90s Websites
Bringing 90s internet nostalgia back to life
Hey there, I'm the embodiment of all things iconic from the world. Step back in time with me as we explore the vintage charm of old website, the dark corners of the internet for the weirdest and most terrifying websites, complete with that nostalgic 90's vibe. Don't be afraid to embrace the strange and click on the unexpected!
Let's bring back the magic of the 90s internet - one click at a time!
Space Jam:
Sing it with me now: “Everybody get up, it’s time to slam now. We got a real jam going now, welcome to the Space Jam. It’s your chance, do your dance — at the Space Jam.” This gem from 1996 is burned into the memories of so many 90s kids. Space Jam wasn’t just a movie, it was an experience — and it started on the website that promoted the film. When this site came out, it was the pinnacle of web design. The starry tiled background with clip art planets, spaceships, and basketballs invited us to browse around and learn more about the Space Jam universe.
When clicked, the icons took us to interactive landing pages full of trivia games, coloring books, behind-the-scenes content, and even downloadable screensavers and posters. The Space Jam site is a textbook example of what web design in the 90s looked like — colorful, clunky, and full of mismatched backgrounds and unnecessary animations. This iconic site is still live but hasn’t been updated since the 90s.
Yahoo! Games:
Yahoo Games, a subsection of the main Yahoo! website, launched in 1998. The site hosted a large variety of Java applets and Flash games in categories like card games, board and tile games, word games, sports games, and more.
An image of the original Yahoo Games website.
While the web design was pretty simple — lots of blue hyperlinks in greyscale columns — the games themselves were addicting and fun. Anyone who spent hours trying to line up gemstones in Bejeweled knows exactly why Candy Crush is such a popular game today.
All the games were free to play, as long as you could handle persistent pop-up ads and game limitations. You could also shell out the cash for “All Star” status, which got you some extra privileges. But even if you stuck to the free access, Yahoo Games had over 1,000 different games to choose from, making it a great place to hang out in the early days of the internet.
Yahoo Games had a good run, but shut down in 2016.
San Francisco FogCam:
In 1994, The Department of Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University created FogCam — a webcam that continuously monitors fog conditions on campus.
An image of the San Francisco FogCam.
What started as a simple student project has become a piece of history — this webcam is still operating today, making it the world’s oldest and longest-running webcam. And considering how many times people have fought to keep this webcam running, it’s certainly one of the most beloved as well.
Although the site is regularly maintained and even has an accompanying Twitter, the design looks about the same as the day it launched. The webcam shows a low-resolution image that updates every 20 seconds as opposed to streaming in real time and the text looks like it’s typed directly into a Word document.
Hampster Dance:
Hampster Dance encapsulates so much of early internet culture — a meme built on a Geocities site featuring rows of animated GIFs of hamsters, topped off with an auto-play ing song.
Hampster Dance went live in 1998, but didn’t start racking up visitors until early 1999.
Once the word had spread through forwarded emails, Hampster Dance became a sort of litmus test. If you recognized that never-ending “dodadidadodadodo” you were a young internet person — you had an ICQ or AIM screen name, frequented chat rooms, and maybe had your very own collection of GIFs hosted on a Geocities or Angelfire site. If you didn’t know the tune, you were not in with the internet crowd.
In addition to the variety of hamster GIFs, Hampster Dance had other key 90s website design traits. Elements like the visitor counter at the bottom of the page, a “guestbook” that visitors could sign, and the looped background music that couldn’t be turned off were all favorites of 90s web design standards. The page no longer exists, but a very faithful copy remains on Neocities (neo-neighborhoods.neocities.org)
Goosebumps:
Scholastic’s best-selling book series and TV show, Goosebumps, got its own website in 1996.
The Goosebumps homepage featured a collection of clickable illustrations on a dark background. This illustrated navigation style was popular in the 90s, particularly for sites aimed at kids.
When clicked, the monster illustrations took you to different pages of the website — each with their own themed, patterned background, of course. The Goosebumps site also had some pretty iconic typography choices, featuring the classic Goosebumps font along with a mix of colorful Word Art images.
The site kept kids entertained with video clips of Goosebumps episodes, fan-submitted stories, and Boo-Grams — spooky e-greetings with virtual monster stamps that visitors could send to friends.
Scholastic now has a section of its main site dedicated to Goosebumps with videos, games, and book information.
Texas Internet Consulting is an old-timer:
tic.com appears to have been registered in April 1987. The website itself is pretty basic but magnificent by virtue of its age.
The firm was originally a one-man operation run by Smoot Carl-Mitchell. It does have links to bios that were last dated in 2004, and apparently, he is currently working for Cort Business Services.
Caine, Farber & Gordon, Inc. is still alive and kicking:
The domain appears to have been registered in 1987. The website itself seems equally as old. This company was founded in 1970 and is a software and systems firm best known for the PDL/81 Program Design Language Processor.
Harking back to tales of Armageddon just before the millennium, these guys had it covered. Apparently, their processor is Y2K compliant –nice to know.
Acme.com:
acme.com was registered in 1994, is one of the oldest websites, and is still working. It seems the website owner is quite happy to keep the antique look of the site and to be honest; it’s quite refreshing to modern “fancy” sites.
As the site details, they are “Purveyors of fine freeware since 1972. On the net since 1991.”
Fair enough.
Toastytech.com:
Here’s another funny one. Back in the misty past of the internet, Microsoft once asked that users install IE 1. It appears one particular customer was less than pleased.
Taking the time and dedication to create an entire web page detailing just how evil Internet Explorer is, frankly, impressive. And all this in 1998.
Jodi:
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is one of the great classics of Net Art. The project, created by the artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmas, is a real website that aims to de-construct, destructure, confuse. From its home page in fact we find ourselves in front of a chaotic screen of incomprehensible green text on a black background. The aesthetic is that of the “glitch”, of the technical defect, of the bug, of the compilation error, a type of language therefore anything but friendly and informative. By clicking randomly on any point of the screen you access other web pages and from there to still others. The contents of these pages are obviously in line with the entire project, here in fact we find flashing texts, fragments of pixelated images, incomprehensible graphics, aborted or malfunctioning animations etc.
Yyyyyyy.info:
(WARNING FOR PEOPLE WITH PHOTOSENSITIVE EPILEPSY) This site is a bizarre onslaught of flashing gifs, sounds, and non-speech bubble text, all poorly formatted and seemingly random, that changes every time you refresh the page. It's a disaster zone. Any sense I try to make seems pointless, if you click on some of the images. The most interesting is that if you click on a specific image (I think it was a door) it opens up a website that shows you strange images in a sort of slideshow. But be warned, the website shows a lot of images about computer viruses!
Superbad:
Superbad.com was created in the late 90's as a part of a competition and was praised for its unique and colorful web design. And I think there is more than meets the eye, hear me out.
I think this website was ahead of its time, I think it's an unsolved ARG (Alternate reality game). Clicking on words and pictures on the website take you to other links, and while the pictures seem arbitrary and random, I think the website is more connected than we think. The first page on Superbad.com is three “identical” pictures of cartoon meat butchers, when you click on one it will spiral you down the many different pages of Superbad.com. And one think most of them have in common is children's stories, family's, and meat. There are pages where stories of random memories, some are gruesome. Also on the website are pages with code, puzzles, distorted pictures and writing which have not yet been deciphered.
973 Eht Namuh 973:
Explore the mysterious world of 973-eht-namuh-973, one of the most enigmatic sites on the Internet. Eht Numah è lo speculare di The Human. Il numero 973 purtroppo non ci aiuta. Intriguing images and biblical passages blend together in an online experience that challenges the intellect. Discover the allure of this virtual enigma as you try to unravel its hidden meaning. This site is very similar to Superbad.com, and remains one of the Internet's greatest mysteries to this day. The page 973-eht-namuh-973 is not what it seems. Its seemingly indecipherable contents have led many Internet users on a frantic search to decipher its contents.
Jodi:
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is one of the great classics of Net Art. The project, created by the artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmas, is a real website that aims to de-construct, destructure, confuse. From its home page in fact we find ourselves in front of a chaotic screen of incomprehensible green text on a black background. The aesthetic is that of the “glitch”, of the technical defect, of the bug, of the compilation error, a type of language therefore anything but friendly and informative. By clicking randomly on any point of the screen you access other web pages and from there to still others. The contents of these pages are obviously in line with the entire project, here in fact we find flashing texts, fragments of pixelated images, incomprehensible graphics, aborted or malfunctioning animations etc.
Heavensgate:
Heaven's Gate, formerly known as Human Individual Metamorphosis, and Total Overcomers Anonymous before 1996, was a UFO cult founded and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, based in Rancho Santa Fe, a suburb of San Diego (California).
The site, which still exists, collects information on all the related suicides of the participants of this subspecies of cult.
On March 26, 1997, the police found the bodies of 39 members of the cult, who committed mass suicide by drinking poison, linking the fact to the approach to the Sun of the comet Hale-Bopp, whose brightness and visibility to the naked eye exceeded even the predictions made by experts.
Among the people who committed suicide was also Thomas Nichols, brother of television actress Nichelle Nichols. A member of the group for 11 years, before taking his own life he recorded a video in which he said he was the happiest person in the world.
«Members of the Heaven's Gate cult, unable to locate the spacecraft they believed was in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet, returned the $4,000 telescope they had purchased for the occasion, claiming it was defective.»
Sentimental Corporation:
This portal with a minimal 90s style is semi-unknown and very rarely visited. However, it cannot be said that this web page is not interesting. Sentimental Corporation has all the appearance of being a sort of online shrink, which will put your sanity to the test. The main topic of the site is strong social criticism. A mysterious site, where you can find numerous videos, sometimes even more than an hour long. The content of these is disturbing and enigmatic, sometimes violent. A portal that seems small, but which in reality has many ramifications, so much so that up to now no one has yet been able to establish with certainty how large it is.
Space Jam:Sing it with me now: “Everybody get up, it’s time to slam now. We got a real jam going now, welcome to the Space Jam. It’s your chance, do your dance — at the Space Jam.” This gem from 1996 is burned into the memories of so many 90s kids. Space Jam wasn’t just a movie, it was an experience — and it started on the website that promoted the film. When this site came out, it was the pinnacle of web design. The starry tiled background with clip art planets, spaceships, and basketballs invited us to browse around and learn more about the Space Jam universe. When clicked, the icons took us to interactive landing pages full of trivia games, coloring books, behind-the-scenes content, and even downloadable screensavers and posters. The Space Jam site is a textbook example of what web design in the 90s looked like — colorful, clunky, and full of mismatched backgrounds and unnecessary animations. This iconic site is still live but hasn’t been updated since the 90s.
Yahoo! Games:Yahoo Games, a subsection of the main Yahoo! website, launched in 1998. The site hosted a large variety of Java applets and Flash games in categories like card games, board and tile games, word games, sports games, and more. An image of the original Yahoo Games website. While the web design was pretty simple — lots of blue hyperlinks in greyscale columns — the games themselves were addicting and fun. Anyone who spent hours trying to line up gemstones in Bejeweled knows exactly why Candy Crush is such a popular game today. All the games were free to play, as long as you could handle persistent pop-up ads and game limitations. You could also shell out the cash for “All Star” status, which got you some extra privileges. But even if you stuck to the free access, Yahoo Games had over 1,000 different games to choose from, making it a great place to hang out in the early days of the internet. Yahoo Games had a good run, but shut down in 2016.
San Francisco FogCam:In 1994, The Department of Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University created FogCam — a webcam that continuously monitors fog conditions on campus. An image of the San Francisco FogCam. What started as a simple student project has become a piece of history — this webcam is still operating today, making it the world’s oldest and longest-running webcam. And considering how many times people have fought to keep this webcam running, it’s certainly one of the most beloved as well. Although the site is regularly maintained and even has an accompanying Twitter, the design looks about the same as the day it launched. The webcam shows a low-resolution image that updates every 20 seconds as opposed to streaming in real time and the text looks like it’s typed directly into a Word document.
Hampster Dance:Hampster Dance encapsulates so much of early internet culture — a meme built on a Geocities site featuring rows of animated GIFs of hamsters, topped off with an auto-play ing song. Hampster Dance went live in 1998, but didn’t start racking up visitors until early 1999. Once the word had spread through forwarded emails, Hampster Dance became a sort of litmus test. If you recognized that never-ending “dodadidadodadodo” you were a young internet person — you had an ICQ or AIM screen name, frequented chat rooms, and maybe had your very own collection of GIFs hosted on a Geocities or Angelfire site. If you didn’t know the tune, you were not in with the internet crowd. In addition to the variety of hamster GIFs, Hampster Dance had other key 90s website design traits. Elements like the visitor counter at the bottom of the page, a “guestbook” that visitors could sign, and the looped background music that couldn’t be turned off were all favorites of 90s web design standards. The page no longer exists, but a very faithful copy remains on Neocities (neo-neighborhoods.neocities.org)
Goosebumps:Scholastic’s best-selling book series and TV show, Goosebumps, got its own website in 1996. The Goosebumps homepage featured a collection of clickable illustrations on a dark background. This illustrated navigation style was popular in the 90s, particularly for sites aimed at kids. When clicked, the monster illustrations took you to different pages of the website — each with their own themed, patterned background, of course. The Goosebumps site also had some pretty iconic typography choices, featuring the classic Goosebumps font along with a mix of colorful Word Art images. The site kept kids entertained with video clips of Goosebumps episodes, fan-submitted stories, and Boo-Grams — spooky e-greetings with virtual monster stamps that visitors could send to friends. Scholastic now has a section of its main site dedicated to Goosebumps with videos, games, and book information.
Texas Internet Consulting is an old-timer:tic.com appears to have been registered in April 1987. The website itself is pretty basic but magnificent by virtue of its age. The firm was originally a one-man operation run by Smoot Carl-Mitchell. It does have links to bios that were last dated in 2004, and apparently, he is currently working for Cort Business Services.
Caine, Farber & Gordon, Inc. is still alive and kicking:The domain appears to have been registered in 1987. The website itself seems equally as old. This company was founded in 1970 and is a software and systems firm best known for the PDL/81 Program Design Language Processor. Harking back to tales of Armageddon just before the millennium, these guys had it covered. Apparently, their processor is Y2K compliant –nice to know.
Acme.com:acme.com was registered in 1994, is one of the oldest websites, and is still working. It seems the website owner is quite happy to keep the antique look of the site and to be honest; it’s quite refreshing to modern “fancy” sites. As the site details, they are “Purveyors of fine freeware since 1972. On the net since 1991.” Fair enough.
Toastytech.com:Here’s another funny one. Back in the misty past of the internet, Microsoft once asked that users install IE 1. It appears one particular customer was less than pleased. Taking the time and dedication to create an entire web page detailing just how evil Internet Explorer is, frankly, impressive. And all this in 1998.
Jodi:wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is one of the great classics of Net Art. The project, created by the artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmas, is a real website that aims to de-construct, destructure, confuse. From its home page in fact we find ourselves in front of a chaotic screen of incomprehensible green text on a black background. The aesthetic is that of the “glitch”, of the technical defect, of the bug, of the compilation error, a type of language therefore anything but friendly and informative. By clicking randomly on any point of the screen you access other web pages and from there to still others. The contents of these pages are obviously in line with the entire project, here in fact we find flashing texts, fragments of pixelated images, incomprehensible graphics, aborted or malfunctioning animations etc.
Yyyyyyy.info:(WARNING FOR PEOPLE WITH PHOTOSENSITIVE EPILEPSY) This site is a bizarre onslaught of flashing gifs, sounds, and non-speech bubble text, all poorly formatted and seemingly random, that changes every time you refresh the page. It's a disaster zone. Any sense I try to make seems pointless, if you click on some of the images. The most interesting is that if you click on a specific image (I think it was a door) it opens up a website that shows you strange images in a sort of slideshow. But be warned, the website shows a lot of images about computer viruses!
Superbad:Superbad.com was created in the late 90's as a part of a competition and was praised for its unique and colorful web design. And I think there is more than meets the eye, hear me out. I think this website was ahead of its time, I think it's an unsolved ARG (Alternate reality game). Clicking on words and pictures on the website take you to other links, and while the pictures seem arbitrary and random, I think the website is more connected than we think. The first page on Superbad.com is three “identical” pictures of cartoon meat butchers, when you click on one it will spiral you down the many different pages of Superbad.com. And one think most of them have in common is children's stories, family's, and meat. There are pages where stories of random memories, some are gruesome. Also on the website are pages with code, puzzles, distorted pictures and writing which have not yet been deciphered.
973 Eht Namuh 973:Explore the mysterious world of 973-eht-namuh-973, one of the most enigmatic sites on the Internet. Eht Numah è lo speculare di The Human. Il numero 973 purtroppo non ci aiuta. Intriguing images and biblical passages blend together in an online experience that challenges the intellect. Discover the allure of this virtual enigma as you try to unravel its hidden meaning. This site is very similar to Superbad.com, and remains one of the Internet's greatest mysteries to this day. The page 973-eht-namuh-973 is not what it seems. Its seemingly indecipherable contents have led many Internet users on a frantic search to decipher its contents.
Jodi:wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is one of the great classics of Net Art. The project, created by the artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmas, is a real website that aims to de-construct, destructure, confuse. From its home page in fact we find ourselves in front of a chaotic screen of incomprehensible green text on a black background. The aesthetic is that of the “glitch”, of the technical defect, of the bug, of the compilation error, a type of language therefore anything but friendly and informative. By clicking randomly on any point of the screen you access other web pages and from there to still others. The contents of these pages are obviously in line with the entire project, here in fact we find flashing texts, fragments of pixelated images, incomprehensible graphics, aborted or malfunctioning animations etc.
Heavensgate:Heaven's Gate, formerly known as Human Individual Metamorphosis, and Total Overcomers Anonymous before 1996, was a UFO cult founded and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, based in Rancho Santa Fe, a suburb of San Diego (California). The site, which still exists, collects information on all the related suicides of the participants of this subspecies of cult. On March 26, 1997, the police found the bodies of 39 members of the cult, who committed mass suicide by drinking poison, linking the fact to the approach to the Sun of the comet Hale-Bopp, whose brightness and visibility to the naked eye exceeded even the predictions made by experts. Among the people who committed suicide was also Thomas Nichols, brother of television actress Nichelle Nichols. A member of the group for 11 years, before taking his own life he recorded a video in which he said he was the happiest person in the world. «Members of the Heaven's Gate cult, unable to locate the spacecraft they believed was in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet, returned the $4,000 telescope they had purchased for the occasion, claiming it was defective.»
Sentimental Corporation:This portal with a minimal 90s style is semi-unknown and very rarely visited. However, it cannot be said that this web page is not interesting. Sentimental Corporation has all the appearance of being a sort of online shrink, which will put your sanity to the test. The main topic of the site is strong social criticism. A mysterious site, where you can find numerous videos, sometimes even more than an hour long. The content of these is disturbing and enigmatic, sometimes violent. A portal that seems small, but which in reality has many ramifications, so much so that up to now no one has yet been able to establish with certainty how large it is.