Favorites — Early Internet Sites Preserved via Wayback Machine

Final Fantasy Gaiden — On April 1, 1999, The GIA (Gaming Intelligence Agency) published an elaborate April Fools joke announcing "Final Fantasy Gaiden," a fake direct sequel to Final Fantasy VIII. The hoax was crafted by Nick "Rox" Des Barres and Andrew Vestal, and included convincing fake screenshots, a logo, and even a fabricated MPEG battle video. The story claimed Seifer, Fuujin, and Raijin would be the main characters in a two-disc game retailing for 3800 yen, set to release Fall 1999. The following day, April 2nd, The GIA revealed it as a prank. It remains one of the most convincing and well-remembered April Fools jokes in early gaming journalism history.

Hampster Dance (hampsterdance.com) — one of the earliest viral websites, featuring a looping animated GIF of hamsters dancing to a sped-up sample. It spread entirely by word of mouth and email in 1998 and 1999.

Final Fantasy VI: The Power Within — a GeoCities fan site dedicated to Final Fantasy VI, representing the era when passionate fans built hand-coded HTML pages to celebrate their favorite games. GeoCities was the home of millions of personal and fan sites before Yahoo shut it down in 2009.

W3Schools (w3schools.com circa 2000) — one of the earliest and most widely used web development tutorial sites. Many developers of that generation learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript here.

half.com — an early peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling used books, CDs, and DVDs at half price, founded in 1999. It was acquired by eBay in 2000 and shut down in 2017.

MSN Zone (zone.com) — Microsoft's online gaming portal where millions played Age of Empires, Hearts, Spades, and other games over dial-up connections in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Yahoo Games — Yahoo's online gaming platform featuring classic card and board games including Gin Rummy, Chess, Checkers, and Backgammon. A staple of early internet leisure.

EB Games (ebgames.com circa 2001) — one of the dominant video game retail chains of the era, later merged with GameStop. A destination for game release dates, reviews, and pre-orders.

Camelot Herald (camelotherald.com circa 2002) — the official news and community site for Dark Age of Camelot, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that was a major competitor to EverQuest in the early 2000s.

VN Boards — IGN's fan community boards for Dark Age of Camelot, specifically the Morgan Le Fey (MLF) server community. Morgan Le Fey was one of the most active and competitive DAoC servers in the early 2000s, known for its realm vs realm (RvR) combat between Hibernia, Albion, and Midgard. VN Boards was where the MLF community gathered to discuss strategy, post realm war updates, and argue about class balance.

Stats Online — an early online sports statistics site for local high school athletics, representative of the era when even grassroots community sports first made it onto the web.

Smallworld Fantasy Football — an early fantasy football platform from the late 1990s, before ESPN and Yahoo dominated the space.

PokeZero (pokezero.com) — an independent fan-made Pokemon online game project by user MykeZero, active circa 2001. A separate effort from Konidias's Pokemon Online at Bulbagarden — two different creators, two different communities, sharing the same dream of a Pokemon MMO.

Unetit (unetit.com) — an early 2000s community for sharing code snippets and getting peer programming help, active around 2001. A small but representative example of the informal developer communities that existed before Stack Overflow.