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Video Game Websites in the early 00s

webdesignmuseum.org

11–20 of 95 posts

Re: Video Game Websites in the early 00s

#11
post #7

It does put into perspective how phones fucked it all up. That Nintendo 2k1 is looking really good, with high information density without being overwhelming, and an overall nice design to just look at.

Nintendo 2k1 website [1] was god tier slicing with the curved layout, inset menus, and sprites for the corners, edges, buttons without transparency. The pixel backgrounds, fonts, buttons, shadows looked great on a CRT. Tried to replicate it myself back in the day with HTML tables.

[1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/nintendo-2001

Re: Video Game Websites in the early 00s

#14
Ah yes Flash. I had just started learning how to build static HTML sites and was going down the road of learning flash instead just as I saw Steve Jobs came out in opposition of it.

I decided to turn back to regular HTML/CSS and then PHP.

Turned out to be the right move but I still kinda to miss those old flash sites.

Re: Video Game Websites in the early 00s

#16
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites.

These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games.

So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an era.

Re: Video Game Websites in the early 00s

#18
post #3

I think should make a comeback [1]. Then we could go back to having sick looking art pages [1] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp

Map wasn’t really the thing that enabled all of those designs, even though it was certainly often used to build them.

We just didn’t have a million and one layouts and device sizes to handle back then and so you could get really creative with available space. Even CSS Zen Garden later on had designs that worked much better on the limited screen sizes of that era - which don’t work well today.

Flat design trends killed off the rest of it I think.

Re: Video Game Websites in the early 00s

#19
post #16

Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an…

Here's one from my old AOL days. We originally just used email, AOL message boards, and a scheduled weekly chatroom, but once the Web took over it merged into Starmen.net [2]

Since we're on a "reminsence about legacy Internet" trend right now, here's the opening to [1]:

"What most people forget to remember is that it’s not just about the game. It’s about the people, it’s about the newsletters, it’s about the discussions, the trivia, the polls, the websites, and the meetings. Everything that was a part of the club was a part of the community, and there was so much involved that it was almost too much to handle. Who had the time to be a member of some 15 Online clubs? I can distinctly remember sending out invitations to join Moonside and receiving replies along the lines of “Sorry, I’m already in like 5 of these things.” Now, I wish there were more clubs and to any of you who have one: I will readily join. The only last great, recently active club I can think of now is the EarthBound Gang, arguably the greatest Online EarthBound Club ever. In early 1999, a lot of the clubs started dying out. I know that mine began to slow down, only to be restarted in the fall of 99’, and again in the summer of 00’. But as a whole, the EB clubs were never restarted, which is a shame, because some of them were downright fun."

[1] https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html

[2] https://starmen.net/

Re: Video Game Websites in the early 00s

#20

The variety in design is so inspiring. No constraints... just do what looks cool.

I don't think so. Most of these are based on the box art.

I'm not saying web design is the same thing or easy, but I am saying the major elements of the design were decided on already and there's little chance it was done without those same people involved.

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