Hall of fame

The South Park character maker that has been running since 1999 and still gets updated with props from new episodes.

The original film's promotional site, left online untouched for nearly thirty years and preserved when the sequel arrived.

Hundreds of thousands of user-made timed quizzes: name every element, every country, every Friends character. The genre's warehouse.

Wiggle the mouse and a black worm follows; wiggle harder and it strobes violently, so treat the epilepsy warning seriously.

The official browser Tetris, marathon mode included, so you can settle the argument about whether you are still any good.

Type a word, pick from several hundred FIGlet fonts, and get the enormous ASCII banner your terminal deserves.

Everything people typed at each other on bulletin board systems before the web existed, preserved as plain text and left open.

The gentle way into fragment shaders, with every example editable in the page and redrawing itself as you type.

A playable account of why cooperation appears and then collapses, using game theory and roughly ten minutes of attention.

The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.

One of the first things the internet ever collectively lost its mind over, and it is still rows of dancing rodents and one loop.

Two Google search terms, one question: which one gets searched more? Your instincts are far worse than you think they are.

Coin-operated arcade cabinets from the seventies onward, emulated in a tab, attract mode and all.

A catalogue of films, broadcasts and recordings that are known to have existed and cannot now be found. Some entries get solved.

A student sold a million pixels of advertising at a dollar each in 2005. The mosaic is still up, and most of the links now go nowhere.

Long-form comics about grammar, cats, running and grief, from the man who also invented Exploding Kittens.

The original fake newspaper, whose headlines get quoted as fact often enough to sustain a small correction industry.

Sixty-odd propositions place you on economic and social axes, then show you exactly where Thatcher and Gandhi ended up.

Visual essays answering questions nobody commissioned, like which pop lyricists have the largest working vocabulary.

Drag countries across the Mercator projection and watch Greenland shrink to its actual size. Settles the argument in about ten seconds.

One button, one random pointless website, no explanation offered or needed. The site that turned this whole genre into a genre.

Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.

A painting that zooms into itself forever, assembled by a dozen artists so carefully that the seams never quite show.

Daily gift catalogue for things nobody needs, and the reason several of your friends own a novelty tap they never use.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

The outlet that breaks the story first and considers taste afterwards, with a documented record of being right.

The onion router straight from the people who maintain it — the browser download plus a plain-English account of how the relays work.

Click to place a block and a small algorithm builds a plausible seaside town around it, with no goal of any kind.

Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.

A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.

Races you against real people typing the same passage, which is the only known method of making a typing test tense.

You are an AI told to make paperclips, and you follow that instruction all the way to its conclusion. Four hours, one button to begin.

The editors' own curated list of the encyclopedia's strangest entries, and the best rabbit hole entrance there is.

Roughly a hundred thousand Winamp skins, all loadable in the browser. An enormous accidental record of amateur graphic design.

An operating system that never existed, built in a browser, with its own applications and a genuine sense of its own history.

Ten minutes out of somebody else's window somewhere in the world, filmed by them and left quietly running.

The forecast as an animated map, with wind, waves, temperature and a dozen models to argue between, free and without an account.

Answers computed rather than retrieved: integrals, unit conversions, orbital mechanics and the nutritional content of a Mars bar.

Six goes at one five-letter word, the same word for everybody, once a day. The puzzle that spawned an entire genre in three months.

Look out of a stranger's window somewhere else in the world for as long as you like, then swap to another one.

Stick figures on romance, sarcasm, maths and language, with a second joke in the alt text of every single strip.

You can do anything at Zombo.com. The welcome message has been loading since 1999 and it has never once explained itself.