alt Hacker NewsVideo Game Websites in the early 00s
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A lot of this work was done by Walter |2| Costinak. He was an absolute legend and he's still doing a bit of design work today. I know because he did the branding for my last company and product. I worked with him a lot at Gathering of Developers back in the day. Together we rebuilt the website for Take 2 Games and they used our work for well over decade before doing a redesign. If you like this style, I recommend you reach out to him. Here's his website:
Ah, the good old days when everyone was on a computer using a screen between 640 and 1024 pixels wide. :)
I think a lot of the reason web design is more boring now is because you have to make it work on all sorts of different screen sizes with responsive design. There are a lot of tools to make this easy, but you still need start with a simple base so it looks ok on the smallest mobile screen.
I think <map> should make a comeback [1]. Then we could go back to having sick looking art pages
Needs moar Happy Puppy
https://web.archive.org/web/20000827164040/http://www.happyp...
https://web.archive.org/web/19961023005340/http://www.happyp...
I have fond memories of Planet Quake and also Blues News (for the latest scoop). I remember it spawned a whole bunch of other planet sites. I think some of them became part of GameSpy (or its parent company). I probably moved on by then.
I remember spending hours and hours on FreeArcade.com, playing a lot of Java Applet games. I seem to remember my favorites being "Wiz3" and "Tailgunner", but there tons on there.
Once I was fourteen or so, I discovered Newgrounds and (along with SomethingAwful) that ended up being where I spent most of my time online. Even though a lot of the games were kind of crap, I still thought it was cool that people made these games. Not big, heartless corporations, but just regular people who thought it would be cool to make a game.
Newgrounds is still around, and there's no reason I couldn't go on there, I guess I've grown old and curmudgeonly enough to not even think about it anymore.
Maybe I should change that.
More than 20 years later, fans of Championship Manager Season 01/02 are still actively maintaining it:
The variety in design is so inspiring. No constraints... just do what looks cool.
Utopia [1] [2] by (back then) Mehul Patel's Swirve. Apparently it is still going on. Same with NationStates! [3] [4] Max Barry's book Jennifer Government is also decent.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000816192919/http://games.swir...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(1998_video_game)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20021208105428if_/http://www.nat...
I know it's mostly nostalgia, but this was the best time online for me. I was just a teen exploring GeoCities, tripod, and dot.tk directories. I found a lot of good friends in that time.
I miss the Glitch/GameShark crews that were around. =Bi0= was one of the best ones around.
I don’t know if it’s pure nostalgia talking here, but games sites back then were made to look fun like they were part of the game. Verses now when they’re a dull and corporate.
Looking at many of these now they definitely appear dated. At the time, of course, these would have been “cutting edge”
I think one clear thing we can see is a trend toward more homogenized UI on web in the last 20years.
I worked as a web dev in ad agencies in the early 2000s and built a lot of Flash sites, banners ads, and games that - like a lot of the sites showcased here - were quite unique in their design and aesthetic.
Slowly over time these started to disappear as people embraced web design trends and techniques that meant everything started to look the same.
I think a large part of this at the time was due to Flash being killed off, trends like “flat design”, frameworks, jQuery, and Wordpress becoming popular.
Marketers and designers became more savvy to what “works” online and everyone copied each other in a race for attention.
PlanetQuake and PlanetHalflife were my gateway drug into level design and modding back in the early 00s. Good time.
http://classic.battle.net/war3/ still works. Every time I need to check some OG WC3 data for nostalgia or any other reason I use this instead of fandom.
No GameStorm? (http://gamestorm.net)
I know EA shut it down in 2001 but c’mon!
XGen Studios belongs on this page. Spent a lot of time mucking around on their interactive homepage, and even more time playing their flash games or on their forums.
I loved MiniClip. HeliAttack 3 rocked.
Peak civilization
The outstanding Wing Commander CIC [https://www.wcnews.com] was the first one I discovered. Guess it gets more updates than Star Citizen, lol.
I think we underestimate the creative downside of forcing responsive design on everything
It's sad that RuneScape is not on this list, yet it is on their site - https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?s=runescape
I really thought this was going to those sites that's had a collection of mini games, like shockwave.com used to be.... Man I played so much donut boy
So many of these have… designs. Take the buttons, they have texture, they fit into a larger design element. They’re not a rectangle with rounded corners and maybe a gradient.
I miss the official Nintendo forums every day. I was a dumb kid back then but I really got my online sea legs on those message boards, and other ones related to Pokémon fan sites.
These remind me of the sites that Japanese studios are still publishing for new visual novels and small games. Also of some artist portfolio sites (in layout, not art quality).
My favorite one was a fansite for the original NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy. Wonder if it's still up
It does put into perspective how phones fucked it all up. That Nintendo 2k1 is looking really good, with high information density without being overwhelming, and an overall nice design to just look at.
Web design has become so boring
Ah yes Flash. I had just started learning how to build static HTML sites and was going down the road of learning flash instead just as I saw Steve Jobs came out in opposition of it.
I decided to turn back to regular HTML/CSS and then PHP.
Turned out to be the right move but I still kinda to miss those old flash sites.
Fond memories of SC Legacy, the old IGN and various message boards
It's not quite as stylish as these, but my personal favorite video game site was the Super Smash Bros. Brawl blog site, which had its heyday around 2007 or so.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071001132450/http://www.smashb...
It was the first time I had ever seen pre-release information about a game, and I checked the site religiously. The game director himself wrote all the posts, and it felt like a revolutionary way to get me excited about the game.
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites.
These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games.
So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an era.