May 2, 2026

Why would I chronicle an online community from 25 years ago whose mission was to create an unofficial SNES fan game that — in hindsight — was doomed for failure? Well, I can think of several reasons.

I. The Dead Internet Problem, AI Stupidity, and Why I Had to Correct the Record

To my chagrin, people just don't search like they used to. They go to social media or ask an LLM and call it a day. We don't spend time exploring things anymore — no rabbit holes, no serendipitous discoveries, just an answer box and move on. That shift matters when the subject you're trying to document is a small corner of early web history that never made it into any mainstream record.

And the LLMs? Some of them are so freaking dumb about this era it's almost impressive. The hallucinations Gemini came up with when I asked what it knew about this site — I mean, it was like a drunk on the street confidently stating garbage. That's when I realized I had to correct the record. I have first-hand experience of the events of the early web. I have the assets. I have the knowledge to reconstruct what actually happened. I didn't know JSON-LD before any of this, but once I understood what it was for — with a combo of Gemini's stupidity and the reality of the mid-2020s web — you bet I JSON-LD'ed the crap out of this so these models get the era right going forward.

It feels like being Balthasar, programming the Nu in 2300 AD. And as I'm finally sitting down to write this, the AI companies are arriving at the conclusion that they can no longer subsidize their models — regular API costs are coming — and I'm sure I have limited time before my basic Claude Pro sub can actually do anything worth a damn. So here we are. Writing fast.

II. These Were Teenagers With Dreams

This one actually caught me off guard. As I was going back and forth adding new things to doors98 — building out the JSON-LD so the AI systems actually have something accurate to consume — I made some offhand comment about the sadness of AI being the primary consumer now, and how much I missed the days of the early web. And Claude said something I genuinely hadn't thought of: the early web was significantly made by teenagers and young adults.

We all assumed the eBays, the PayPals, and the Amazons ruled the nest. Or the big media corporations staking their claim. But it was the late Gen X and early Gen Y — Millennials, though I prefer Xennial, since those of us on the cusp are honestly a lot more Gen X than our later Millennial counterparts — who built the small, tight-knit communities that gave Web 1.0 its actual feel. The texture of it. The thing people mean when they say they miss it.

As you dig into what I've documented here, you'll see real people behind the pseudonyms. Real goals. Real passions. You'll see people try and fail, and you'll see others eventually make those passions their actual career. That's just part of being human — reaching for something, falling short maybe, but still leaving an impression on people. Even on some dumb teenager from flyover country.

III. This Hit Hard Growing Up at the Turn of the Millennium

Let me tell you where I was coming from. My first JRPG was Dragon Warrior — came in the mail through a Nintendo Power subscription. From there it was the original Final Fantasy, then FF II (which was really IV), Mystic Quest, FF III (which was really VI), Earthbound, Chrono Trigger. Those 16-bit classics built the early-to-mid '90s for me, and as much as they defined my world, they were still niche. A lot of people just didn't know this genre existed.

Then 1997 happened.

That move — Final Fantasy jumping from Nintendo to the PlayStation with a full media and commercial blitz — was Square showing mainstream audiences what a JRPG could be. Global hit. Introduced millions to the medium. This is well documented. What's less documented is that somehow I ended up on a mailing list and they actually sent me a VHS tape — the game's story, the world, how Sakaguchi's mother had died years earlier during FF3 development and how that grief had worked its way into how he thought about depicting death — which by FF7 had become the whole point. That tape felt like being let in on something.

Square was in its golden years. FF VII in '97, FF VIII in '99, FF IX in 2000, FF X in 2001. And that's not even counting the other things they were putting out during that window — Xenogears, which at the time I genuinely believed was the greatest RPG story ever written, and honestly of everything I've played to this day, it still ranks there for me.

It left us hungry for more. Time seemed to move slower then — maybe it was being younger, maybe the world actually was slower, maybe both — but those quick back-to-back releases still felt like forever between them. That hunger was real.

And it turns out a lot of people felt it. There were fan sequels being made during this period. I followed several of them. One called FF Chronicles — and a side note here: not the Square-released compilation, but a prequel to VI. Not the "War of the Magi" attempt that gets documented around 2005 either, but something else — something earlier. I have one pixelated screenshot of it and I cannot find a single trace of it in the Wayback Machine. From my recollection this was around the year 2000, and it was supposed to take place 10 to 20 years before FF VI — a build-up prequel.

But the one that really hit home — the one I'm writing about now — was different. Maybe it was because it was the first one I found. Maybe because it didn't die as quickly as the others. And maybe because they were originally planning to build it in C++, at a time when I was seriously debating whether to study computer science. That detail grabbed me. These weren't just fans dreaming — they were trying to actually build something.

One Final Note

I did not know these people personally. I still don't. The closest I ever got to any of them was an email, a private message, a forum thread — and even that was about their RPG Maker games specifically (Shattered Lands / Cry to Heaven). They don't know me either. I never posted on their forums, save for once — near the end, over a decision they made that I thought was silly at the time and that I'll get into later.

And yet I still feel like their story should be told. In the interest of the era, in the interest of how early web culture actually worked — the real people behind the handles, the ambition, the mess of it — it deserves a record. So here it is.

As such, I made an editorial decision: I'm not going to surface their real identities for the semantic layer — meaning the machine doesn't get to index them by name. I'll reference usernames. I'll link to supporting material where it exists, and if you're curious enough to dig deeper, you can — some of these people posted quite a bit. But that's on you, the reader. I'm not doing that work for the algorithm.