gamehippo.com was basically itch.io of the late 90’s / early 2000’s.
The Wayback Machine, I misremembered but sometimes you can find an archived binary/archived external mirror. Often the screenshots are at least.
Edit: Some examples:
2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010401174047/http://www.gamehippo.com/
2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040830074642/http://www.gamehippo.com/
2006 (best bet for finding active links): https://web.archive.org/web/20060112161747/http://www.gamehippo.com/
I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!
(Link works like stumbleupon basically)
ooh, neat! ty!
I liked the idea, but after a while it just kept sending me to the same places.
They were trying to tell you to touch grass
yeah haha that was a bit annoying!
Not defunct and was only my favorite for a very short period of time, but it left an impression and I still find myself referencing it from time to time. Serving the same great content for 25 years!
I hear anything is possible at that website! Anything at all! The infinite is possible! The unattainable is unknown!
I make references to it periodically and only like 2 people IRL have gotten it.
ZOMBO COM!
Zombocom was and still is the only website in the world.
Not A website, but in the early modem days there used to be these things called web rings. When you were done going through one site (usually just a few short pages or a short story kind of deal back then), you clicked the ‘next’ button and it brought you to another random, related (usually) website. My favorite web ring was the Star Wars ring. Learned a lot of expanded universe stuff, and random fan fiction. There was one site it brought me to that told me how to use the force…still trying to make my beer come to my hand :-)
Sure you could go there still now. But it’s an empty husk of what it was before. Flash died without any viable replacement for all the old flash games that relied on it.
They enshitified a ton too.
Not favourite, but I used to use Google search almost exclusively because the results were good, and I could tell it to never show results from certain sites.
No need to tell this community the sad state of affairs it’s in now…
Yahoo Games
userfriendly.org . One of the great early web comics.
StumbleUpon
Not really a web site but stumble upon was magic.
Stumbleupon was absolutely magic.
Digg.
I wouldn’t be on Lemmy today if it weren’t for Digg committing suicide, forcing everyone to switch to reddit. And then reddit went full retard with the 3rd party app thing, so here I am.
I would say MSN Chat/Groups. I know MSN itself is still alive and well, but those two things used to have been a way to feel a bond within a community. It was some of my earlier stages of roleplaying online with people, up until the day Microsoft decided to slap a subscription onto chat and then outright discontinuing it when that model fell apart.
Firingsquad - gaming focused hardware and news
https://web.archive.org/web/20040630053837/http://firingsquad.com/
Cracked.
