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Episode 329: ’90s Video Game Websites (Patreon)

Published:
2020-09-28 13:00:01
Edited:
2020-09-28 16:41:57
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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This week, instead of focusing on the usual topics of games, platforms, creators, franchises, or genres, I felt like putting together a bit of a memorial to something long-vanished: A bygone era of gaming culture. Being online in video game spaces today is very different than it was 20 or 25 years ago, when people like myself and guests Andrew Vestal and Brandon Teel decided, "Hey, we should make websites about the things we like." 

In a lot of ways, the current online video gaming space is much better than it was at the time—there are far more voices (and more diverse voices) creating great work now, and there certainly was nothing like Patreon to help fund the time and team that go into a show like Retronauts, that's for sure. In some ways, it's not nearly as good, as interesting and unique content has trouble existing on its own and tends to be funneled into platforms like Twitter, corporate wikis, YouTube, or... uhhh, Patreon. And in some ways, it's still the same—the seething darkness that fuels today's angry hate movements has always been present in gaming, it's just more centralized now.

For better and for worse, Andrew and Brandon and I talk about the nature of online gaming sites back in the late ’90s, when the World Wide Web was still finding its feet and a Google was just a large number. Andrew launched informative news resource sites like The Unofficial Squaresoft Homepage and The Gaming Intelligence Agency; Brandon helped create more comedy-focused sites like Zany Video Game Quotes; and I was basically just blogging about retrogames and retro-style games before anyone knew what a blog (or a retrogame) was. We also talk about lots of other sites that existed at the time, and how the web as a whole worked and fit together.

If you were there for any of this, enjoy the stroll down memory lane! And if not, well, enjoy learning about the early days directly from a guest who had a role in establishing one of the first video game memes. All your something something, and all that.—Jeremy

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Comments

Chase

What SUPER GOODNESS blast from the past this podcast was, the fact that vestal is still around somewhere. Love these meta-history episodes, please keep it up! (Spent most of my Middle schools days around The Gia community as FFD, Remember these times well, Being toastyfrog`s most annoying 12 year old fan. )

Jared Breland

This sounds like a great topic. Looking forward to listening.

John Simon

Oh man! I saw the title and and I thought "Andrew Vestal" would be perfect for this. Very cool that you covered how Square's US office was thinking of making his Unofficial site Official. That was something that was discussed on alt.games.final-fantasy, but it always sounded like a rumor of a rumor. I'd first heard of Unofficial from this article in GamePlayers magazine. https://i.imgur.com/EWZuepE.jpg page 28 https://archive.org/details/game-players-issue-80-january-1996 dragon.res.cmu.edu/andrewv/square.html - guessing that's the student supplied web hosting at Carnegie Mellon University. So much of the early web was kickstarted with setups like that. "This Was Before CMSs, if you want a change it's time to bust out notepad" - I groaned. "We have a hundred images and we want to generate thumbnails and paginate them to twenty per page. Had to write a program for that." - I groaned some more. I remember the site looked like a smaller version of this: http://archive.rpgamer.com/games/games.html and it must have been an absolute maze under the covers.

Kormakur Gardarsson

The GIA was the first fuel on my internet nerd fire that’s been burning ever since. A lovely trip down memory lane.

ADDninja

Did they leave out |tsr's NES archive??

Nicholas Wilhelmy

I loved both Square.net and the GIA back in the 90s, and I’ve always secretly hoped Retronauts would cover them in an episode. Thank you so much for recording this.

Nicholas Wilhelmy

Andrew Vestal, if you are reading the comments here, I’ve always wanted to thank you for The GIA. I really enjoyed everything about your work back then, and I still hold it up as the gold standard for a games website.

Recreational_Hate

Nice, this is a great episode everyone! As someone who only faintly remembers a pokemon website from the late 90s that we would access from the library where my older sister and would print/cut out pictures for me, hearing all of this is so entertaining and cool. I didnt actually have an internet connection at home until 2010 lol

SilverHairedMiddleAgedTuxedoMask

Great episode. The earliest "viral" game related website I can remember was "Acts of Gord" which supposedly were the true stories of a Canadian independent game shop from the mid-90s but in retrospect had to be completely made-up as Gord would often chase down and beat up shoplifters which seems like a tad bit of over-exaggeration. Late 90s GameFAQs was my favorite gaming website ever though, back when the message board for almost every single game was active and every game no matter how obscure had at least two written FAQs for it. I never owned a PlayStation but could confidently talk with my PSX friends about Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, and Silent Hill solely from the excellent plot summaries/plot analysis FAQs on the site.

Sam D.

Thank you for this episode. One of my earliest memories on internet was having a mini-heart attack when the (unofficial) squaresoft homepage went away before finding the relocated square.net. Funny enough just last month I spent hours trying to remember the Zany Video Game Quotes site. I couldn't remember the name so I unsuccessfully queried archive.org for every site that may have linked to it.

Cajun Baz

The roaring Mozilla HTML 2.0 animated gif I put on my homepage in 1996 accounted for a quarter of my university's Internet bandwidth for a day before I got a call from the sys admins. Apparently many people all over the Internet just embedded that section of code into their own homepages and as exposure increased, the pull on my university's servers went exponential. That was when anything "moving" on a static HTML page was the height of innovation.

Christoph

I loved this episode so much. I was way into square net and RPGamer at the time. Once I picked a fight with Jeremy on the forums about his article about FFVII’s Barrett. My whole point was “he’s just a fun character, relax”. But Jeremy really ended up teaching me a very important lesson about inclusivity and representation. Sometimes a fun character is really not a fun character. I’ll always remember that.

CitizenMeh

Wow, this was a trip down memory lane! Was a regular reader of the GIA back in the day, I still think of Fritz Fraundorf's fanfics everytime I boot up Xenogears...

Gretchen Leigh

I absolutely loved this episode, and I would love to see a follow-up with some of the other early game website folks (Kevin Gifford/tsr, Danny Cowan/sardius, Insert Credit, etc.) or early message board hubs like GameFAQs.

Ryan Oliver

Great episode. I had a Geocities site in the mid-90s in which I eviscerated Sonic by describing it's gameplay as "Press a button and watch a blue blur fly across a level". One day I got an email from someone saying, "Ha! Yeah, you described Sonic perfectly." The positive reinforcement and awareness people were actually interacting with my words was a high I've yet to come down from. Now I own a toaster that prints Sonics face on my toast. So he got the last laugh.

Shaxbert

I spent plenty of time on the Unofficial Squaresoft Homepage back in the day, but I also frequented nearly every site Ragu put together back in the day. The first indication I ever got that people were actually seeing the dumb pictures I drew at the time was when I came up in conversation in the forums where I used to lurk, and it was a genuine thrill.