One of the first I recall was Midtown Madness 2, borrowed out by my neighbor on a DVD, but I never gave it back I do not know about the timeline (my memory of my childhood is fuzzy) but at some point my cousin gifted me her used Gameboy Advance with some games - VRally 3, NFS Underground 2, Monster Truck Madness, Super Mario Bros 3, stuff like that. I also vividly remember being a big fan of the Crazy Machines series, where you could use tons of objects to build Rube Goldberg machines in a physics/electronics playground. Me gaming really took off though with Minecraft later on.
I have recently thought about this; imagine you were an evil trickster demon or something ( ) on the mission to completely ruin the retro web/simple web for its users. The hiccup: you can only change one tiny thing about how it works. What would it be?
I'd introduce emoji reactions to forums and boards; you could like a topic or react with any number of emojis like on Facebook, but some of them would be obviously mean spirited or outright negative like a thumbs down button, an angry emoji or a nerd emoji. That'd surely change the culture a lot to the point where plenty of people would no longer be interested in it.
I agree with all that has been said here! There is a certain charme that a letter has that an email doesn't. I'd be up for being penpals with anyone here!
I have thought about a catchier name than "retro web revival", and decided to go with an acronym from here on out:
RAWR which stands for Retro-aesthetic Web Revival.
It's a bit less clumsy than writing the whole thing out every time, and it is a big subculture by now with barely any cohesion beyond communities like Neocities. Sometimes I think that it'll spread very soon into some kind of mainstream and then explode in popularity. x3
A lot of people in the retro aesthetic web revival/RAWR () subculture seem to be younger, too young to have consciously experienced the original web we are kind of modelling ourselves after. As someone who grew up during the last few years of forums and the old web, I see some things that are now different from what I am used to originally.
So, let this be a thread to collect little tidbits and ways in which our RAWR subculture is different from the original times.
I'll start with a few things:
People used to be very interested forum threads' position in the thread list, and would push them upward by posting nonsensical placeholders (often only the word 'push':wink:. That was frowned upon and often against the rules. You don't see this much anymore and people generally don't care about their thread being "buried" anymore.
There used to be a big obsession in forums with roles and ranks like moderator, administrator, helper, donator and so on to the point where I would notice their role first and their identity second.
Politics changed, and the RAWR subculture is much more diverse (gender, ethnicity, neurodiversity, age and so on), accepting, and progressive than I remember the original old web ever being, even on specifically progressive communities.
Low-effort responses are nowadays pretty rare because the kind of people who seek out the retro web are usually the ones who also strive to get away from shallow social media.
I think it has been a subculture for some time. As much as I'd love to say it's anti-capitalist, companies and scalpers are taking advantage of us with the latter making us pay much more for things that use to cost us pennies and the former making half-baked nostalgia catering films and games for a quick buck.
Well, that only really applies to nostalgia-as-an-aesthetic, which is not really what I meant. The great thing about the retro web revival in my opinion is the utilization of obsolete technology and aesthetic for a creative, personal, remixed expression in a DIY fashion.
Old movie and game remakes and nostalgia fuelled retro bait do not really fit there in my opinion. I was thinking a much more DIY focused subculture, seizing the tools with which they build their (internet, movies, beverages, food, clothing, commodities,...) and doing it yourself.
Just like we are doing it with the web. They won't give us a noncommercial way to express ourselves? Then we are going to self host and learn how to do it ourselves, by taking long obsolete (and therefore cheap and no longer exploitable) technologies to make them our home.
Fanfiction for old TV series is more like what I had in mind. Sewing your own clothes from old material, or simply wearing leftovers. Learning how to do your own hair without following predatory trends. Making your own cola with a self-printed vaporwave label instead of buying Coke. That stuff.
I think the essence is: take retro aesthetics and rob them of their origins, turning them into DIY projects.
Many people who are participating in the retro web revival also seem to be reviving some other things — we have seen mixtapes getting back into circulation, people leaving their smartphones behind, old technology being utilized once more... do you think this can become a whole subculture? An anti-capitalist revival of the past, with associated clothing styles, slang, hobbies, meeting places?
Like, imagine just the same as there is a blues bar or a punk pub today, we'd all gather to drink homemade lemonade in a retro themed internet café...
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) on the mission to completely ruin the retro web/simple web for its users. The hiccup: you can only change one tiny thing about how it works. What would it be?
