• 26 Oct, 2025 *

I’m excited to finally be participating in the Bear Blog Carnival as just a writer and not the host.

This month has been mentally exhausting for me, so I’ve been procrastinating on this assignment because I knew that I had a lot to say about this month’s topic: “Early web memories”.

Before I begin though, there are a few things that I would like you to keep in mind while you read:

First, my early web experiences are confined to a very specific period of time, that is, 2003 to 2008. 2009, a completely new phase in my life began, one where I kind of disappeared from the part of the Internet that I had grown up in. That’s when I began to hang out more on Facebook and to interact mostly with my IRL friends and acquaintances (with the exception of the period between mid-2010 to mid-2011).

That “dark age” probably lasted until either 2016, when I joined Reddit (yes, I was late to the game), or 2017, when I started a Discord server that blew up about a year later. From then, until the end of 2023, I experienced my “social media addiction” phase. As a New Year’s resolution for 2024, I then deleted all of my social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, 9gag, etc.), and retreated to Discord, YouTube, and Substack. That year I was a bit adrift on the Internet, until I “stumbled” on the IndieWeb through Bear Blog earlier this year (abandoning Substack), beginning a completely new phase.

See? I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep this short.

Second, my first computer (probably) was a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo 400. It was slower than slow, but I have fond memories of it. Sometime in 2007 (probably) I finally got an upgrade: (probably) an HP Pavilion A6010N. This is important, because the limitations of these machines heavily influenced my early web experiences (I didn’t play a lot of PC games, for example). I’m astonished how hard it is to find information on these old models though.

Third, I had returned from Germany to Portugal in 2000. I did primary school in Germany, so I’m fluent in the language. This also influenced my early web experiences. It was only once I started surfing the web and downloading American movies, shows, and music on the Internet, that I began to learn English. At first, however, my web experiences were confined to German and Portuguese websites.

nintendo.de

If this wasn’t the first website that I ever visited, then it likely was one of the first ten or so. I actually have a very faint memory of accessing it for the first time on the computer in my school’s library, long before I had my own computer. That was on Windows 98, I believe. Wild!

The website had a very 2000s look that I dearly miss. Something that deeply saddens me, is that it isn’t archived anywhere (though nintendo.com, for example, is). Back to the design though: If I had to guess, Nintendo didn’t have a cohesive strategy for their online presence at that time. Their subsidiary in Europe (specifically in Germany), just did whatever they wanted, and they did sehr gut! The website was constantly being updated with news, trailers, tips and tricks alike. It had an actual forum too, where I even befriended someone. It was through this website that I was also made aware of my favorite video game of all time.

planethtml.de

Please don’t visit the modern website. It’s a shadow of its former self. Take a look at this archived version instead, if you want. Yes, this was the website that I first learned HTML on. Sometime later I became a big fan of W3Schools (which I use for referencing to this day), but before that, it was this random, simple, German website that introduced me to web design.

Believe it or not, a lot of major life decisions that I made with regard to my education (or lack thereof) trace back to the illusion that this website made me believe in, that anyone could make it as a web designer. Still, it was a fun time for me to learn how to do all of these things from scratch. Simple as HTML is, for a teenager who understood absolutely nothing about technology, seeing the immediate results of my creative input on the screen felt like magic.

gametrailers.com

It’s insane to me that long before YouTube, this one website existed where almost on a weekly basis you could go and watch new trailers for upcoming games, and even full-blown video reviews (featuring the legendary voice of Brandon Jones).

This was more than just an aggregator of game trailers: They had shows, interviews with industry leaders, documentaries, you name it. It was a website that was truly ahead of its time and it is such a shame that it got replaced by YouTube.

I think that GameTrailers is also where ScrewAttack and Angry Video Game Nerd either had their start or moved to. I need to use this opportunity to plug my favorite top ten video from ScrewAttack of all time, which features a joke about Metroid Prime that gets me every time I re-watch it. (Yes, I re-watch this video on occasion.) “Hey. I’m stuttering Craig. And I’m handsome Tom.” Ah... the nostalgia.

Starting probably in 1999, my father would buy me a monthly German video game magazine called Maus Klick. Until I started browsing the web, that was my main source for video game news (and I miss it). GameTrailers eventually came to fully replace that. It was especially important to me between 2005 and 2006, during the transition from the Nintendo Gamecube to the Wii.

I need to give a special shout out to mag64.de, nintendofans.de, filb.de, and bisafans.de, which were also some of my primary sources of Nintendo news, and have somehow all survived into [current year]. Crazy. Germans endure.

techzone.pt (now zwame.pt)

Last but not least, there was one Portuguese website that I began visiting all the way back in 2003 (and with this one, I remember for sure), namely techzone.pt (which was later sadly renamed to zwame.pt, a move that I never understood). As far as I know, it still is the largest tech-related forum in Portugal. In fact, it’s still a forum. It has not fundamentally changed how it operates since then.

This website was important to me for several reasons: One was that Nintendo truly had an image back then that its games were specifically designed for children. I got mercilessly bullied at school for preferring Nintendo games over the more “mature” PlayStation ones. Portugal was very much Sony’s territory back then.

This website had a section for all major console manufacturers, including Nintendo. It was small, but relatively active. I began to participate there every. Single. Day. For several years. It’s where I first began debating the timeline of The Legend of Zelda. It’s where I exchanged some items in Animal Crossing (for the Gamecube). It’s also where I first found people to play Mario Kart DS with.

The other reason was the long-term friendships that I made on there: In 2007, when Super Mario Strikers Charged released for the Nintendo Wii. It had a very solid, extremely fun online multiplayer feature. I immediately began organizing tournaments through the forum, the largest of them aggregating 32 players, with an actual group stage (like a real torunament). I have such fond memories from this time.

Through those tournaments, I slowly began to befriend some people who I would eventually meet in real life, five of them at least. We organically formed a group that would meet almost every evening on Skype, and later on move to Discord (where we still are, all these years later). Our lives have been deeply affected by the relationships that we built on this unassuming, Portuguese forum (three guys from our group actually were roommates through most of college) and it will therefore always have a special place in my heart.

MSN Messenger

I don’t have that much to say about Microsoft’s old instant messenger (the simplicity of which I dearly miss), but I do want to mention it because it was an integral part of my daily routine on the Internet before 2008, when I began to transition to Skype for my online friends, and Facebook for my IRL friends.

What that routine looked like is that once I returned home from school, I would immediately boot up Skype to chat with some of my classmates. I loved it because some of the girls that I had a crush on, who were too embarrassed to talk to me during recess (because I wasn’t cool enough), would be a lot more talkative on there.

Some people that I met through forums and the like I also eventually began to chat with on MSN. At school I struggled to make friends and to socialize because I just wasn’t popular, but on the Internet, I experienced plenty of indirect human interaction.

Pornography

I hate to end this post on a negative note, but I do need to address the elephant in the room.

It will never cease to amaze me that I somehow just instinctively knew to search for “sex” on the Internet, all the way back in 2003/2004, find pornography with relative ease, and I also knew what to do with my right hand while I looked at it, without anyone ever teaching me.

(Sorry for the graphic description there.)

It became an addiction. Until at least 2009, there was probably not a single day that went by without me, well... masturbating at least once. I had no control over it. My mother only caught me looking a pornographic picture once, and she ran away from the room in disgust, calling me a pig. We never talked about it. My parents must have regretted leaving me with a computer in my bedroom, unattended, with full access to the Internet, but they resolved to do nothing about it. It was a huge mistake on their part, but they had four children and way too many responsibilities, so it was probably just easier to ignore the problem and let me sit quietly and distracted in my bedroom.

I was already 14/15, but this experience severely damaged my views on sex and how I look at women, because all the “education” that I got on this matter, came from hardcore acts that don’t represent how regular, every-day people enjoy physical intimacy. I’m convinced that part of the reason why I was such a socially-awkward kid, who struggled to make friends, was because I began to see women as objects, and to pursue romance with them primarily with the end goal of having sex in mind.

That didn’t happen until I was 23 though, so if there’s any truth in this belief that many people have, that porn addiction actually contributes to decreased sexual activity with real partners, then I was definitely a statistic.

Conclusion

So, while my early web memories are mostly filled with the brightness of positive experiences that I fondly (and longingly) look back to, that same brightness also casts a shadow of how not only my dependence on the Internet for entertainment and socialization contributed to the woes that I experienced as a teenager, but also how my porn addiction subtly affected my relationships with everyone around me, especially women.

I’m one in probably billions who had a similar experience, so I think that it was obvious from the very beginning that the Internet would become a mixed bag of both good and bad influences for society. I’m finishing with a tangent here, but when we say that the Internet today is worse than what it was back then, I don’t think that’s necessarily true, or at least not nuanced enough. The bad was there almost from the very beginning (I remember, for example, one time when an actual PDF-file sent me a picture of his penis on MSN after meeting me in a chat room on some website, and he was very upfront about what he wanted to do to me, though thankfully, I just cut ties with him). It’s just that the bad was less visible, and we were younger, so we’re naturally biased towards the memories that are positive.

Now, as adults, I think that we’re experienced and mature enough to be more selective about what memories we make on the web, so the silver lining in all of this is that we can choose to orbit the parts of the Internet that still hold a bit of that magic from that age. It is being kept alive by the IndieWeb, by small forums, small Discord servers, small platforms like Bear Blog, and the like. Maybe in another two decades from now, we’ll look back at today with as much longing as we now look at the early 2000s.