{"id":809159,"date":"2025-12-06T21:47:42","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T21:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/revisiting-the-first-video-game-websites-from-the-dark-ages?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed"},"modified":"2025-12-06T21:47:42","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T21:47:42","slug":"revisiting-the-first-video-game-websites-from-the-dark-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/revisiting-the-first-video-game-websites-from-the-dark-ages\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting the first video game websites from the dark ages"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad’s Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites<\/a> packed with cheats and the same gifs – but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage<\/a>, its message boards filled with poetry<\/a> and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled “SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read.” There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer\/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then – and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.<\/p>\n

Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She’d been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. “[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that’s saying a lot,” she says. “So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass.”<\/p>\n

Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. “I definitely wasn’t even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing,” she says on a Zoom call. “I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me – didn’t know back then that it was called copy – and put it all together.” For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan’s face. “I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that’s all I had,” she laughs, pointing to the website’s splash page while sharing her screen. 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 don’t even remember how much [Irrational] paid me,” she grins, “but it probably wasn’t very much.”<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad’s Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. 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.” There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer\/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks…<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":809160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[230],"tags":[259,8712,4047,773,8254,339,4034,8711,8673,59,11488,1977,168,189,2001,34,86,54,516,5926,3987],"class_list":["post-809159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eurogamer","tag-action-adventure","tag-bird-view-isometric","tag-black-isle-studios","tag-first-person","tag-grand-theft-auto-2","tag-grand-theft-auto-v","tag-interplay","tag-multiplayer-competitive","tag-multiplayer-cooperative","tag-pc","tag-planescape-torment","tag-ps1","tag-racing","tag-rockstar-games","tag-rockstar-north","tag-rpg","tag-shooter","tag-single-player","tag-strategy","tag-take-two-interactive","tag-third-person"],"yoast_head":"\nRevisiting the first video game websites from the dark ages | Arcader News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. 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