Remembering the Web's Early Creators
The Internet is a much different place than it was in the early 2000s; a whole generation of early Web content creators and pioneers have been left forgotten. Are we to blame?
This site is dedicated to the lost and forgotten, the weird and obscure, the overlooked and underrated. In other words…anything. Video games. VHS tapes. Toys and comics and soundtracks and vintage TV commercials. Derelict malls. Abandoned amusement parks. Discontinued cereal and cancelled candy. Stage shows and puppet shows, concerts and comedy tours.
Lost Nostalgia seeks to remember, even celebrate, these things and more besides. But, no doubt, a huge component of our mission lies in lost media--shows buried by the stones of time. And I’m not necessarily talking about television or radio here; rather, I’m lamenting the early Internet.
Since its mainstream breakthrough in the late 1990s, the Web has been host to some amazing content, some of which was hugely popular in the years predating Social Media. Remember newgrounds.com? It still exists! But few care (or realize) that it was an early pioneer and progenitor of home-grown content long before YouTube cast its first innertube across the digital stream. Homestarrunner.com was another early sensation, featuring its own brand of bizarre webtoon comedy for a hungry, pre-broadband audience. It’s now but a flicker of what it was in its glory days, but the revamped site still offers plenty of “vintage” fun.
Even the inescapable YouTube has undergone certain epochal changes over the years. Its earliest iteration was decidedly primordial, featuring shorter videos of a substantially homespun, off-the-cuff feel. Defunct productions like Classic Game Room or Clan of the Grey Wolf now seem quaint when compared to more modern fare, but in their heyday, these shows seemed like masterpieces. In the early 2010s, filming anything even remotely “professional” required at least some nominal tech and know-how. Today, a mere cell phone mixed with a sliver of ambition is all one needs to create a watchable show. What was first deemed a kind of Internet "public access" has morphed into something far more considerable, for better or worse.
As for NewGrounds, HomestarRunner, Classic Game Room, and Clan of the Grey Wolf, they no longer command the same clamor or fervor, existing instead on the fringes of an Internet that no longer seems to need or even remember them. It’s a tragic turn, but it’s our own fault. We let the Net flatten our collective attention span to skittering seconds, let our smart devices Swiss cheese our memories into a perpetual playlist always set to the present. Nothing “old” can remain unless refashioned, remade, and rewaved before our chasing faces.
And this is why the past…fades so fast.--D
