Revisiting the first video game websites from the dark ages

Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read."

Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive.

I can visit the fossilised remains of these sites on the Web Design Museum, which links to the Wayback Machine, and showcases dozens of bygone video game websites including id Software's mid-90s catalogue, Westwood Studios, Sierra On-Line, shareware pioneers Apogee/3D Realms, and of course, the original Battle.net.

1999 was also when Jay Tholen (Hypnospace Outlaw, Dropsy the Clown) finally got the internet, two years after he persuaded his parents to get a computer; he'd spent the time fantasising about the oft-romanticised "information superhighway" and created an offline pseudo-web for himself via thrifted CD-ROMs.

She was an avid Star Wars: Dark Forces player who visited loads of fan sites, and the ability to download new missions and levels ("they weren't called mods back then") promptly was crucial.

But looking back at this oral history of web design and video games in the ‘90s - a time frequently described as "a wild west" by nearly everyone I spoke to - is also a stark reminder of lost optimism that the internet would one day bring us closer together.