My first sites were likely tied to AOL (and then Compuserve's) proprietary portals. You could find curated wrestling sites, video game message boards, and chatrooms there. I remember these actual sites the most early on during my first internet ventures in late '98/early '99:
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Quirk's Customs. One of the early prolific wrestling figure customizers. He did a lot of then-contemporary Hasbro customs. I later found out that he did indy wrestling under the alias "Spider", and sadly he died after someone botched a flip on him outside the ring. Poor guy was only in his early 20s.
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WWF Mirror Images. This site did weird Photoshop distortions of wrestlers and otherwise hosted various wrestler photo galleries. They linked to Quirk, which is how I found him.
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Cheat Code Central. I think this was every 90s kid's go-to cheat code website for awhile. Remember cheat codes?
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Kenny's Krib. A stupidly popular website that blended South Park with WWF/ECW/WCW wrestlers. With the rise of wrestling came the rise of this new show called South Park that pushed similar envelopes, making it a perfect pairing to go with the Attitude Era. I'm not sure how the site was run, but they'd regularly update it high-quality South Park versions of wrestlers. I remember sourcing this site to make an Owen Hart SP image for one of our in-class art competitions in 4th grade. Me and few other kids would win every week because we kept making these things to the point where the teacher called an audible and wouldn't let us win anymore since it wasn't fair to others in-class.
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WWF.com official chat room. These were pretty marky chat rooms full of kids arguing about wrestling, combined with girls swooning over The Hardy Boyz. The first girl I met online was from here. Her name was Tara, her friend was Skye, she was from TX, and her screen name was TooCutes. She was about 15 I think, and she stopped talking to me when I admitted that I was 11.
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FigureZone and AFR. FigureZone (with Aaron Morgan) was the first wrestling figure site I ever found. I was so excited to see people talking about wrestling figures and making up total bullshit news stories about said wrestling figures. They'd get legit news and would just TOTALLY make stuff up (which you can see if you use the Wayback Machine). But when you're 11-years-old/a modern day Facebook user, you don't know how to parse through information to tell if something is properly sourced or not. I was on FZ's message board a lot as a kid. I forget all my names, but I know one of them was MYSTERYKoRn1 or something like that. As far AFR, aka Wrestleworld, it was a more modern-feeling site that would occasionally get hacked into with a forced porno GIF being displayed in the splash screen. Scrubbing your history/cookies to that sure was fun to do before you knew how the internet worked. AFR had the more popular forum, and it was the most like WrestlingFigs which came a few years later. AFR is where a lot of us old folks who migrated over to WF first started.
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Slingo. I think this was like slots and bingo mixed together? This was an early flash game site. I think there was a social element to it, like a chat room or something along those lines.
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Snowcraft. If you were around back then, you very likely saw this snow ball fighting flash game. I'll just post a screenshot of it. It was included all over the internet:
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Newgrounds. The most popular user-submitted flash game/movie site at one point in time. Our culture was pretty dark at this point, and combined with edgy teens making up the majority of the userbase, the big flagship game was a school shooter game called Pico's School. Still, this was a hugely important site for its time. Egoraptor got his start here, and his Metal Gear/Sonic Awesome cartoons were genuinely pretty funny. I remember a lot of those 'get the girl' dating games and the 'choose your adventure' dialog games were popular. The big thing though was seeing people make flash animations and games using old school video game sprites. At the time, those sprites were only like 5-10 years old (which is CRAZY to think about nowadays), but we never really had gaming media do anything like this at that point, so there was a huge novelty in seeing people repurpose seminal gaming characters/music into other things. I could go on for days about Newgrounds; if you were there, you knew.
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Maxpages. This one is more personal for me, as I used to make websites in Maxpages every year. I made multiple personal interest sites on Maxpages from about 1999 through as late as 2005. My stuff was basically happenings going on at school, wrestling news, music news and a podcast I hosted before podcasts were really a thing (I modeled it after a radio show, with song clips and all). It was basically another Angelfire/Tripod/Homestead/Geocities site where you could make free simple webpages. Back in the day, finding a reliable image host was nearly impossible, which is why Photobucket got so popular (and why they killed all their goodwill in modern times by breaking parts of the internet by holding images for ransom and forcing an ugly watermark over everything). My sites were complete with that infamous firebar gif or the barbed wire gif that didn't need to be animated but was for reasons. I learned a lot about coherent design by making mistakes on these platforms, however. This was right before Freewebs came around and had the more "What You See Is What You Get" coding approach to web design, so this time was very much so a trial and error thing. It was really cool to have your own website in middle & high school. You'd get regular traffic from people your own age that would give you feedback, and chicks dug it, so that was cool. I used to have an EZboard where people from my classes would hang out in after school, and this was before social media, making it feel extra special to do this.
Two of my friends who went to my school got
expelled for posting inflammatory stuff about teachers on their Maxpages sites. Mine wasn't as bad as theirs, but I had some mildly incriminating stuff on there too. Luckily, I was tipped off that they were getting stooged, so I quickly put a password on my site before anyone got to mine. I still remember the opening line my friend used for a rap he made against our principal:
"Mr. Senetis can suck on my penis." As sophomoric as it is, that shit still makes me laugh, haha.
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Gamespot/IGN. These are pretty self-explanatory, the big two video game news sites. I remember they both were some of the earliest sites to host video from e3 and the Tokyo Game Show. I'm sure the quality was 320x240 and low-bitrate, but the only other way I got information about games was through magazines like PSM (the unofficial one), EGM, GI, and Nintendo Power. This has nothing to do with websites, but I remember being in 7th grade study hall and getting my new copy of PSM out, which had several pages on the brand new MGS2 unveiling trailer/gameplay demo from e3. I read that up and down for 2 hours. I miss being that excited about video games. Oh yeah, one more off-topic random memory related to magazines. My buddy in HS got this magazine that had a demo disc for MGS3 in it way before the game came out, and he let me borrow it right before school began, so I sat with that baby in my backpack all day until I rushed home and played it like 50 times in a row. It was the early chunk of the game where you go through the swamp and make your way to Sokolov.
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KoRn.com I'm mentioning this one because they had a massive site redesign between Issues and Untouchables, and it had this catchy instrumental made specifically for this flash game town you could run through. Any Korn kid from back then knows how long that wait was between
Issues and
Untouchables, so we were desperate for anything new. We were mostly satiated with b-sides from the
Follow the Leader &
Life is Peachy-era on Morpheous/Limewire/Kazaa/Napster, but to hear something actually new was exciting. They never used it again as far as I know, though I stopped paying attention to Korn after
Take A Look in the Mirror, so I'm not fully sure. Here is the flash video/tune:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_o1gU0gw94 and here is yet another unused Untouchables-era e-card song from the same time period:
youtu.be/3okKUis1Few . Whatever this was never saw release, which always surprised me since someone got hold of the near-final
Untouchables songs and released them MONTHS prior to the album coming out. Whatever song that must've never been completed.
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Candystand. Candystand Mini-Golf (Classic) was one of the coolest flash games you could play. It evoked the fun side of mini-golf: it was colorful, inviting, and it incorporated water and cool slides. Plus, the creative use of branding with the candy being integrated into the course was ingenuous marketing. I played this several times a year for years of my youth:
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Homestar Runner/Strongbad I was never into the Homestar Runner stuff, but Strongbad's emails, and later that Trogdor game? I was all over that stuff.
I could probably keep going on, but that's a good enough selection of my first few years online.
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