Internet 1.0 Stories - Tales of the internet past

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Is sixth gen online console gaming considered internet 1.0?

I was on Live from day one on the OG Xbox. It feels like the Wild West compared to what we have now. I dumped pretty much the entirety of my junior high and early high school years into Phantasy Star Online and Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow.

I also got in to FFXI on the PS2. Talk about a pain in the ass to get running. Between the PS2 HDD and PlayOnline, I felt like a legit hacker when I finally got into the game.
 
I first got access to the internet in the summer of 1999. I had gotten a N64 and Ocarina of Time a month beforehand and was obsessed with the game. Unfortunately for me this was roughly the time that I had started to view girls as something I wanted rather than icky. Between long forgotten porn sites, my own budding sexuality, and Princess Ruto (the fish princess), it's no surprise I came out somewhat fucked up.

aside from that, I mostly remember using limewire to download a lot of western stuff impossible to come by here. I always found it amusing when Bill would ask me to buy my favourite artist songs when such a thing was impossible.
 
I played through Chrono Trigger when ZSnes was able to run it past the intro and play the music and sounds. This was in the fall of 1997 and while the game worked well enough certain things were broken, like transparency layers were actually solid so turning on and off layers manually was necessary to get through some areas.

Emulation during that time was pretty crazy. Playstation games could be emulated on the PC while the PS1 was still the dominant console on the market. UltraHLE could run Zelda Ocarina of Time 2-3 months after the game was released and it made Nintendo very upset. Bleem! played a couple of PS1 games on the Dreamcast, it made Sony very upset. People had been plugging away doing fan translations of games from older systems as well and were releasing patches for the roms, that made things a lot easier for those that wanted to play some SNES rpg that never came to the west. Before that the alternative was buy the cart, play the game in japanese, frequently consult a stack of paper with the entire script printed out in English. It sounds impossibly ridiculous but some people did that.
 
Does anyone remember a geocities website called Cosmo Canyon? It was a site full of parody Final Fantasy fanfiction and fake walkthroughs for fake games called I.A.Q.s. It was super autistic but I loved it when I was 11. I think the webmaster went on to write articles for GIA (anyone remember that site?) and opened up a new site called Qu's Marsh.

i also remember places where you could shorten the url for your geocities/angelfire/tripod site for free.
 
Who remembers the Crichton Leprechaun. It was one of the first viral stories I remember.
Crichton_Leprechaun_Amateur_Sketch.jpeg


Turns out he was identified.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
I played through Chrono Trigger when ZSnes was able to run it past the intro and play the music and sounds. This was in the fall of 1997 and while the game worked well enough certain things were broken, like transparency layers were actually solid so turning on and off layers manually was necessary to get through some areas.
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Also that point in the future era where you have to hold down three controller buttons in order to open a plot-critical door, but the emulator was only able to register two at a time. That one frustrated a lot of folks.

Man, I was crazy about emulators for a good stretch. But years even before Zophar's Domain and AGTP, I was making a pest of myself on local BBSes and borrowing my dad's work account with the college to Telnet into MUDs or dick around on gag Usenet groups. Fuck, I'm old.
 
I remember being told not to have a song in my status on AIM because i was "too stupid to have a song by said artist" as my status by some rando i met on an online game i shouldn't have been playing at my young age.
I also remember just in general being a retarded idiot-child on the internet and getting myself banned from a few forums for that.

I also vividly remember the first renditions of Gaia, if that counts, and constantly getting hacked because I stupidly trusted those sites that you put your information in to get free gold.
 
Most of my early days on the net consisted of browsing small game forums and being a complete sperg on them. I'm shocked I didn't get banned from them, but at the same time, I think back then everyone was that way in a sense.
Oh, and Geocities sites. I tried to make my own but it just turned into a page that just had a bunch of images I had saved on my PC on it and nothing else.
Speaking of making pages, I remember when Xanga was also a thing and I had fun making pointless pages with dumb gifs on it, too.
 
I remember buying shit on ebay as a kid using an account I set up in my mom's name. Getting in bidding wars with people and trying to keep refreshing with my slow dial-up internet so I could win by a few pennies.

And you could still get good deals on stuff too. The first thing I bought was something like 3 complete Colecovision consoles, a bunch of accessories, games, manuals, etc all for like $13.12.

I'd walk on down to the post office, buy a money order, and mail it out and wait for my stuff to come. Was pretty much the norm to pay like that on ebay.

Weird to think about, since now I just buy shit off there in seconds from my phone.
 
Auto-scrolling horror comics. They were basically creepypasta in comic form but when you scroll past a certain point it would hijack your browser screen and rapidly rush through panel after panel of something like a Grudge/The Ring girl rushing right at you with a rapid clicking noise from your speakers or something like that, almost like a screamer. Never managed to track them down again.
 
Desu Mountain said:
Auto-scrolling horror comics. They were basically creepypasta in comic form but when you scroll past a certain point it would hijack your browser screen and rapidly rush through panel after panel of something like a Grudge/The Ring girl rushing right at you with a rapid clicking noise from your speakers or something like that, almost like a screamer. Never managed to track them down again.
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Here's the one I remember.
www.webtoons.com

Chiller - Bongcheon-Dong Ghost - Horang

Stories that crawl up and down your spine.
www.webtoons.com www.webtoons.com
Note: spoopy jumpscare, obviously
 
1997 is when my home got the internet. Our school had it, but things were limited, so having unrestricted internet was mind-blowing. I used to spoil movies for others by reading about them online, and print out video game codes and walk-throughs to sell or trade at school, for money or snacks.
 
Zan said:
fake walkthroughs for fake games called I.A.Q.s
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I haven't seen anyone talk about these in over a decade. Used to read a bunch on the site for Disaster Labs (the Arfenhouse guys) when they were still together, they had a guy named Matt who loved writing them. Mainly parodies of fighting games and Megaman X. I'm still trying to figure out where all the Disaster Labs guys are now. The only one I've seen recently was Seppel, who's made a furry porn card game and trooned out. Everyone else is MIA.

I remember Wikipedia's early days when it was total anarchy (compared to now) and you could add practically anything. Like a page on the aforementioned IAQs. Or individual pages for each character in a work you like, which nowadays would get bundled into "List of (work) characters" or the work's page itself. You could even plug your website in a page's external links as long as it was relevant. Used to do that with this shitty forum I made. Not that it drew in any traffic.
 
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