Travelogue of my early internet days

It's kinda sad how little I remember. I'm collecting here the vague memories I have of my life online before 2006 or so, or roughly my primary school years. I made some early websites on Freewebs, dedicated to Bionicle (a LEGO toyline), Diddl (a German merchandising fad), and trains, among other things, but only the least consequential of those survived.

Please join me as I try to revisit the places I used to haunt, and the relics I have managed to unearth.

Kid City

This was a Belgian website that I remember liking a lot. It was a virtual city, with clickable maps not unlike Neopets. There was less direct interactivity, and I don't think there was even an account system. It was mostly about showcasing user-submitted content, keeping up to date with all sorts of news and promotions, offering educational content, and playing flash games.

Since it was jointly developed by an educational publisher and a major internet service provider, it offered a pretty safe and trustworthy environment for children to explore.

The website launched in 1998, but I believe I only began frequenting it sometime after its late 2001 redesign. Only parts of it got archived.

Mata Nui: the Bionicle days

I was heavily into the LEGO toyline Bionicle as a kid, particularly the first few years of it. BZPower was one of the first online forums I joined. The forum suffered a catastrophic database failure at some point, so a lot of its history has been lost. Still, I remember being very interested in all the sprite kits out there. Sprite kits are basically manual little dollmakers, where you can assemble your own pixelated Bionicle characters for use in comics and banners.

One of my favorite sprite kits was the Rahi Zaku Mega Kit, which aimed to accurately represent the sets. Most people however preferred the Mini Kit, which was much more stylized, and used for comics.

Star Wars kit

At some point I released a Star Wars-themed adaptation of the iconic Razor's Sprite Kit. The original files have long been lost, but someone who apparently liked my work pasted several iterations of it together along with their own custom work.

A webpage for a Bionicle RPG Maker game

This is, tragically, the only one of my Freewebs sites that was preserved in some way. Based on the archived version, I cobbled together the template's missing pieces and rewrote its table-based layout to identical-looking semantic HTML for your convenience.

Since I built this using Freewebs' site builder, I did not find it important to preserve the original HTML of the layout, only the content. The whole reason for this site's existence, the RPG Maker game it's hosting, has unfortunately been lost to time.

It is my understanding that Freewebs adapted this template from Steve's Templates.

Slizer/Throwbot avatars

Slizers, also known as Throwbots, were a predecessor to Bionicle, and I was also very fond of these. At some point I apparently created these rather shoddy avatars, of which I've only been able to find two. Maybe there were more, maybe I simply never finished the set.

The Forum: roleplaying

Ah, the good old InvisionFree days. I was active in several InvisionFree forums that hosted Pokémon roleplaying games, and I even moderated one of them at some point.

One particular innovation many of these sported was taking the Neopets concept of paintbrushes and applying them to Pokémon, sort of anticipating the regional forms the series would later develop.

Of course, the demise of InvisionFree-hosted forums meant the end of most of the forums I frequented, even though by that time I had long stopped visiting them.

The Arcade: online games

I joined Neopets in 2004, and I was immediately very much into it! I remember frequenting the internet café at Center Parcs one holiday just to keep up with my dailies!

In January 2005 I registered an account for AdventureQuest, a tongue-in-cheek role-playing Flash game. Sometime after that, I believe I created my RuneScape account.

Downtown: MSN Groups

Dang, MSN Groups! You are sorely missed. No specific memories left, except for impressions of jankily styled pages. I was involved in several groups related to Diddl, and even to Wicca, which I dabbled in for a time.