the OG sims was fun
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Is it just nostalgia or were the website designs from the 2000s more unique, playful and with character? Responsive design and mobile web are a necessity, but I feel like they annihilated all creativity in web design.
Just look at those sites, they're hard to navigate, there's no consistency between them, where are the ads?
I'd still gladly have them over the bland, hard to navigate, soulless crap we get now.
The "standards" where not there, so all websites had to make things custom. I remember my wife making custom buttons for hers back in the day. It was so awesome.
Maybe you know about it, but neocities still has some of that charm. https://neocities.org/browse
I've seen some neocities sites, they are pretty cool.
I just wish some of the larger websites (gaming or otherwise) would make something similar for their desktop website and make a simple (non-responsive) mobile version.
They were more unique and creative. Were they functional? Ehhh not always. But i still love it and with modern implementation id like to see more of it. It doesnt have to be dated. It can just be a creative difference. Not every single site has to use js and look like the 3 websites 99% of normies use.
Take baccyflap.com. I love this site and see no issues at all with it. Most people under 30 would run away screaming from this site (hyperbole) because they are conditioned by x, fb, and the tok.
I'd almost totally forgotten about webrings. Thanks for posting this for that reason if no other, it has a big list of webrings to explore.
Webrings are so fun
It's just nostalgia. The vast majority of those were either entirely devoid of content or entirely unusable.
Also, mostly Flash, so disqualified for human consumption by default.
I won't argue against it being nostalgia driven (it's a powerful thing), but most of those sites definitely did not use flash.
We should bring flash back to torture bots and AI scrapers
Foreshadowing of Nintendo's future.
Except Wario isn‘t really there anymore. Probably because the greedy guy is running things in the background.
Seeing the old runescape website gave me whiplash
Oh man, I even recognize a few of those! I miss that era of web design.
I found some old websites myself a few months ago and put some links on my blog. These aren't archive links, they're still up in their original form.
Pasting a summary below:
Sonic Team, https://www.sonicteam.com/
A bunch of websites for Sonic Team's games are still up, dating back to the Sega Saturn. Here's a few highlights:
- Sonic Adventure, for the Dreamcast, released in 1998.
- A blog from the music team about their trip to a recording studio in New York. Check this one out with Google Translate, it's amazing.
- Photos from the trip
- Space Channel 5, also for the Dreamcast, released in 1999.
- Sonic R, for the Saturn, released in 1997.
- Nights into Dreams, also Saturn, relased in 1996. The footer mentions Netscape 3.0.
- a page about the story with a very 90s era background
The King of Fighters. This fighting game series still has some of the original marketing sites up for its earlier
titles.
- KOF 98 "Unlimited Match". I'm not sure when this was made. This is for the 2008 re-release of KOF 98. The copyright date says 2007 and there's a Wordpress logo for the favicon. However, everything else about the website screams "1998." It's using tables for the layout and font tags for text colors. I'm wondering if there was an existing site for KOF 98, and they gave it an update for 2008 without changing the way it was written.
- KOF 2000. A great example of how a site would sometimes have completely different layouts for each page.
- KOF 2002
- A general information site about SNK's games, last updated in 2009, but looks like it was designed before then.
Honorable Mention: Team Fortress 2, https://www.teamfortress.com/
This one is newer, of course, but still has some hallmarks of mid-2000s web design. I point out some things about it in the blog post.
Love this kinda stuff. Thanks.
No HEAT.net?
Ah I forgot this one!
I also remember WON for half life and some related games.
Where are the cookie popups? Where are the ads?
I definitely remember ads, and lots of them.
So you're saying they were photoshoped out of these images?
No, I'm saying ads were plentiful, particularly as pop-ups, which would not be shown here.
Rip geocities.
Damn, talk about coincidence. Just 5 minutes before looking at this here thread, I was looking at a forum thread from 2003 about Die Gilde (German economy simulation/city builder.)
I remembered the Pokemon Stadium one.
These sites were so creative.
What a blast from the past!
I fondly remember checking up on the different planet sites, like planethalflife to check up on the mods that would get released all the time. Good times indeed!
Yea I remember the picture of the day on planet half life, I probably went to that site every day.