I Made a Tiny Corner of the Internet That Never Left 1999

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?

Going deeper than nostalgia

There's a certain kind of nostalgia that 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 the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to go deeper than the obvious things everyone remembers. I wanted the weird little details that nobody would think to put into a nostalgia article.

The trip to a friend's house where we collected insects. Sitting around while my family watched TVB dramas. Going to the deli after school. Getting Chicken Treat. My uncle taking me to Port Adelaide, buying me a Nintendo magazine and then taking me fishing.

Even the uncomfortable memories started coming back. Being left out at lunchtime and sitting by myself on the oval. Forgetting my lunch at school and being too embarrassed to ask for a sandwich. Bringing a Pokémon card to school because I thought everyone would think it was cool, only for the kid with six Charizards to tell me it wasn't.

Those are the memories I wanted.

The stuff underneath the nostalgia.

Then I started remembering things I didn't know I remembered

I started writing a little Pokémon diary for the site.

The entries are deliberately written like they're coming from a kid. The spelling is bad, the grammar is bad, and sometimes the punctuation barely exists.

If nine-year-old me would have written "becouse", that's what the page says.

At first, I thought the diary would mostly be about Pokémon. And, to be fair, Pokémon was a massive part of my life in 1999.

But once I started writing, something strange happened.

I'd finish one entry and suddenly remember something completely unrelated.

Then another memory would surface.

Some were funny. Some were embarrassing. Some involved friends or family. And some were incredibly mundane.

Waiting around while Mum filled out paperwork. Sitting in the car. Walking around a shopping centre. Going to a friend's house and playing whatever game they happened to have.

Things that were completely insignificant at the time.

But I remembered them.

And I started thinking that maybe that's enough reason for them to exist somewhere.

Nobody was thinking about preserving these moments when they happened. It was just another afternoon. Just another trip to the shops. Just another day at school.

I didn't know I'd still remember some of these things 25 years later.

So now they're sitting on a website.

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.

Pokémon was a massive part of it

Although, to be fair, Pokémon really was everywhere.

Pokémon cards. Pokémon Red. Booster packs. Japanese cards. K-Zone. Pokémon CDs. Trading cards at school. Arguing about who had the better collection.

One diary 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!!!

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.

Somehow, I ended up with all the things I wanted

There's another part of this project that has been a little surreal.

Reading these diary entries, I'm constantly reminded of how much nine-year-old me wanted things he couldn't have.

A Nintendo 64.

A PlayStation.

More Pokémon cards.

New games.

Zelda.

I'd see another kid with something cool and immediately want one myself.

Then I look at what I have now and realise that, in one way or another, I eventually got almost all of it.

I have a Pokémon card collection that nine-year-old me couldn't have imagined. I own nearly every retro console under the sun. I've accumulated CRTs, Consoles with RGB mods, flash carts, scalers, accessories and all the other weird hardware rabbit holes that come with being an adult who never stopped caring about this stuff.

It's actually kind of ridiculous when I think about it.

If you somehow showed all of this to me in 1999, I don't think I'd even understand what I was looking at.

I'd probably just ask if I could play the games.

And then I'd ask if I could look at the Pokémon cards.

But the funny thing is, I don't think the important part is that I eventually got all this stuff.

It's that I never really stopped wanting to know more about it.

The kid who was fascinated by a Game Boy eventually became the adult who wants to know how the hardware works.

The kid who wanted every Pokémon card eventually became the adult who builds a collection around the cards he actually loves.

The kid who couldn't wait to visit a friend's house to play their new console eventually became the adult who owns those consoles himself.

The objects changed.

The technology changed.

The amount of money I could spend changed dramatically.

But the underlying curiosity didn't.

That's probably what I find most interesting when I look at the diary now.

I'm not looking at some completely different person.

I'm looking at the beginning of a lot of the interests I still have today.

The collection is just the part that came later.

And, admittedly, it got considerably more expensive.

Nine-year-old me was also hilariously wrong about everything

Some of the best memories are the ones where adult me wants to reach through the screen and correct him.

I remember seeing Super Smash Bros. in a Nintendo magazine and describing it as a game where you could "FIGHT MARIO AND PIKACHU!!!"

There was also the mysterious PC RPG my older friend bought. We expected something cool like Final Fantasy or Breath of Fire. Instead, I decided it was boring.

I later went back to his house and found him playing it again, so I wrote:

Honestly, I wasn't wrong.

If you'd spent $100 on a game that turned out to be dogshit, you'd probably want to play it anyway.

Then there was the Squall dinner plate.

My friend and I saw it 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.

What I didn't understand was that the whole thing was a parody. The advertisement was written in this ridiculously cheesy, over-the-top style, treating a dinner plate with Squall's face on it like it was some kind of mystical Final Fantasy artefact. It had dramatic photography, a "LIMITED EDITION" banner and completely absurd descriptions about the plate and its supposed magical qualities.

My friend thought this was hilarious.

I just thought:

"It's a plate."

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 wasn't just some random Final Fantasy plate.

It was an absolutely ridiculous parody of the kind of overblown merchandise advertising you'd see in gaming magazines, complete with a guy dressed as Squall looking intensely at the camera while someone tried to convince you that this was the most mystical dinner plate ever produced.

I laughed my arse off.

That stupid plate became one of my favourite discoveries while rebuilding the memories for this project.

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.

The Kayin Incident

Another one I absolutely had to include 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."

At the time, I just thought they'd given Kayin a really weird alternate costume.

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, complete with the Smooth Criminal look, moonwalking, the Thriller zombie walk and various Michael Jackson mannerisms.

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.

Somehow this stupid character has become one of the funniest memories from that whole PlayStation era.

WHERE IS THE METROID???

Then there's probably my favourite entry.

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. He probably had absolutely no idea what we were talking about and was just working through his support script, asking us if we'd found various items. But to us, every question sounded like another clue.

"Have you got Space Jump yet?"

Naturally, we assumed this was a huge clue.

Maybe you needed Space Jump to find the secret Metroid Baby.

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 don't want to remember 1999 as a collection of products

I don't want my memory of 1999 to be Pokémon, N64, Tamagotchi, Blockbuster and dial-up.

Those things are part of it.

But they're the surface.

I'm interested in what's underneath.

Who bought the Pokémon cards? Who took you to the shop? Who were you sitting next to? What did you do after school? What were you scared of? What did you argue about with your friends? What game did you desperately want but couldn't afford?

That's the stuff that makes a childhood feel real.

The tiny details are where the memory lives.

And I think that's why this project has become so much more meaningful to me than I expected.

I'm not trying to recreate 1999 perfectly.

I'm trying to preserve my version of it.

I 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 memory corruption exploit.

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 that the GeoCities site itself doesn't explain any of this.

That's deliberate.

If you visit it, I want it to feel like you've stumbled across some kid's website from 1999.

There are Pokémon pages, video games, Zelda stuff, MIDI music and a growing diary full of increasingly strange memories.

The modern explanation lives here instead.

Because I'm not really trying to go back.

I know I can't.

I'm just putting a little doorway there.

A tiny corner of the internet where I can still see that kid.

Not the generic version of childhood that everyone remembers.

My childhood.

The family. The friends. The games. The shops. The stupid jokes. The embarrassing moments. The boring afternoons. The things that seemed completely meaningless at the time.

All the stuff beneath the surface.

The deep-level nostalgia.

And for a little while, I get to leave it all sitting there on a badly designed website from 1999.

Exactly where it belongs.