I don't know why, but I felt compelled to "tour" many of the sites I used to visit back when I was first starting to be online and I couldn't quite avoid feeling that something's amiss.

Perhaps I'm blinded by nostalgia by saying this, but I truly miss the internet of old (particularly the iteration that existed from 2003 until the advent of the so-called "Web 2.0") because it allowed for some untamed creativity when it came to crafting sites, which provided them with a sense of wild imagination that couldn't be overshadowed by the primitive techniques used to make them... frames, pop-ups, Javascript, scrolling texts, low-res graphics, all of that enhanced the mood and put the spotlight where it rightfully belonged: on the content itself. Having visited so many sites in which it was clear that the author was giving birth to a work of art makes me despise this new wave of sites in which "design is king" and "the users generate content", despite these being infinitely more powerful than anything from that era.

I'm aware that we have more and better tools to improve upon the kinds of things I was being delighted by twenty or so years ago (wheew!), but to me it is all about context.

Take a Wikia, for example.

Sure, it might look impressive and be an amazing way to propel a given fandom to unprecedented new heights, but that's because a lot of people can chime in and contribute to them... I used to know sites in which one or two people would painstakingly build the same databases by themselves, one afternoon at a time. One of these sites was run by one guy individually, and he went through every piece of official Dragon Ball merchandise he could find in order to post detailed, almost book-sized commentary on those (and even translated and copied over the entirety of the official characters' guide, which must have taken ages to complete). To me, a site like that would be worthy of endless preservation, but it went offline nearly two decades ago and now the incomplete, broken and empty archived shell is all that remains of such a passionate project. It's really tragic when you look at it.

Abandonware sites were another constant feature of my online travels, and one that's sadly dying a slow and painful death, now that many IPs have been bought, revived and sold again.

There were so many Abandonware sites active between 1998 and 2007... and all of them had an unique flavor to them, because they were being reduced to shrines to old games and not just hanging out places that also happened to offer discontinued games for download.

Who could forget about the never-ending battle between the webmistress behind the world's famous Home of the Underdogs and a ton of third party sites and web providers that turned into a big game of chicken when those started targeting the accounts used by HoTU to host their games and that the staff had to keep replacing on a daily basis. I mean, check out this insanity:
March 1999 - April 1999: A very good (in terms of rapidly increasing number of games) but very frustrating (in terms of accounts being routinely deleted by free providers) period for the site. By the end of April, the number of games had gone up to around 400 or so. Had over 60 free accounts scattered across major free providers, as well as (then) lesser-known ones e.g. The Globe. Had over 50 free e-mail accounts from those same providers, which I used in a systematic pattern to register for yet more accounts. The "master file" --the list of all the HOTU games and which account they were in-- was roughly 15 screens long.

This kind of struggle would hardly be seen these days, but it does speak volumes about the commitment that each and every webmaster had with their sites. I'm no lawyer (nor do I pretend to understand how the copyright law works) but those people weren't doing anything wrong by sharing unsold, unlisted and unattainable games through free distribution, yet the witch hunt that was spawned by the mere existence of these sites was so brutal that many people gave up their sites and moved on after it became clear that their reasoning was not getting through the corporate mind.

A site I used to hang out at around those dates (which happens to be the one I met @"Ognimod" through) and that shall remain nameless was actually forced to close down because a group of people threatened the webmaster with legal action.

The last of the "classic" sites I used to visit closed down in 2010, amidst a failed updated that wiped out the forum and many of the features contained within... a rather anti-climatic ending to a site that had been shot down and revived twice before.

But I was actually surprised to hear that some of the pages I loved as a teen are still up, just vastly changed. 

One of those sites has been turned into an archive of itself, in which ten or so years worth of forum posts are still accessible and largely visible to anyone willing to go through them, but all the subforums are locked and new registrations have been disabled (not to mention, the entirety of the download section has been vanished from the site). I can actually live with that, since the place is different, but its atmosphere remains unchanged and one can almost expect to see new replies at any time... it's that well-preserved.

Another one of those little gems saw its last update in 2004, but it's still going strong despite the fact that it's now completely broken due to it having outlived both its guestbook provider and Geocities, which were essential for it to work properly... but as its own time machine into a world that no longer exists, the humble "bakery" becomes priceless.  

There are many other sites from that time that still stand in one way or another, but I won't link to them... most have become barren wastelands in which Spambots roam free and that's not the way I want to introduce them to people who have never heard of them. It'd be a massive disservice to places that provided me with endless entertainment and more than one lasting memory from simpler times.

I know that this "look back" isn't as complete as it could be, but that's because I chose to limit it to the places I actually got to experience first-hand when they were alive and popular... this was, in no way, intended to be an extensive review of the last two decades of the ever-changing internet landscape, but what I made of it as a simple spectator of its development.

PS: Shoutouts to Aurora from 80sCartoons.net for keeping the dream alive and going throughout all these years. Your site was one of the most pleasant stops I made on the journey.

PS2: Those online Gameboy emulators that introduced me to such classics as Link's Awakening DX had to be mentioned somewhere. The amount of hours I must have spent playing around with those while tearing my phone bill apart through sheer dial-up prowess... and same with flash animations and minigames. Christ.