Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 329: ’90s Video Game Websites

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Jeremy Parish takes a trip back 20-odd years to the early days of the World Wide Web to revisit the era's online culture with two pioneers of the games internet: Andrew Vestal (The Unofficial Squaresoft Homepage) and Brandon Teel (Zany Video Game Quotes). Cover art by John Pading.

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, please be sure to sign our guest book. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronuts. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this time we're taking a very casual stroll through Memory Lane. Usually, you know, our episode topics tend to be pretty focused, pretty specific to a single game or series or person. But occasionally we do something that's a little more, I don't know, conceptual, a little more nebulous.

And this is definitely one of those cases. This episode is about running a video game's website in the 90s, which, like, that's pretty granular when you stop and think about it. But, you know, this is kind of where I got my start as an online nerd on, you know, using like Netscape Navigator 1.0 on a college computer and looking at this very early thing called the World Wide Web and finding websites where people talked about video games and realizing, whoa, I'm not alone. It's amazing. And so this week I have with me two people whose sites I frequented and contributed to and who I feel made a really great impact in the gaming space of the late 90s. They may disagree with my assessment there, but definitely they created sites that are memorable. And

I feel have been pretty influential in a lot of ways. So I'll let you guys introduce yourself. So let's start in the state side with the state side guest. Go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about why you're here. Hi there. My name is Andrew Bustle. And I had two websites that I ran back in the 90s. One was called the unofficial Squarespace home page, a later square net.

that one was from about 1994 to 1996 and then later on together with some friends we launched a larger endeavor called the Gaming Intelligence Agency or the GIA and that one we ran from about 98 to 2002 and so yeah it was a really different time back then and I'm really looking forward to reminiscing today about what it was like to do that

and then up in Canada Yeah, I am Brandon Thiel. I am also known as, oh, I was known back then as Lago, but I go online as Ragu now. By website I am most known for is probably zany video game quotes, at least back in the 90s. I worked on that from, I think, 1998 to about 2001 or so. and it was just a website about where I collected video game quotes from all of the video games like taking screen shots from maim and nesticle and all those old emulators and putting it up online for people to laugh at.

And myself, I ran websites, not anything as wide reaching as those sites, But, you know, I launched my first site in 1996 on GeoCities. God bless. And eventually went out on my own to launch ToastyFrog.com in 1999, I think. And, you know, talked about a lot of the same stuff that these guys did, just not as focused, more scattershot. And that's where I ended up today doing a scattershot podcast about video games. So really, nothing as much has changed in the past 20 years except the Internet, which is radically different. than it was in the late 1990s. So, you know, the World Wide Web launched in 93, 94,

depending on kind of how you want to evaluate that, how you want to kind of mark it down. But really, the idea behind the web was to create a visual interface for information that could be interconnected through hyperlinks, through text that you could click on with a mouse, a mouse interface, and would link you to another destination, whether that was a page on the same site or a page on someone else's website. And so you created this broad network where people would, you know, put information, put

images and essentially create a sort of shared collective resource of knowledge. And it's actually really hard to get across what a revolution this was for the average person at the time because information tended to be so so sequestered and so inaccessible before the internet really became a thing that was widely available, you know, initially through dial-up services like AOL and CompuServe, but also, you know, eventually just through, it's just kind of a thing we have now. It's basically a utility. It's a commodity, a service. And it's become much more commercial over the past few decades. but back in the early days it was very much a pioneering endeavor and there were some commercial video game websites among other things but all of them were very much

experimental and everyone was kind of trying to figure out like what are we doing? Can we make a living doing this? Is this actually a thing that is worth doing? I think most people understood like the internet is the future but what does that actually mean? What does the future look like? How does that actually become a thing we can do and it's not just a, you know, a huge time sync that we see nothing in return for.

And so these guys here on the line today are, you know, they help pioneer some of that. And Andrew's websites and Brandon's websites were two very, you know, there's some overlap that we'll talk about, but they were really kind of focused on different things, whereas Brandon was very much focused on the humor and ridiculousness of video games, you know, the unintentional goofiness that you, you sometimes found and just sort of commemorating that, Andrew was much more about, you know, I think the Squarespace homepage just focused on like, I love these video games, correct me if I'm wrong, and want to talk about them. But then that evolved into a resource, a website, you know, the GIA focused on bringing news, breaking news, giving comprehensive and well-written

reviews, giving unique and cutting-edge previews and features. And, you know, know, even doing early video content before there was a YouTube to dump everything onto where you had to find resources to host video and, you know, hope everyone had the ability to download 320 by 240 video footage without, you know, crashing your website and destroying your hosting for the next month. It was a very uncertain time and there was a lot of figuring things out as we went along, a lot of hand coding and a lot of figuring out video codex and a lot of of trying to decide which image format would be best. Like, do you want to compress your JPEG down to a three?

Because that's going to save bandwidth, but it's also going to look like crap. So, yeah. So I just really want to talk about kind of how you guys got started creating websites. And I'll talk about my own perspectives, too, like kind of what it meant to create a website in the 90s, what process that involved. And also just, you know, from your perspective, what was the gaming web life? back in the day, before there was, you know, Reddit gaming and, you know, reset era and Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth. Before there was YouTube, before there was Twitch. Like, none of

those things existed. It was a very different space. And I think that's something you just really have to focus on when you're thinking about this space. Just that it was before social media, before Twitter, before Facebook, before Instagram, before it was really easy to share things and for things to, quote, unquote, go viral. I think there was much more of a sense of permanence in place in terms of what these virtual spaces were like and these websites were like. And I think you saw that also in a lot of kind of the fan sites at the time

were based around being like virtual Final Fantasy towns or something. And in that day, you know, you were going somewhere. You were visiting places. But yeah, I would love to talk a little bit kind of about how I got started because I got on the internet fairly early from a friend of mine

whose father worked in Peter Science, went to a conference and came back with a floppy disk with Netscape Navigator 0.7 on it. And so plus winsock.d.l because there was no networking built by default into Windows 3.1, as you may recall. I was a Mac guy, so I didn't have that experience. It was all just kind of, I want to be on the internet. Okay, I'm on the internet. Hooray. So, yeah, it was not that easy on Windows, and especially before 95, if you wanted to get online, you kind of had to bootstrap the network stack onto your machine to, get there. And Jeremy, I think I told you this before, and it sounds apocryphal, but the reason I started

the Final Fantasy website is because I got online and I went to a search engine and I searched for Final Fantasy and I got no hits. That's hard to imagine. But this was before Final Fantasy 7, which is also hard to imagine. This would have been right around the time Final Fantasy 3, aka 6 launched, right? It was just about that. I know I launched before Chrono Trigger came out because I remember talking about that. Yeah. It was definitely before Corona Trigger because yours was one of the first sites I went to on the first day I got on the internet.

And that was in 95 around June. And yeah, I know, because I have a printout from the very first version of my site that I still see from time to time whenever I move house. That's dated May 94. So I know I was on at least that. And Final Fantasy

3 slash 6 came out April in the U.S. So close to that. But yeah, it was really just, it was nothing more than I really like Final Fantasy. I have played Final Fantasy one seven times. I beat it with a party of all white maids. I love it. Yeah, I mean, that was basically where I started with my website, although weirdly enough,

kind of strange to think now, I didn't have a video game section of my site. It was like, hey, I like Star Wars movies, they're neat. Remember those things? Like, no one remembers Star Wars, but I do. It was cool. I also like Japanese cartoons like Rhonda One Half, and I like weird music from Britain, like King Crimson. That's me. That's Jeremy Parrish. Thanks for coming to my website. Archipical.

Everyone was like, I'm really into reservoir dogs and full fiction. Every website that launched in the mid-90s had to have a stat on their movie section. I missed that part. I'm afraid. Sorry, it was just Star Wars for me. The thing back on the track for a little green back. Got to find just the guy, I knew some of my minds. The thing about this really early internet, too, I mean, you remember directories? Just like search engines weren't there yet. Google wasn't until about like 97, 98.

So, like, it was like Yahoo was basically, it was like a white pages, you know, where people would submit their links and, you know, if you wanted to learn more about Final Fantasy or whatever, you know, this is about 95, 96, once there's more than one website about Final Fantasy on the internet, you would go to these places and you would click through kind of the directory, like, tell me about video games, tell me about role playing games, tell me about Final games, and just kind of a very manual process because the, the, the algorithms and the indexing to search were just not there yet. Yeah, I mean, the day that my site showed up on the anime web turnpike, I thought, wow, I have made it. I am big time now. I'm on the anime web turnpike. Yeah, do you remember, I mean, can we talk about web rings? We're going to get there, that's for sure.

Okay, yeah. But again, I think that's just kind of the lack of discoverability that people were building these other mechanisms to help share. share traffic with each other and find each other sites. Yeah, I mean, there were early search engines like Lycos and, I can't remember what, Alta Vista was one. Alta Vista was the best back before Google. But Google didn't launch until, what, 98, 99? So.

I think 28. Yeah. And Google's whole thing was just like, we are just a search box. Just type what you want and we're going to give it to you. That's it. It was so stripped down, so minimalist. It was a revelation. It was very effective, but there was no, there were no frills to it.

Whereas all these other sites were like you had frames and you had like early advertisements and everything was categorized and really convoluted arcane ways. It was kind of difficult to navigate. I remember that Yahoo, it was, I think it was all updated manually by actual like human beings. And so it would not update very quickly. It would be weeks until your site would actually show up on there. Like they weren't using spiders or anything. And so I think the web was much more about individual sites linking to other sites. And the way that you found other sites was by finding one site.

And then by from that site going to all of the sites in their link section and so on, so forth. And eventually you'd notice maybe you see the same sites linked from different people. So you'd go, well, I'll click through and see what these are. But it was something I think is we're talking about too is, you know, the web was, is not the start of the internet, you know, like there were things on the internet before that. And so, um, there were the news groups, um, things like all games, Final Fantasy and all games, Final Fantasy RPG, um, which is, what is a news group? Imagine there's only one message board in the entire world and everybody posts, you know,

but, um, so, you know, there was a lot of communication through that. Um, there was a lot of communication just through like the, like, the, like, phyton board relays that would kind of pass messages back and forth between different people. BBSs, around the time that we were launching in the mid-90s, IRC was just starting to become a big thing, internet relay chat. But you really, if you wanted to be a part of the community, you really had to hop into these other sort of non-web-based mechanisms because the web itself was just getting started and it was no one really knew how to use it.

And it wasn't really two-way either. You know, they really updated the HTML standard to allow you to post-information. and make decisions on the website based on what somebody does. But it was not like that in version 1.0. The early versions of HTML, I mean, your interactivity was basically limited to, like, polls. You could click a radio button or submit a form by email. And it didn't really go much further than that.

And all of that required, all of that stuff like the submission and stuff like that, that all required extra backend stuff. It wasn't built into HTML. HTML was just displaying text and images. That's it. Yeah, I mean, there were basically, we're kind of getting into a general technology history here, but, you know, there were multiple standards for presenting text. You know, there was stuff like gopher and waste, wide area internet space, I think it was, and a few others. And they were just basically like if you, with these things, if you knew the address you wanted to go to, you could enter that protocol. make you to that protocol, enter the address, and you'd go to a specific site.

It was kind of like, you know, almost like with BBSs where you would dial in to A, BBS and be able to access what was there. It was kind of the same paradigm where you were just sort of limited to the links that you knew. And what made the web so revolutionary is that it was really designed around one, a visual mouse-driven interface where it was very easy to navigate. and two, again, it was built around hypertext. It was built around the concept of linking of, you know, jumping off from the point that you were at to another, like a completely separate space. And, you know, having access to information on one site that would then say, hey, I am the webmaster here and I found stuff that I think is really great over on this other site.

And you should go check that out. it was it was almost like word of mouth but very organized so it had this kind of like it's hard to really come up with a good comparison but it was kind of like a bulletin board that you know if you were like well i found everything that i can look at at this bulletin board you'd press you know a link on that bulletin board and all of a sudden you'd be at someone else's bulletin board it would just like teleport you there and because you know the hypertext worked in both directions you know you could jump back immediately and you know you know know, this was kind of derived to some degree from hypertext or hypercard for Macintoshes and some other similar technologies that were explored in the late 80s. But they didn't really sort of become a standard until the early 90s when the WC3 signed off on them and said, hey, let's codify these things and turned them into the new web protocol that everyone can use and that is eventually what basically became the internet like it's it's basically superseded everything else anything with an http or https like that wasn't

the only way it's still not the only way to get information online but people use the web as sort of the the baseline default of sharing information online because it is so convenient it is such a a user-oriented information sharing kind of space and that is really the real strength of the internet is it's a place to share information. And so the web really did change the nature of online, you know, between the ease of use and the interlinking and the kind of lack of boundaries, you know, it wasn't like a dial-up service like AOL or CompuServe or whatever, where you were kind of in their walled garden and that's what you had access to.

It was much more open. It was a, you know, a standard as opposed to a product. Which we've all gone back to now. Yes. Exactly. We're back in our little silos, our kingdoms and fiefdoms. But before that happened, there was this time of great creativity and, you know, just people out there trying to figure out what the hell am I doing. And for me, you know, I'd been, I started college in 1993 and I think that spring, someone was like, you need to check out this thing called the World Wide Web.

It's going to change everything. You are studying journalism. find out about it. So I found out about it probably like that fall, 1994, when it was just barely getting started. I remember the first thing I remember looking for was just information on King Crimson, the band. And I found a web page about King Crimson that had a tiny thumbnail of the album cover to In the Court of the Crimson King. And I was like, God dang, I need to figure out how to save this image. I've got a graphic of in the court of the Crimson King's cover. It's like 200 pixels wide. this is crazy.

This is so awesome. And that was it. That's where I jumped off. For my first web page that I started, the unofficial Squarsoft homepage, I think what is really key there is, I was just looking through it. And I was like, yeah, I had a whole section dedicated to the Japanese packaging of games. And like you said, it's like 200 pixels wide. But it's also the only picture of the Japanese box of Final Fantasy 3 for the Famicom

that I had ever come across in my entire life that ever existed on the internet. And I was just like, I have to put this on my page so that English-speaking people can find it without having to stumble across it. Because information, there was just that much of an information scarcity back at that time. And then this feeling that if you found something cool,

you might lose it because everything was so disconnected. And, you know, while that made it really easy for people to hop on and for people to link from one place to another, it also wasn't like Facebook where you upload it to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will make sure it lasts for the next hundred years

that it meant that people graduated from college and their websites disappeared because their web hosting was tied to their college account and there was no such thing as their property web hosting next time. And so it was really

just kind of easy come, easy go and I really had this feeling of like I want to try to create a more permanent way for people to show their appreciation for these games by having everything that you find in a single place.

Yeah, and that concept was very kind of new. There was no sense of permanence to the internet at that point. And, you know, there was no real organized way to get a lot of this kind of esoteric information. I mean, I started using the web right around the time that Final Fantasy 3, aka Final Fantasy 6 came out. And that was one of the first things that I kind of stumbled across was like Final Fantasy 3 is actually Final Fantasy 6. And that was revelatory for me and really got me interested in, you know, like learning more about all these things that I'd kind of seen mentioned maybe offhandedly in a magazine, but not with any real depth, but just being able to get into, you know, these

final fantasy towns and fan pages and learn more about this series. Like, you know, I think just the kind of timing on which I, with which I got onto the web had a huge impact on me and really helped me kind of realize like, hey, I really like this series. And it's interesting that more to video games than what I was necessarily aware of, and I wouldn't actually start working in video games in the games industry until 2003. But, you know, almost 10 years before that, I was kind of planting the seeds and sort of setting the stage for me being an obnoxious know-it-all about old video games. Oh, I definitely remember, like, the first day I got on the internet, my dad showed me use net, and immediately I zeroed in on alt.coms, final fantasy,

and was like, holy shit, they have Final Fantasy on here, and that was it, that the internet was now my thing. And I remember that first night, I went on to Andrew's site and downloaded a bunch of facts and printed off like 300

pages worth of Final Fantasy facts on the family printer, which my dad wasn't terribly happy about. And I remember spending a significant amount of time in those facts, trying to

going through the rumors section and trying to resurrect General Leo or things like that. So Jeremy, have you read Chris Kohler's boss-fight book about Final Fantasy 5? I have, yes. Yeah, I just think that's a really good companion piece for anybody

who is interested in like what was the internet like, what was being a fan like in the mid-90s. Because even though Chris's book is about Final Fantasy 5 in a lot of ways it's about what was it like being an English-speaking fan of Japanese video games at the dawn of the internet era and learning about these things that you didn't know existed and learning more about them

and learning and just falling down that rabbit hole of oh I knew there was a thing called Final Fantasy 5 but now I can see pictures of it and now I can listen to the soundtrack and now I can read a fact even though I have never played the game I'm going to read the whole fact because I want to experience the story vicariously through somebody describing the gameplay. But again, you were just so desperate for every piece of information because everything was so new. And that sense of newness and yearning, I think, was just so key to what the experience of being a fan online, you know, whether you're making a page or browsing the pages, what was like at that time. Yeah. And I think that really gets to what a small, if you can call it a community,

what a small community it was at the time. Because, you know, there's a limited subset of humans who were reading video game magazines in the early 90s, and an even more limited subset of that group who were reading about, you know, hey, there's final fantasy games. And then within that, there's a smaller circle of people who were like, oh, they mentioned this final fantasy game that didn't come out here. And a smaller set there who were like, I actually want to know more about that final fantasy game that didn't come out here because they mentioned it. And then I never saw that game. And then within that, there's the set of people who are like, I'm going to go find that game and I'm going to figure out how to make it work on my super in Nintendo and I'm

going to play that even though I don't speak that language. That sort of mentality was kind of how you got to early gaming websites and you know having launched my first whatever excuse of a site in the late night like December 1996 actually makes me kind of a late bloomer. I was you know kind of a Johnny come lately relatively speaking because by that point geosities existed so I didn't have to worry about, you know, scaring up some web space, some hosting space on a school server or like my friend's dad has like this 286 that he keeps in the corner of his basement and has connected to a BBS or something. It was like, oh, here's a website that will give anyone who wants it a chance to put together a website. Two luxurious megabytes of information

can be stored in this space and shared with anyone, assuming that you can actually log on to the site and upload because the bandwidth on it was terrible. But the, you know, the potential was there. The capability was there. And that's, you know, the point at which I bought the Bible-sized guide of how to write HTML. And despite having no aptitude for programming whatsoever, stumbled my way through it and put together a site with, you know, almost no content. I think what you saw the first thing was like a 200-kilobite animated jiff of a, it was Toasty frog. So of course, it was a frog that just burst into flames and was left as ashes. I drew and created this animated jiff myself. And it used up so much bandwidth, 200K. You don't understand how much

bandwidth, how much data that was in 1996, 1997. That was just, it was a disgusting waste of information and technology. It was so offensive. And yet now it would be nothing. I think that the very first I watched my website had a limitation of 10 megabytes per user, which I went over and they shut it down. And I remember I was, I guess I was 14 at the time, my father called and spoke to their systems administrator and got me bumped up until 20 megabytes. I was able to keep the site going for a few more months there before I had to move on to greener pastures. But, yeah, you fought for each fight back then. Yep. And the transfer rates were usually like one or two kilobytes per se.

second, if that. Yeah, my animated frog bursting into flames, it was like the story about the frog that you slowly heat up the temperature one degree at a time until it, you know, boils to death. It was basically like that as an animation. Not intentionally. It was supposed to be like a five-second animation, but it usually took like a minute to play out because of the transfer rates. And also, it wasn't always on.

If you weren't getting your internet from a university, which I wasn't, they would have plans which they would give you like 100 hours of or no was it even 100 hours it might have been less than that like 100 minutes but you were extremely limited in how much time you could actually spend on the internet yeah that was definitely an aOL like aOL had limitations on time like that for for a long time eventually they just kind of said whatever but yeah bandwidth connection time, just access in general. These were resources. They were scarce.

You had to have your own phone line and you had to negotiate with the other members of your family, whether you could dial in on that phone line or not. Yep. And if you shared like an AOL account with someone, which I did for a little while, at the time you could only have one person dial in. So they eventually changed their password and kicked me off because I was keeping them from getting onto their service. They were like, instead of, you know, actually saying,

hey, could you not dial up so much? They just were like, goodbye. Goodbye. AOL style. So, yeah. we start with you and just kind of like talk us through the unofficial square soft homepage and how that evolved into square net and um you know how you jumped off from that into the gia because it's they were two different things yeah so i mean the the unofficial square soft home page was was really

dedicated to just one company site um which you know it's it's funny because it's been so influential for me and my own life in terms of kind of tying my self to to japanese RPGs and to square but again, it was almost an arbitrary thing when I chose it at first. It was just kind of like, oh, yeah, I like this. I want to write about this and talk about this more. And so I did. And so it eventually, we eventually changed its name to square net. And, you know, it started out as just kind of, I mean, I'm going to say some things here which you can feel free to disagree with. But I feel like it kind of started out as an information resource and then it grew into more of a community. And I think that's something that's really kind of important to think about at this

time that, you know, I was asking some people who I'm still in touch with, like, what are your memories of the websites from this time? And universally to a person, everybody was like, oh, I made all my best friends through these websites, whether it's through posting in the forums on the sites or talking about them with other people at other locations or just finding each other in the IRC channels that were put together to discuss and manage these sites, it really felt like the whole idea of an online community was even something that was kind of, I mean, they were there before, of course, but I think we were seeing the evolution of a new type of quasi-real-time online community, where it wasn't just people you were kind of posting back and forth with

and the mirror of the Bolton board was being updated once every four hours or whatever, but you were able to have these real-time friendships and these real-time relationships with people. And so the site just kept growing and growing. I mean, I don't know if you remember this. There was a time where it was hosted on SquareLay servers, squarely working on the Spirits Within movie and Parasite Eve around the time of Square Honolulu. And there was also discussion about it trying to become an official square homepage or not because it was much more popular than SquareStone PR efforts at the time.

Oh, I didn't know about that. That did not work out. I mean, we, I want to get back to this later, but I definitely want to talk about what it was like in the 90s to be somebody who was writing about games as a fan and what your relationship with the companies were like. Because that was very different than the way companies treat fandom today, for sure. Yeah, I'm trying to imagine any Japanese corporation, but especially Square, just seating control of its online public face to a fan, to someone, not a fan, but someone in America. Specifically, that's just unthinkable. So crazy. The thing is the U.S. team thought it was a great idea because I spoke with people there,

and we had a good working relationship. And they were some of my first exposure to, quote, unquote, professional game development because I was still a high school kid at the time. And these were the people who were working on Squares games, you know, things like Secret of Evermore or Parasite Eve or the movie and so on. And it just felt like, oh, what an exciting thing to be a part of. take it as far as we can go. Because like you said, there were no rules.

Nobody knew what it meant to be online. You know, magazines like EGM or game fan or something, if they had a website, it was often a separate entity from the magazine without a real clear connection on what was going into the magazine, what was going on to the website. There was just some other people with a domain name that happened to match. Yeah, I mean, I got my start in the Games Press working for OneUp.com when Zip Davis was like, well, we have all these magazines,

we should have a website but for like the first four or five years the magazines were like who are these assholes on the on the internet who are just publishing stuff for free they want to publish our articles for free so people can read them without buying the magazine that's crazy we can't let them do that these are the worst humans get them out of here precisely and so yeah so it just kind of grew and grew and frankly I think it grew beyond the point where I could manage it. It's kind of still around today. As you may recall,

it kind of evolved into arpegamer.com. That was shortly after I started college. I was just overwhelmed by college and not able to keep the website going. And so I handed it off to a colleague who I knew who converted it from being about square games to being about kind of all role-playing games. Good old RPG gamer.

RPG You say RPG gamer? Yes, sarcastically. It was sarcastic. It was RP gamer. I spent a lot of time on RP gamer. And I guess did you have like bulletin boards, message boards on SquareNet? I honestly can't recall.

I think I did. Okay. The thing about open boards is they would come and they would go because they would be really good for a while. And then they would spiral out of control and you wouldn't be able to moderate them. And you would just shut them down for three. to six months and try again Peter. Yeah, I spent a lot of time on

either SquareNet or RP gamers forums. I mean, this was around the time Final Fantasy 7 came out, maybe a little before that. So I guess by that point it was RP gamer. It was, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, I spent a lot of time there because it was like, wow, there's people who actually give a shit

about this stuff as much as I do. That's great. I want to talk to these people. And, yeah, I still have friends who posted there, like Alex Frioli, who runs the No More Wopper's podcast with Ray Barnhold. I met him on

the message boards at RP Gamer. I was Toasty Frog and he was Toaster Thief and we're still friends. Both of those guys went on to work on the Gaming Intelligence Agency later on. It was a small, it was a small tight-knit community of RPG nerds

who... I mean, I was tapped for helping out with the design and artwork for the GIA because of my my extremely voracious use of the message boards there. I remember someone reaching out and being like,

hey, we really like the stuff that you keep posting on the forums. You want to work on this website with us? We could use, you know, some layouts and some character mascots

and that sort of thing. And so, yeah. But I think that kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier, just like this was all word of mouth. This was all like, I know a guy who has to say, do you want to join us?

Because there was no money in it. There was no advertising. online advertising was barely a thing. And around 97 or so, right when it started to come together, there was the big crash, the first dot-com bubble burst, like in the late 90s. And so you could not make money running a website for Lover Money. And so that meant that the people who were doing it were doing it

because they really enjoyed having the opportunity to communicate with the wider fandom and to share their thoughts with that wider audience. One of the things I think actually really helped these sites being created not for money, but for just sheer fandom, was because when it started, it was all, pretty much the internet was all universities. And the people getting on that early web were college students and younger people who didn't necessarily have to pay rent and didn't have to have to have. a job, or at least not a full-time job. And so they actually would have the time to just devote to making a web page for the hell of it. Yeah, I was a college student when I started my

webpage, and I was taking a lot of, well, taking a few journalism classes, but working on the student newspaper. And so I, because I'm a stupid workaholic, even back then, I would, you know, just be up at the newspaper offices all the time. And the fact that, that the newspaper offices had a T1 connection to the internet on pretty modern like power PC systems at the time, you know, really fast, really effective. I was like, this is, this is my home now. This is where I live. This is, you know, I can go back home and I can, I can dial up to AOL and scrape through and get by with their terrible worldwide web connection. Or I can just stay here at the office and, you know, set up camp and enjoy it, just really blaze through.

and spend all my evenings posting on forums about video games. That sounds good. Yeah, I'll do that. So what you bring up about college kids, I want to transition from there to talking about Dragon Fire and Andy Church a little bit. So I don't think you can talk about the role playing game fandom in the mid-90s in the web without talking about Andy Church, who's still around and still a great guy and gone on to do many more amazing things, but this is where he got to start being amazing.

And Andy Church was a college student at Carnegie Mellon University who decided that he would allow anybody who wanted to have space on his server, his server being literally a computer in his dorm room, and make it available to the World Wide Web. And his site was called Dragonfire. And this predated GeoCities or any of the other kind of sign up and get a website for free thing. And it was also, it was all Andy church hand stamping each body, the person who came in. You know, he didn't have a fully automated process. You basically wrote Andy and you were like, Andy, I really like Watership Down and I want to make a web page about Watership down. He would be like, that sounds great. Here's 10 megabytes.

Here's your password. Have a great time. And he hosted the SquareNet once it outgrew that 20 megabytes that I had gotten from my original provider. and before it went over to the Square L.A. servers, it was sitting on his norm room for a while. And his magnanimity, I think, was really instrumental for giving the fandom a place where everybody had a place to express themselves and communicate themselves right at the start of the Internet. And so I think it was just such a wonderful, awesome thing to see. Yeah, I definitely remember, like, you go right to the landing page on Dragonfire.net and check out the pages that were there. and it was basically

everyone who had a website about Final Fantasy games or RPGs in general. I just look at Dragonfire for the first time and Andy actually has written some from year by year 94 to 99

what it was like running. I see that now. So anybody who wants to learn more, I think, would be well served to go take a look. Dragonfire.net. That's it. Yeah, I did not know. what the story was for Dragon Fire, but I remember that a lot of sites that I looked at that I enjoyed reading were hosted on Dragon Fire. I didn't realize it was just some kid who was like, hey, use my computer. It's cool. I thought it was like, you know, a proper service. Again, like Angel Fire or GeoCities.

Eventually, he did charge for it, but at the beginning, you would just email him and just ask him, hey, can I have some space? And he would use. say yes. So Brandon, I don't know if you even know this, because I talked to Andy a lot. Are you aware that Andy wrote Dalnet services for IRC? He ran Dalnet? He wrote the services. He wrote the services. He wrote all he did. So let me, let me try to explain this as quickly as possible. So IRC is internet relay chat. It's like Slack. Anybody could set up a server. It was very distributed. A bunch of different instances. The Wild West one, and the first one was called FNet, and there were no rules there. And so people were always kind of jockeying for position and to, quote, unquote, take over each other's channels.

You know, if somebody had a internet chat channel where they like to talk to people, people would try to manipulate the network in such a way that they could get in there and take it for themselves. And so Dalnet introduced something called services, which were basically like admin-level bots who would sit in there and be like, you have a username, you have a password, this channel belongs to this person, this person is the admin of the channel, and they have ownership of it, and they can set other admins. And again, principles have seemed very obvious today, but that did not exist at the time that IRC started. So a lot of the ongoing chat and communication took place on this down-net instance of the IRC server, because it was a place where you could always have your

username, you had some sort of identity and consistency connected to the channels and the people that you were talking to. I was always kind of a little shit when I was younger, always kind of pretending to be an anarchist. So I would, I hung out on FNet more than I hung out on Dalnet. I thought Dalnet was for conformists. Exactly. Dalnet is for the soft people who can't hack it in the wild west of that. There was definitely, I remember, I remember, it was like, you know, it's like, oh, you lock your doors.

Oh, you should just, you know, be ready to, armed at the teeth, defend your territory at any time. So, yeah, no, but Andy, Andy was just continuing on to the GIA, he was always offering technical assistance and helping to configure our servers and just really a huge behind the scenes presence for myself, a younger high school kid who barely knew Bubkis about. actually running computers, he was really instrumental in, for myself and for a lot of people having their first good experience on the internet. I did not know that about him, that he actually was involved in that, making Dalmet actually something that people could use. He's had a lot of fingers and a lot of weird, interesting things. He invented gram expansion for fan translation.

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So I want to ask you about kind of from Unofficial Squaresoft homepage to SquareNet, but I am looking around the unofficial Squarespace, website archive you have here and it's it's amazing how much like of a time capsule this is you have you know the last update is toward the end of 1996 and you still have final fantasy tactics info even though that game wasn't released in like it wasn't released in japan until mid 97 and not in the u.s until early 98 and it's it really like it really shows how much guesswork was involved in covering games from from overseas because you hear you have some scanned art

work including Lamza rests her in her gloved hand. And so you have Ramza here holding a sword. But you know, you just kind of had to make the best guess. Is this a lady? She looks cute. She must be. Yeah. Lamza. That's her. It's really fantastic to not only see this website that is broken into frames and has, you know, default link colors and everything, but auto playing music. And auto playing music. But it's still, just, you know, it really shows like there, it's almost seamless sharing information overseas now. You can order from Amazon Japan and get a package in two days. But, you know, in 1996, that wasn't the case. It was like there's this whole other continent and they use fax machines still. It's weird and it's,

it's hard to, you know, they speak a different language and they have such cool video games, but we don't really know that much about them. But look, I found this in a magazine that someone sent me after they visited Japan a few months ago it's awesome look at this it's exclusive you got a scoop right here you say that sarcastically but so much of even once we started the GIA

in 98-99 the transition from running a square soft page to the GIA we wanted to do something a little bit more general purpose and we wanted to not necessarily compete but we wanted to build something which we felt was on the level of what the standard for online video game discourse was at that time in terms of, you know, let's talk about games and let's talk about games seriously, as opposed to just kind of saying the graphics are an eight and the music

is a nine. No, I mean, you actually kind of overshot the discourse online at that point, but I wasn't, I wasn't being sarcastic. Like, I get it. I was kind of doing the same thing myself. And I remember kind of my own big breakout covering video games, as it were, was when I got a hold of the demo for Kronocross, which also had the vagrant story like preview movie on it. And I, you know, I imported that from NCSX or someplace and got overnight shipping on it. It was like-

CSX because everything was, because I actually looked up because I was thinking about that. I was my own Krono-cross demo story. So, go on. but but yeah like I got that in the mail or you know like speedy overnight delivery and was like guys I got this disc I'm gonna I'm gonna go home over lunch and I'm just gonna play the demo and send you you know videos and do quick write-ups and all you have to do is just you know link to my website at the end of the articles and my my site traffic went from like 50 people a day to about 500 and stayed there it was it was a breakout it was amazing and it was just because I paid a lot of money for overnight shipping on sick and insights four maybe yeah and I spent like 20 bucks for shipping and had access to this demo

before anyone pretty much anyone else in the US did and I was like I'm going to share this and get it online and you had the platform to share it and to broadcast it and people were hungry for information they wanted to see videos they wanted to hear you know music from cronocross and you know preview videos of

vagrant story and I was still figuring out video codex and you know how to record but but I made it work and uh you know we were all just kind of figuring out things as we went along and basically like I've got something it's it's valuable I'm going to put it on the internet and and yeah so my my story there very very similar my family lived in Texas at the time that game came out while we were visiting um my cousins in michigan um I packed my desktop into the back of our car and drove it up to Michigan and I had NCSX send that demo to my cousin's house in Michigan rather than Dallas overnight so that I could continue to get that content and capture those images. And of course, everybody thinks

I'm insane. And of course, I wasn't saying. But that's how you got scoops. It was currency. Yeah, you paid for overnight shipping. At the GIA, we knew somebody who lived in Japan, who knew a store that would sell submitsu a day early, which is still as good as gold. You get in 2020, you know, if you can find somebody who can get you that content earlier. And I was paying $25 a week to overnight Femitsu to the U.S. So I could go to my dorm computer room and use the dorm scanner and scan in everything from Femitsu. You know, I think it shipped on Thursday in Japan, got to the U.S. on Friday, and I would spend most of my Saturday morning, you know, an hour or two going through and just scanning

anything that looked interesting in and putting it up. And it seems insane that shipping it to the U.S. was faster than finding somebody in Japan to scan it, but the internet was still so small, and the current, the ability to connect with people was still so limited that that was how we did it. Yeah. Yeah, and these days I have friends who live in Japan, and they're just like, hey, if you need something,

just let me know. It's so much easier. But I have to admit, there is a little bit of a thrill that's missing to that. like it's you know it's commodity now as opposed to currency and so yeah the novelty is a little gone so that's why i only write about old stuff you talked about videos and getting videos up part of the reason the gia had so many videos is because i i met somebody who lived in japan who was really into um the japanese j pop and j rock music scene and so he had a dvr running basically 24-7 on the music channels in order to grab all the latest videos from Japan,

convert them, and upload them. Again, there was no YouTube to the sites where people were sharing these videos. And he was like, he got in touch and he was just like, hey, I'm capturing all these video game commercials because my BBR is running all the time. Do you want them? And I was like, yes, that would be great. And so we started running, and it was this visual connection and this video connection to the Japanese game industry

that really was not there before and I felt was really a lot of people's, you know, like the Choo Choo Rocket commercial. Yeah, I was just going to say. Yeah. Was a bit of a viral sensation at the time that it went up there and then it just again

it's all about access, it's all about knowing a guy it's all about scanners are expensive DVRs are expensive video encoding requires an expensive machine and so you really have to have somebody who is fortunate enough to have that or is at a college where they can steal resources from the university in order to get the website running. That was just so much of that was just piggybacking off the

largesse of others. And I'm grateful for everybody who ever took the time to contribute something or send something in and to share something and to be part of that community. But it was a group effort because there were only a few people here and it was it was much harder to make content. than it is nowadays. Yeah, it was very fortunate for me that, you know, the GIA kind of happened to coincide with this sort of, I guess, like a year and a half window where I owned a really good model, like a tower Mac that had a good video card built into it

that had lag-free direct video feed, like through S-video, and could capture video directly from a game while I played it on the computer screen. And, you know, I figured out how to do interlacing and how to compress video as, you know, without losing too much quality and that sort of thing. And it really sort of taught me a lot. And then, you know, technology changed like a year later and all of that information was wasted and it took me another 15 years to get back into doing video again. But, you know, there was this kind of brief window. I was like, I have the technology to do this and I have the interest. And I know people who have a cool website that I want to contribute to. So I'm going to, I'm going to. I'm going to do this. And that was, yeah, for me, that was really a huge part of me kind of getting started and getting my foot in the door when it came to the video games press. There was a guy who worked on the GIA, Brian Glick, who Canadian, had a Mac.

He was really into video codex and really into video compression and always running AB tests to try to figure out the best way to, you know, get a video down to two and a half megabytes that people actually download it. And we used to give him grief about it. You went on to do that professionally, so, you know, jokes on that. But yeah, there was a really strong, I think, technical requirement for content creation, whether that was, you know, whether you use Notepad or Dreamweaver or some other assistive tool, you still had to get into the weeds of the HTML code a little bit.

You still couldn't do it purely visually until a few years later. And if you wanted to do audio, you had to convert all the audio yourself using multiple command line tools. If you wanted to provide video, you had to have the setup and the knowledge in order to provide that video. And it's, in no way, am I waxing nostalgic for this era? I think it's amazing that anybody with a cell phone

can make a video that gets viewed by 100 million people at 24 hours nowadays. But you really have to have this kind of spheres aligning of the people, the technology, the time, and the effort to get everything put together just because there were barriers. Yeah. So, you know, one of the barriers for me was that I had to learn HTML. And like I said,

I quickly realized I don't have an aptitude for coding. So I moved to a wizzy big editor. But even then, I was still going in and tweaking and making changes to say, well, you know, the cells aren't lining up here. It looks weird in this one browser. I've got to make sure it works an explorer as well as, you know, Netscape Navigator. So, yeah, it was definitely not just plugging in a WordPress extension and everything's fine. It was a lot more complicated.

There were no CMSs, as I think someone mentioned in the planning notes for this. You cannot emphasize that point enough. I remember the first time I met Anup Gagnat while he was in Japan, and he went to an ITN.com website where he typed the text into a field and then hit published. And then it appeared on the website. And I was like, what the hell? because he didn't do any coding. He just typed into the title field what he wanted the title to be,

and into the body field what the body was. And I mean, on the GIA, we had custom C code that we wrote to generate all of our HTML that we ran as an executable in Windows. In order to do things at the scale that we wanted to do, we would be like, you know, we're going to, you know, basically regular expressions. We would say we're going to have 500 screens, screenshots and they're going to be broken into 25 pages and they're going to be named

this dash that 0-0-1 through 0-500 make the HTML. Then it would basically go do and do string manipulation in C and use file writing commands to put the HTML. And that was what we used in place of the CMS is this external automation to allow us to try to provide information of a larger scale than. and we would be able to do manually. And it worked, and it was great. And this was probably state of the art in 1998 before there were any CMSs.

But it was absolutely revolutionary for me to see somebody not do that and do everything through the web browser. Just what a world be a ventured. So I want to switch gears here and let, you know, kind of a chance to highlight some of Brandon's work. If that's cool with you, Brandon? Yeah, I'm okay with that. So I want to talk about, one, first, what was the deal with Final Fantasy Towns? Since you ran one, what were those about? I remember them.

I remember visiting them. I thought they were interesting, but I don't really know where that concept came from and what it was all about. It was just a thing that happened for a while, and then, you know, a couple of years later, it went away. Yeah, it was basically due to this one guy, a Tatsushi Nakau, an engineering student. I forget which university it was. but he had a little website and it was patterned after an actual town in one of the Final Fantasy games

and he didn't use any screenshots or anything like that he had drawn up all the sprites or not the sprites the background tiles and the characters all basically in the same style as the games and he had the image of the town and they had a thing called image maps where you could actually use your mouse and click on one of the parts of this image and it would take you to another page on the site rather than having to click on a text link and inside every one of the buildings in this town you'd have another section of the site like the art gallery or where he had the facts or the news and it was like

all extremely charming, and it always had in all of the sections of the site, they'd have the little character sprites talking to each other, little dialogues between them, and this was one of the first Final Fantasy sites I saw, and it kind of left an indelible impression on me, as I think it did for a lot of people. It was called the town of Elusia, and there were a lot of people who saw this and thought that they wanted to create one as well. Tatsushi Nakau was nice enough that he allowed everyone to use those little character sprites that he made on their own Final Fantasy sites. I'm looking over your archive site here, and it's got a whole history of it. You've got a shout out to Tatsushi Nakau saying, thanks for letting me use the icons.

There's also a point that says, ignore Andrew Vestel's editorial. Support the Final Fantasy Port Translation. Oh my goodness. So it was a small community back then. I did not realize that we would be crossing the streams quite like this when I put this together. But it does kind of show. Like, you know, it was just such a small place, the Internet, the World Wide Web of 1995, 1996. Yeah, and Andrew was actually partially responsible for Zany video game quotes coming to be

because he got me kicked off of Dragon Fire. Okay, so I think we need to hear this story and just how Zanee Video Games quotes came about because I feel like that is a relic of a completely different element of the early video gaming, like 90s video gaming web space, but I'd like to hear it from your words. Yes, so at the time, there was this Usenet group called

alt.coms dot games dot Final Fantasy. RPG and it was an RPG where people like a story based RPG not really with rolling dice but kind of like a chain story where people would select one of the characters

in this RPG and they would write stories about it and all of these stories would all connect together and I had wanted to be a part of that but I was like 12 or 13 at the time and I know that there are good writers who are

12 and 13. I was not one of them. I was a very bad writer. But I kept trying to get in and I kept getting kicked out. So I was like, screw this. I'm going to make my own with blackjack and hookers. And me and this other kid at the time, we made our own RPG called the Freaky RPG, which was kind of the same deal, except on an early message board, which I had to figure out how to set up a curl site to do that and we got some other kids who wanted to work on this RPG and we had our own little RPG going on but anyway I was a little shit at the time and I wanted to be nonconformist and for some reason I had a grudge against the unofficial Squarespace off homepage because it was the biggest homepage at the time and me and all of the guys and

this little RPG we had which was at the time called the Freedom RPG for some reason because we were more free than the Final Fantasy RPG, whatever the hell that means. And we decided to

send Andrew a Valentine's card which he had written an essay about Aris's death in Final Fantasy 7 and how it affected him. I was told there would be no discussion of Aris's editorial on this podcast.

And so we sent him this Valentine's card with Aris getting stabbed and said, Happy Valentine's Day, which in retrospect is not nearly as cute and funny with how internet harassment has gone over the years. But Andrew got Andy Church to kick us off Dragonfire for that. If it makes you feel better, I was a shit, too. I think we all were in the 90s. We were all shits. It's fine. Looking back, I'd like, I wouldn't say it was power hungry or anything, but I was just

kind of like, like, I'm going to teach these kids a lesson about sending me nasty emails. And it's just like, if there's, if there's one thing I've learned since the 90s is how to chill out. So, you know, like never, never too late. So, but I apologize. I would like to take this off the key. Oh, you don't have to apologize. You don't have to apologize for. that. We were completely

in the wrong at that time but we got kicked off and somehow that RPG found a new website. I forget who footed the bill for that. But at the time when I was posting on that RPG

I was emulators were just starting to come out and you could take screenshots from these emulators and I was downloading ROMs like a madman, ethics be damned. I mean, I was 14 or 15 years old at the time. You didn't just download the smoke monster packs? I mean, come on. No, it was, you had the ghost and the machine packs at the time. Oh, see? Those were, like when the ROMs were just dumped on the internet, the very first time that ROM ever saw the internet, it would be in one of these Ghost of the Machine packs. And you would download that as it came out and you would have a brand new. set of NES ROMs to play.

Man, I didn't even know about those. I would just, like, go to GeoCity sites, be like, oh, there's a ROM of a game that I have meant to play. I'll try to download it and hope they haven't used up their meager bandwidth for the month, but usually it was just a dead link. I mean, do you remember

that new games were being added to the list of enumerable games at the time? Yeah. It was always the exciting part. But, you know, it's not like nowadays where the every NES emulator runs every NES game. It was like, guys, you can run, you know, Final Fantasy 5, and the layers look correct now, and you weren't able to do that before. You could sort of run Castlevania 3.

I mean, the layers are going to be all screwed up, and you're going to go into a section, and it's going to be all garbage, but you can technically play through to the end. That's awesome. Yeah, I know I've mentioned this before, but, you know, back in like 1996, 97, when, man, I can't even remember what it was called Super MagicCom or something like that, first came out. you know, like, wow, super NES emulation. One of my go-toes was Chrono Trigger, and I have seen the intro to Chrono Trigger running at like one-third speed

with the slow fireworks and the distorted seagulls going, Whoa. Air raid. Like, I can't, I can't start up that game without hearing the distortions of an early emulator

struggling to play Chrono trigger. It was definitely, you know, a very kind of exciting, not entirely legal, but very exciting time where it was like, wow, I can play these games I love on my computer. And it's kind of a crappy rendition, but I don't care because I'm doing it on my computer. That's wild. Yeah, as a digression, I, uh, the super Nintendo emulator was, um, super passophami. And the guy who made it, who died a couple years ago, arrest in Pee. He got really pissed off about the Westerners downloading it and not paying him for it. And so one of the versions, he had it delete your Windows partition if you were running it on U.S. locale windows.

So I would try every version to see how well Final Fantasy 5 would play because I desperately wanted to play Final Fantasy 5. and so one night I downloaded that one on my dad's computer because he had the most powerful computer in the house and I tried to play Final Fantasy 5 on it and it didn't work so I left it and my dad turned off his computer and turned it back on again and there was no windows anymore

so that was so I was in a little bit of shit for that but anyway getting back on topic. From those emulators, you could take screenshots. And if you didn't have a video capture card at the time, which were quite expensive, and also not very good, most of them, you couldn't get screenshots or video or anything of the video games you're playing. I mean, you could maybe, like, take a bad Polaroid of the screen and then use your Logitech hand scanner to scan it in at, like, to DPI, but it was very, very difficult to get images from a video game that wasn't like a

PC game onto your computer. So with emulators, that kind of just opened up the, it opened up everything to allow us to get screenshots. And so what I would do is I would go through these funny games, or through these old games, and I would take screenshots of the goofy, bad translations and funny quotes from these games, and I would append them to my signature on this Final Fantasy RPG forum, and I kept doing that for a while, and then I thought to myself, like, I need a new angle for a website because I don't have my old one anymore, and I kind of just want to make a website again. And so I was doing these screenshots, and I thought, well, I have enough of these now. I could put all of these on a web page. So I

got a free web account on a web provider at the time which was called Zoom and their logo was exactly the same as the bad guys from Metal Slug and I put my website up on there and all of the people on my RPG forum they thought it was really awesome and one of them my good friend James

James McCain also known as SACC online he said hey I have this Macross fan site which I've actually paid money for and I can give you a little bit of space on this web server and you can put your website there

and from that time on Zany video game coach was at macross.simplnet.com slash zaniviji as it was for quite some time and it wasn't like a huge blockbuster website but

gradually over time people started to come to it and they started to submit their own quotes and I would slowly add them to the database and yeah that was kind of how it went at the beginning. Yeah, I feel like the bulk of the content that you sort of dealt in was mostly mistranslations or like weird translations, especially from like S&K games, that kind of thing, or like really roughly translated, localized super NES RPGs or something. And one thing that I, you know, thinking back, I always kind of appreciated about your site was that even though it was dealing with mistranslations, it wasn't racist about it. It wasn't like making fun of, I mean, not that I can remember. It was mostly just like you'd see, you know, there would always be comments under the screenshots, but it tended to be like, okay, dude, whatever. Yeah, the jokes are kind of bad now in the year of our Lord 2020, but I was trying to make it a little bit more fun than just a dry compendium of all of these quotes.

But I would say that there's probably some racism in there because it was kind of the kind of free-floating kind. that you picked up when I was a teenager and definitely not intentional. I was not trying to be hurtful to anyone, but I'm sure if you go in there now, there's going to be some L&R transliteration jokes and garbage like that, which I would not be particularly proud of these days. But generally, I never had any ill intent about it or anything. I thought it was funny. it was great, and I liked how the weirdness, the going back and forth between the languages,

how it would kind of create a new idiom and transform the language in unintentional and amusing and interesting ways. Yeah, I guess when I say, you know, it wasn't racist. I'm thinking more in terms of like compared to most of the humor sites out there at the time. Like there were, there was definitely a lot of that. Like you said, free floating. It was just a, the internet was much cruder at the time, much less thoughtful and considerate. And, um, yeah, yeah, true.

But you especially got that, like, there were, there were lots of sites that were just dedicated to shock value. And like, let's just see how offensive we can be. There's no, there's no restraints here. I mean, I was the era that South Park came to be in, basically. I mean, I've been a big fan as any video game quotes. since its inception, pretty much. And, like, one of the things I do really like about it is all your stupid little jokes. Like, you know, they don't always land 100%, but I think you get a sense of you and your personality and the humor there.

And I think it's something interesting, too, is that, you know, we talk about how the World Wide Web is a visual medium, but also we're talking about the late 90s here. And so it's like, what, you think I have the bandwidth to put eight screenshots embedded into a web page? No, absolutely not. They're going to be something you have to click through and what you have to click through is text because then the text. And so there was this opportunity

to add a little bit of humor and personality to the site through the structure and the mechanics of it, which I think gets maybe lost a little bit when you can just put a 1600 by 1,200 screenshot directly into the web page and nobody blinks twice. Yeah, I think at that site

were to be launched today, it would be, you know, like an Instagram feed or if you want to be old school Tumblr. And it wouldn't really have, you know, that kind of flavor text. It would just have hashtags. And that's not the same thing. Yeah. There was this one redesign I did on the web page. I made it kind of look like how the King of Fighters 98 looked. Their sort of interface. And I wanted to do transparencies, which simply did not exist for picture files at the time. That the transparency

was on or off. There was not any sort of half translucency or anything like that. So I did the old trick with the grid pattern, one pixel on, one pixel off. And I just used like a two pixel

gif file to do that. And I used that all across the website. And it worked okay in Netscape, but as soon as you loaded it on Internet Explorer, it would just absolutely destroy it. It would just use like 100% CPU all the time. And that was not a particularly popular update that I made for the site then. And I would tell people, well, it would work if you didn't use Netscape, but that was at the time. time when the Microsoft monopoly was kicking into full steam and people were not interested in

using Netscape anymore. So eventually I had to redesign it again. So I think we can't really talk about Zany Video Games quotes without talking about Zero Wing and the role that site played in kind of bringing one of the Internet's first viral memes into existence. I don't know how big apart Zany video games quotes necessarily played directly, but the first I'd ever heard of that game, and specifically the European localization of that game for Mega Drive, was on your site. And I remember when the update that included it went online, like, it came with text that accompanied it that was like, this is it, folks, this is the big one. This is like the ultimate bad translation

just sit back and enjoy like you knew you had gold there and then you know a year later you had techno remixes and it's like my wife knows all your base or belong to us like she'll occasionally just make some oblique reference to it

and I'm like whoa that that really went out there I work in localization and co-workers are like oh like all your base like that is for them the shorthand of what it means to translate text from one language to another in game yeah when i was in college like about 10 years ago i was much older than the rest of my class and uh at one point someone said all your base are belong to us i did not mention that what how i was involved but it was just such an incredibly surreal moment that uh these kids

who were like in their early 20s or late teens and i was just her just her turning 30 and that they that all your base are belong to us have just kind of become part of the the gamers vernacular just absolutely surreal so that I don't know exactly how much my site had to do with its popularity it was part of it but it started out on a lot of sites at once It was on the Something Awful forums. There was this other text-only video game quote site that had made an exception and posted that as an image at the same time. And I, of course, we had received it as a submission from someone and we'd put it on there. And yeah, it was on the site for about a year.

And then all of a sudden it just went crazy. it went viral as much as it could at the time do you feel like there are any other you know things that you kind of help surface that that are of not necessarily equal impact but are equally interesting are there anything any any particular updates or games that you look back on and are like I'm you know I'm glad we brought that out and made the world

aware of this oh there is lots of those a lot of the old Taito games crush out the crime where the Supreme Law, I don't think that's a big one, but get you the hot bullets of shotgun to die, of course, yes, that was a big one.

Here is a graveyard of you, that kind of thing? Here's a graveyard of you. That's a good one, yeah. I don't know, like, the cultural impact of all your base are, belong to us, is so all-encompassing that putting anything else

that was on the site in comparison, it just doesn't seem like they even made any sort of impact whatsoever. All right, well, I do want to kind of wrap up at this point, but I just wanted to see if you either one had any final thoughts on the lost art of creating a website in the 90s or anything that you think we've failed to mention that's germane about that period of time and the gaming space and what it meant to be part of online gaming culture in 1997-98.

So I know you want to wrap up, but I do want to talk about my relationship with Square for like five minutes because I think it's really instructive about what it was like to be making a site right then, which is, I mean, I don't know how much I've talked about this even. Are you where square suit me like to try to shut down the website because I haven't talked about that much? No, I don't think I knew about that. Yeah, no, I had to get a lawyer to hang on to the domain name. basically, you know, Square as a Japanese company was not happy with somebody else having, at the time, more influence online than they did in terms of their media. And so they tried to shut me down. They were the one Square Japan who pulled the plug on when I was being hosted a Square L.A. And it was really just an adversarial relationship with them.

And so for me, the big change from the 90s and nowadays is when I look at Inferior. influencers and streamers and how much sway they have with companies and how companies are falling over themselves to pay tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to get people to talk about their game and give their thoughts on them. It's just so vastly different from, you know, before the internet, these PR firms, within a recent memory, the same people had 100% control over their messaging. And suddenly they didn't. And they were not happy about them. And some places adapted faster than others. But I think in those early years,

like you were talking about the magazine people at One Up going, like, you're giving it away for free. It was like, how can we let other people talk about our games? We're the only people who should be allowed to talk about our games. There are games. And it was, you know, just really difficult a lot of the time to do this work because you were not only not being supported by the game companies, but at least in the case of Square.

And certainly, you know, when we went to the GIA, Sony would treat us the same way. Just like, F off, you guys, we don't want to talk to you. Why would we talk to kids when we can talk to adults at magazines? And so it was a very different philosophy around what your relationship with fans were and how information shares. And the idea of going viral barely even existed at this point. And if it were to go viral, it would be seen as you let the message get away from you. It should not be going viral and should be controlled by us.

And so ultimately, around 2004, 2005, we managed to patch things up with Square and we're all friends now. But it was a really difficult time and it was really difficult as a fan because you're like, I love you guys. I dedicated hours of my week each and every week to telling people how much I love you guys. And all you do is want to shut me down and go away. And so, again, I think this is a place where we're in a much healthier social ecosystem nowadays. For all that social media can be frustrating and difficult sometimes, the fact that anybody can get their message out and that the brands, the IP rights holders generally see this as a positive thing and want to work with people to help build that community,

I think it's just so much more positive than what we saw in the 90s a lot of the time. Yeah, it's interesting that a lot of the Japanese, or that some Japanese companies these days, still kind of have that same problem with the streamers. Like, I know that Atlas a couple of years ago really did not want anybody streaming personified. That wasn't a couple of years ago. That's even now. They're still very, you know, they'll, they still turn off, I think Square does this also. They, they turn off audio, like the auto shutdown audio on streams for. or licensed songs and things like that or not even license songs like the main theme, they won't let you stream the ending. Like there are very strict restrictions built into the software.

So they're still not ready to cede control entirely. But, you know, I can understand that to a certain degree. But yeah, I definitely think a good balance between giving an influencer $100,000 to spout insincere rubbish about your game versus suing your fans for having a website. Like somewhere in between is the proper balance. And we're not, we've gone too far the other direction, but hopefully we can, yeah, reel it back in a little bit.

Yeah, no, but yeah, I just, I don't, I think it's, that was such a, an important part of that was, was that you were, it felt like you were fighting the companies. And in many cases, I was fighting the companies in court. And so I just think it's great that even if it's difficult, that there's more openness to working with people who are excited about your products now. Yeah, I mean, I kind of got my start working in the games press and games coverage in that environment, that sort of mindset. And so it's still surreal and surprising to me when developers don't think I'm scummy garbage and are like, oh, yeah, we like you. We want to work with you.

that's great. I still haven't quite gotten used to that. All right. So let's wrap up here. This has been a good conversation. And yeah, it's been very interesting. So thanks both of you for your time. So we're going to wind down now. I'm going to say, you know, if you have any work online that you'd like to share with anyone, like let people know where they can find you on the internet, that sort of thing. Now is the time to pimp yourself. So, Brandon. How about you? I don't really do anything except keep old sites up on a server

in my apartment. I mean, that's important. But I have a Twitter and Andore 7, A-N-D-O-R-E-7. I don't really do much with it. And if you go to Andore-7.com A-N-D-O-R-E-S-E-V-E-N-D-N-C-E-N-E-N-O-R-E-S-E-V-E-N-N-C-E-E-N-E-N-E-N-L-E-E-E-N-E-E-N-E-E-N-L-E, you

you can generally find a link of all the sites I was involved in like 10 years ago and go there and see that they haven't been updated in many, many years. Andrew Hatcher, how about yourself? I have a fairly small online presence these days, and that's by design. But I still do have these old sites are available. If you go to Squarespaceoft. Dot the GIA.com, you can see the unofficial Squarespaceoft homepage.

And if you go to Archive. the GIA.com you can see the gaming intelligence agency and even though it's not mine I do want to plug hypnosis outlaw here if you haven't played that yet I think that nothing really

captures that mid-90s web feel like that game does and even though it's set in a parallel world it really captures that feeling of this is new and exciting and I want to make something just because I can and I want to share a piece of myself with the world it's all really in there

so I would absolutely recommend checking that out if what we talked about here today you know you want to write more Oh and also I forgot that I should actually promote the site which actually does still exist It's not run by me But zany video game quotes.com

That still exists It is basically in the same state I left it when I last updated the site Some of the other people I handed it off to have done some updates in the meantime, but you can still see all of the old and bad jokes on that site and all of the screenshots from very old and inaccurate emulators. And also I have one website, my very first website, it's the last update of my very first website. Uh, www. atchi attack.com,

E-C-C-H-I-A-T-A-C-K dot com slash L-A-G-O-M-O-R-P-H-I-C-A-L-A-M-O-R-P-H-I-T-M-T-O-N-H-T-M. I think that's a capital L-G-O-L-O-L-O-Town, too. That's important. You've got to get the syntax right, yep. Yeah, and then you can see a very, very old classic preserved website from the time untouched pristine you can really feel the nostalgia

you could feel the zeitgeist of the time I can feel the pirated copy of Bryce 3D he used to make this thing my god we will post links to these sites in the show notes on the website and on Patreon Whoa, that's a different world. Getting paid to do stuff on the internet.

How about that? Yeah, Retronauts is supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. You can listen to episodes a week early. And if you subscribe at the $5 a month level or higher, you get exclusive episodes every other Friday and weekly columns by Diamond Fight. So we figured it out, folks.

We figured out how to make money on the internet. But you can also listen to the show for free every Monday at, you know, any service that has podcasts, basically. or at Retronauts.com where we post weekly notes about the show and links to the show and so on and so forth. So how about that? As for myself, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish. I'm on Twitter, which is also not a thing that was around in 1996, GameSpite.

And my old website, Toasty Frog, is still alive. I haven't updated it in more than a year because I only have so much time in my day. But there is a lot of stuff going back to like, I don't know, 2004, 2005. in terms of the archives there. So it's not quite the olden days. Most of that is gone forever and thank goodness. But there is some old stuff that I blogged a long time ago. But anyway, thanks everyone for listening.

Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Brandon, for sharing your memories. And just kind of taking us through the war stories of the olden times that are literally gone. They literally do not exist anymore, not just in terms of times, but in terms of so much of the content that existed and definitely the culture and the context around which, you know, that existed around the content that was created on the early gaming internet, you know, back when the only commercial site was IGN.com and it was called n64.com before it was even IGN64. That's how old that, you know, it's been a long time. And Andrew just added that the content that we're talking about, their content exists because they,

They saved it, yes, that's true. But most of the content that was created for the Internet in 1995-96, it's gone forever. No, it is. I guess it just mean, you know, if you didn't save it yourself, it's gone. You know, if you didn't copy it onto Plopies and CDRs, it's absent because there's no way any of those sites are still around. Yeah, and I've got some firewire drives that I don't even know how to access anymore, but I'm pretty sure I could find like my old Toastyfrog.com website from like 1998, 99. So, you know, the question is, like, what do you do with that digital information and how do you put it back on the internet? And is it worth doing? But thank you guys for not only creating interesting and valuable websites back in the day, but also having, you know, the sensibility to keep it preserved so people can get a little slice of what it was like to be a nerd who liked video games 25 years ago. All right. I think that is it for this episode of Retronauts. So Andrew, Bram and thanks once again, and we'll be back next week to say,

how are you, gentlemen? Thank you. Thank you.