I Made a Tiny Corner of the Internet That Never Left 1999 and Ending Up Going Down The Rabbit Hole

I've been building a little website lately.

Not a modern website. Not a portfolio. Not something designed to be particularly useful.

A tiny, ridiculous little website that looks like it escaped from 1999.

Bright colours. <font> tags. Animated GIFs. MIDI music. Bad spelling. Random links. Pokémon. Zelda. Nintendo.

It started as a joke. I wanted to see what my personal website might have looked like if I'd actually made one when I was nine years old.

But the more I built it, the more it became something else.

I started remembering things.

Then I started remembering more things.

And eventually I realised I wasn't really trying to recreate an old website anymore.

I was trying to recreate a childhood.

What would the internet have looked like if 9-year-old me had documented his actual life in 1999?

Building a GeoCities website from scratch

At first, I was simply trying to make a convincing GeoCities website.

I wanted all the ridiculous little things I remembered from those old personal pages: wallpaper backgrounds, picture pages, Pokémon and Zelda sections, cheat codes, rumours, random links, a guestbook and a constantly updated webmaster page.

Basically, if I could imagine a nine-year-old putting it on a GeoCities page in 1999, I wanted it there.

The whole thing was deliberately excessive. I wanted it to feel like a kid had just discovered that you could put basically anything on the internet and had absolutely no reason not to.

I wasn't trying to make a historically accurate recreation of GeoCities. I was trying to recreate what GeoCities felt like when you were a kid browsing it.

Every page could lead somewhere else. A Pokémon page might link to a Zelda page, which might link to a cheat site, which might have a broken image and a MIDI file playing in the background.

It was messy, amateurish and completely personal.

And for a while, that's all this project was: a little time capsule of the early web.

Then I started writing about Pokémon

The first real rabbit hole was Pokémon.

I started writing pages about the games, Pokémon cards, rumours and all the things I would have been obsessed with at nine.

And eventually I thought the site needed something else.

A diary.

Because if I was really trying to imagine what my website would have looked like in 1999, it shouldn't just be a collection of information about Pokémon and Zelda.

It should have some completely mundane updates about what I had actually been doing.

So I started writing diary entries.

At first, they were mostly about Pokémon.

Trading cards. Pokémon Red. Going to the shops. Magazines. Games. Rumours. The sort of things that occupied a huge part of my life at that age.

One entry is about hearing that you could take your Game Boy and Pokémon game to Marion Shopping Centre and get Mew downloaded onto your cartridge.

To nine-year-old me, this apparently meant there was a magical Pokémon machine at Marion that could simply give you Mew.

I really, really wanted Mew.

I asked Mum if we could go.

She said no.

So naturally I started thinking about whether my brother or his friend might be going instead.

I REALLY WANT MEW!!!

The funny thing is that, decades later, I eventually discovered that nine-year-old me hadn't completely misunderstood the story.

There actually was a PokéTour in Australia in 1999, which travelled around to selected shopping centres and stores, where you could bring your Game Boy and have Pokémon-related events and activities done on your game.

So there really was something happening at shopping centres where kids could turn up with their Pokémon games.

I just remembered it as:

"THERE IS A MACHINE AT MARION THAT GIVES YOU MEW."

Which, honestly, is probably exactly how nine-year-old me would have understood it.

I love these entries because they capture what Pokémon actually felt like as a kid.

Not Pokémon as a billion-dollar franchise.

Not Pokémon as a collectible investment.

Just:

"MY FRIEND SAID THERE IS A MACHINE THAT CAN GIVE ME MEW."

And I believed him.

But then something unexpected happened.

The diary started going beyond Pokémon.

Going deeper than nostalgia

The more diary entries I wrote, the stranger the project became.

Writing about one memory would somehow unlock another. Then another. The further I went, the further back I seemed to be digging.

There's a certain kind of nostalgia we see everywhere now.

You know the stuff.

"Remember Blockbuster?"

"Remember Tamagotchis?"

"Remember when you had to use dial-up?"

There's nothing wrong with that. I remember all of those things too.

But it's really just the tip of the iceberg.

What started coming back to me were the little details that nobody would think to put in a nostalgia article because they seemed completely unimportant at the time.

Sitting in the car while my uncle took me to Port Adelaide, reading the Nintendo magazine he'd just bought me before we went fishing. Walking to Civic Video with my brother in the dark, worrying that he'd forgotten his membership card, only for him to reveal that he'd been joking. Going to the Sunday market with Mum and somehow deciding that a magnifying glass was the toy I absolutely needed. Sitting outside a friend's house because he didn't have the key, so we passed the time drawing Pokémon until his brother came home.

Even something as stupid as seeing a girl pick up a pizza while I was sitting in the car at Mum's friend's house somehow survived in my memory. I don't remember what the rest of that day was about. I remember seeing the pizza and thinking "I want some."

That's the kind of stuff that started coming back.

Not the things you'd normally put in a nostalgia article. Just little moments that seemed completely meaningless at the time, but somehow stayed buried in my memory for the next twenty-five years.

I started remembering things I hadn't thought about in decades.

Even the uncomfortable memories came back.

Being left out at lunchtime and sitting by myself on the oval. Forgetting my lunch and being too embarrassed to ask for a sandwich. Walking home from a friend's house after it got dark and being scared enough to run the rest of the way home.

There were also the little childhood embarrassments that seemed enormous at the time. Bringing my Pokémon cards to school and having everyone compare collections, only for the same kid to keep claiming he had six Charizards that nobody had ever actually seen.

These weren't the big, obvious memories of childhood.

They were the tiny ones. The mundane ones. The funny, embarrassing and sometimes uncomfortable ones.

And somehow, they're the ones that stayed.

And the more I wrote, the more of them surfaced.

Those were the memories I wanted.

The stuff underneath the nostalgia.

That's what I mean by deep-level nostalgia.

It's not just remembering that you had Pokémon cards. It's remembering where you were when you pulled the Charizard.

Which shop did you buy the pack from?

Who was with you?

Where did you sit when you opened it?

What did you do afterwards?

It's not just remembering that you played Pokémon Red. It's remembering whose house you were at, what was on the television, who was sitting next to you, or what your friend said when you finally caught that Pokémon you'd been trying to find.

It's remembering the particular shop you used to go to, the person behind the counter, the walk home afterwards.

The Pokémon cards, games and magazines are just the anchors. Pull on one of them and suddenly there's an entire memory attached to it that you didn't realise was still there.

I wasn't researching 1999. I was there.

I was digging through my own memory and finding little pieces of it that were still buried there.

The people became just as important as the games

Something else I didn't expect was how much the diary would end up being about friends and family.

At first I was thinking about the things I owned: Pokémon cards, Game Boys, Super Nintendos, magazines and eventually the N64 and PlayStation.

But almost every memory is attached to somebody.

Mum taking me somewhere. My brother taking me to the video store. My sister buying me a Pokémon shirt. My uncle taking me fishing. My childhood friends and I going to each other's houses. My older friend showing me his latest game.

I even started remembering people's houses: where the PlayStation was, what someone's bedroom looked like, who had the bunk bed, who always had the cool games.

Those tiny details somehow survived.

The diary stopped feeling like a catalogue of the things I owned and started feeling like a record of the little world around me.

And the people in that world were a huge part of it.

The things I somehow still remember

Some of the memories that came back were so specific that I couldn't believe they'd survived nearly three decades.

One of them was a stupid dinner plate.

My friend and I saw a picture of a Squall plate in a PlayStation magazine at the library. He started laughing his head off and tried explaining to me why it was so funny.

I didn't get it.

To me, it was just a plate with a picture of some guy from Final Fantasy on it.

Decades later, I remembered that stupid plate well enough that I actually tracked down the exact magazine and found the advertisement again.

And now I finally understood the joke.

It was an absolutely ridiculous parody of the kind of overblown merchandise advertising you'd see in gaming magazines, treating a dinner plate with Squall's face on it like it was some kind of mystical Final Fantasy artefact.

My friend thought this was hilarious.

I just thought:

"It's a plate."

I laughed my arse off when I found it again.

It's funny what survives.

I didn't remember the important things about that day.

I remembered my friend laughing at a stupid dinner plate.

Then there was Battle Arena Toshinden 3.

My older friend had a PlayStation and we played through the game together. I picked Kayin because he looked cool, and my older friend showed me all his special moves.

We eventually beat the game with Kayin and unlocked a new character.

His name was Ten Count.

My older friend told me that's what Kayin turns into after you beat the game.

I looked at him horrified and thought:

"I don't think I like Kayin anymore."

Going back to the game as an adult made me completely lose it.

Ten Count is essentially Battle Arena Toshinden's extremely blatant Michael Jackson tribute.

So nine-year-old me had gone from:

"Kayin is really cool!"

to:

"Why did Kayin turn into Michael Jackson?"

I had completely forgotten this until I started rebuilding the website.

Now I can't look at Kayin without thinking about Ten Count.

And then there's probably my favourite one.

My older friend was convinced there was a hidden Metroid Baby somewhere in Super Metroid.

We believed him.

We kept asking:

"WHERE IS THE METROID???"

Eventually we called the Nintendo helpline.

Yes, we apparently spent money on a premium-rate phone call to ask some poor Nintendo employee where the bloody Metroid was.

I can only imagine they were sitting there with their support script, going through the usual checklist and asking us if we'd found certain items or reached certain areas of the game to figure out where we were up to.

Meanwhile, we're probably on the other end going:

"YES, WE HAVE THAT. BUT WHERE IS THE METROID???"

The poor employee was probably thinking, "What the hell are these kids talking about?"

We never found it.

But the joke survived.

Whenever we see each other, he still asks:

"Have you found the Metroid yet?"

A completely stupid joke from childhood has somehow survived for more than two decades.

And that's exactly the kind of thing I wanted this site to preserve.

I then started rebuilding the internet I remembered

Once I had the diary going, I started thinking about the other websites I would have wanted to visit in 1999.

So I started adding those too.

There are Zelda: Ocarina of Time pages, complete with ridiculous Triforce rumours and "secret" information that sounds exactly like something you'd find on a ten-year-old's website in 1999.

There are Pokémon cheat pages, game lists, rumours, walkthroughs and random bits of information that nine-year-old me would have thought were incredibly important.

A lot of it is inspired by the kind of stuff I actually remember browsing back then.

The old internet wasn't just somewhere I went to look at websites. It was where I'd search for game cheats, read rumours, look for screenshots, try to find secret characters and convince myself that somebody on the internet had discovered something Nintendo didn't want me to know about.

The Triforce was the perfect example.

The Ocarina of Time Triforce rumours were exactly the sort of thing that could consume a kid. There were endless theories about secret rooms, hidden items and ways to supposedly obtain the Triforce.

So naturally, my 1999 website needed a Triforce page.

But there's a funny twist to it now.

As an adult, I discovered the actual Triforce ACE% research by SAURAEN — the real technical route for obtaining the Triforce using a arbitrary code execution.

So I ended up building the fictional 1999 rumour page around something that, in a very strange way, has a connection to a genuine discovery decades later.

The kid version of the site is still convinced there's a secret Triforce somewhere in the game.

The adult version of me now knows there actually is a way to get it — just not in the magical way nine-year-old me would have imagined.

It's one of my favourite parts of the project because it blurs the line between the things I remember believing and the things I've learned since.

A little corner of the internet

The funny thing is, the GeoCities site itself doesn't explain any of this.

That's deliberate.

I want you to stumble across it and think you've somehow found a kid's website from 1999.

Pokémon pages. Zelda rumours. MIDI music. Broken-looking graphics. A diary that gets increasingly weird the further you read.

The explanation lives here.

Because I'm not trying to go back.

I know I can't.

1999 is gone. The people have grown up. The houses have changed. The shops are gone. The internet is almost unrecognisable.

And I'm not nine anymore.

But I can leave a little doorway behind.

A tiny corner of the internet where that kid is still there.

Not the childhood everyone remembers.

Mine.

The people. The places. The games. The stupid jokes. The embarrassing moments. The boring afternoons. All those tiny things that seemed meaningless at the time but somehow survived.

That's the stuff I was really looking for.

The stuff underneath the nostalgia.

And now it's sitting there on a badly designed website from 1999.

Exactly where it belongs.