.

[ZekeySpaceyLizard]

hypnospace outlaw is a masterpiece

i have a youtube channel where i have tried to archive animations that are no longer available to find on the web
either because they were demos for animation software that no longer exists, bits of demo reels for artists or studios who have since vanished, or animations for art websites that went defunct many years ago

i wish i'd been more aggressive about collecting these things. theres so much wonderful stuff i remember that is now completely utterly lost to time that i had the chance to archive but never did

either way, here

[Dr. DiegO]

There's a game on steam called "Hypnospace outlaw"

You are basically an admin for something that looks a lot like AOL online; you flag user websites and look at old stuff that looks like it belongs on Compuserve idk. I was really entertained by this but I didn't play it myself. Eventually the 3rd or 4th act of the game opens, and they have their own version of webarchive in it.
It was pretty entertaining; this is pretty faithful to how everything ran back then.

Got this game on GOG, pretty cool. but I discovered mostly by the following one after this, Slayers X.

[Dr. DiegO]

share obscure stuff that has been lost to time on the webzones

in 2001 i got my first real-ish website - as in one i was paying for - after years of using free hosts like angelfire, geocities, tripod, homestead, etc. basically i wanted more than 20MB of space as that was pretty much all you could get for free.

the host was called spaceports, and they have been gone for at least 15 years now. it piqued my interest because of the space theme of the website - how it worked was that after you picked a package you could pick a planet to have your site on, with names of all kinds of planets and moons in our solar system. mine was on the planet cirrus, so my website was something like cirrus.spaceports.com/~rtil. unfortunately it was never archived, but lots of other ones were.

they had a forum, an irc chat, and a sense of community that you definitely would not find at a webhost these days. i made a lot of friends there back then and i have a lot of good memories of it. here's some good screenshots from archive.org:
the landing page
You cannot view this attachment.
they had a page for the most visited sites, updated daily. "top sites" were huge back then, so this was a necessity. most of these are archived, so if you want to visit them you still can.
You cannot view this attachment.
ye olde forum
You cannot view this attachment.

Oh shit I miss more Rtil lore and knowledge 

[rtil]

You were a fan of DDR at one point?

How about Nexon's BEATDANCE????



https://en.namu.wiki/w/%EB%B9%84%ED%8A%B8%EB%8C%84%EC%8A%A4

Obviously this game did not make it out of the private BETA, but it had the fanciest promotional website trying to get users onto it. It failed to find an audience pretty fast and did not survive.

I think I only found out about this game cuz my PC was utter crap and I wanted to try something new. It wasn't listed in PC Gamer or whatever.

Also the game controlled differently; you moved your mouse over the arrows and hit space, instead of hitting Directional Keys to the music like in Flash Flash Revolution or the Original DDR

the style of this is so iconically early 2000's it hurts but i really like it. there were so many DDR clones, i think the biggest PC one ended up being stepmania, at least back then. one of the most infamous gamer rage videos was a guy playing stepmania and smashing his monitor cuz he messed up a 34579834795384 combo. there were already holes in his wall. wonder where that kid is now

[Dr. DiegO]

Man I love Y2K aesthetics

[cipher]

I had some stuff on freewebs, but that is long gone and I did not save any of it. Although part of me thinks that is for the better anyways.

[rtil]

my angelfire website has completely rotted away now, but i did snake it a while back and preserved some of it. it's super cringe, i made it when i was 11. i am pretty sure i've shared pieces of it before, but if not i can post it again

[wasp]

Not exactly lost since it's still up but this website appears to be the source of the most liked image on Gelbooru and it's quite something:

http://morikawadanpage.web.fc2.com/studio/3D/3d_geno.html

http://morikawadanpage.web.fc2.com/index.html

http://morikawadanpage.web.fc2.com/studio/ore_g.html

Incredibly 2000s aesthetic pervading the whole thing. Remarkably seems to have been updated as recently as 2020 though.

[nuac_]

As long as we're talking about super old stuff in general, I'll post a few more links.
These are only -nearly- lost to time though?:

Maru production has been around for 20 years
They made tiny little flash animations but I didn't really bother to translate
I'm assuming they were an artist that dipped briefly into macromedia tools back then
And they still make stuff today but nothing like feature animations or anything.
They were interesting when the web was very tiny, emerging and people want to see what flash could do.
https://maruproduction.com/anim/1man.html

Nekogames made Cursor 10 in 2008
Their new layout while in english has kinda hobbled a bit; I cant find my favourites or both versions of the game, but there are other games worth playing still.
http://nekogames.jp/index.html

GameDesign.jp is one of the later sites I found after flash peaked and was mostly being used for porn ; none of these games are that. The Boxing game is quite good. The resolution on most of these are far too small, but if you bother to get around that or dont mind it, they range from Boxing, Baseball, Dice wars (!!!), and an 80s dungeon crawler RPG complete with 3d mazes.
https://www.gamedesign.jp/index_en.html

Pica-pic.com is a site I want to bring up but cannot; someone parked over the domain and is spreading malware through it now? But there is a youtube video of some the games working; most of these were TIGER or NINTENDO LCD games like game and watch donkey kong.

https://oladaniel.com/pica-pic (old site)

In light of picapic going under though, sometime in 2018--
MAME was able to emulate a lot of the LCD Tiger/Nintendo Electronic games that were handhelds in the 80s and 90s. You can probably find methods for emulating them with google

Ferryhalim.com made some nice games starting in 2000
Nearly everyone has played them and seeing the TV bumper for "flash games" on Tech Tv was a little surreal, but I dont know if the creator was ever sent a copy of it from TV.
His games werent working for a bit, but they are working now with Ruffle plugin support.
https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

Nigoro.jp made some cool games like Rose and Camellia but they no longer seem to be working and are being sold on the switch now.
http://nigoro.jp/en/games/rose/

Pendulumeca was a line-swinging game simiular to an endless runner with spider-man swinging, but a little better than flash clones with that very thing; in this one you play as a hook-shooting robot ???
It was a .jp game that won in a flash competition
https://www.addictinggames.com/action/pendulumeca

SeventhSky is one of the better flash games from 2003-2004, I found it on penny-arcade.com, linksville, which then shutdown because the moderator looking after it got fussy that cool links werent all being posted in the site he was able to moderate links in.

https://nextframe.jp/flash/seventhsky_refine/seventhsky_refine.html

Johanthan Gay was interviewed by Leo laporte a long time ago when flash was getting its legs.
The video is fairly ancient but was uploaded 4 years ago; the date on teh recording is probably a lot earlier than that.

THE GO FUCK YOURSELF WEBPAGE offended a lot of really dumb people
But it's no longer around and has a few archive.ph pages dedicated to its memory.
There was also a story gallery on some really strange things going on in the webmaster's life or the IRC channel.
https://archive.ph/www.amishrakefight.org

And I have to go to bed cuz im getting really dizzy hahahaha brb
More later, theres a bit more

[rtil]

all those ferry halim games are too cute it's giving me diabetes

[nuac_]

Talkin bout, old internet. I think in 2007 I tried getting into deeper IRC crap and my friends recommend I check out "erowid" https://www.erowid.org/

It was like a collection of everyone's drug experiences at higher doses.

It wasn't an incentive to try anything but I found it pretty neat for something I would never do.

And then the psychiatrist I was seeing in thunderbay gave me a prescription for fast acting benzos; which weren't that great; they just happened to make me sleepy, and came with withdrawls and a quick tolerence.


Earlier than that, VGMIX/VGMIX2: https://vgmixarchive.com/ used to be a thing. Theyd have Chiptune versions of songs from Sonic Adventure 2, like

LousySpy - Escape From the City - NES mix.

But then I think a bunch of drama started circulating and VGMIX would accept things OCREMIX would not and then the panel for VGMIX cannabilized and gave up or Idk, im really tired.

In between VGMIX and EROWID , OLREMIX: http://olremix.org/ was a site for all the shit video game remixes that got bagged on by the panel and were deliberately not very good on purpose.

I think the summer hit for most of 2005 or 2006 was JUESSE BELMONT - http://olremix.org/remixes/300. You could not log into IRC and not hear someone mentioning that song.
And like against my wishes, TLF wanted help to animate that into a video because 8bit theater was pretty much toast and TLF wanted to take off and start a chain of hair salons with his paypal money. or something like that.

But he really liked the song and wanted someone to animate it and he totally could too, but it didnt really happen.

I think the song is just Vampire Killer from teh first level, but the hiphop sound before the song picks up is a nice immersive touch on its goofiness.

And then not long after 2007 I thought "Toronto sucks I'm gonna get out of here and go to Northern Ontario" and realized pretty quickly, none of the people living there, like living there either. But more later.