The old internet

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.

NASA's tracker for when the space station is visible from where you live, with sighting alerts by email.

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

The endless runner that ate mobile gaming, in a browser tab with the trains, the hoverboards and the shouting guard intact.

Real-time First World War grand strategy played over weeks against dozens of other people, most of whom will lie to you.

A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.

Graded summaries of the terms you agreed to without reading, with the specific alarming clause quoted. Volunteer-run since 2012.

Thousands of browser-playable parser and choice games, plus Quest, the authoring tool most of them were written in.

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

Canadian satire that assumes you follow Canadian politics, and rewards you handsomely if you happen to.

Millions of pages of declassified government documents prised out by freedom of information requests, free to browse.

Profiles of thousands of American cold case disappearances, written and maintained by one person for decades.

The Australian team that built a career on television stunts, still publishing headlines that get them into trouble.

British satire in short bitter columns, mostly concerning the middle classes and the people who irritate them.

A volunteer register of unidentified remains and missing people, matched by amateurs who keep on succeeding.

A scholarly reference to the whole genre, free to read, covering authors nobody else ever bothered to write up.

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

Complete texts, timelines and scholarship for a writer whose entire output is public domain, on a site that has barely changed since 1994.

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

Aggregates everything the music blogs posted today into one stream, which is how people found new records before playlists took over.

Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.

Multiple-choice questions where the correct answer is a pun, a trick or an outright lie, and three wrong ones end the whole run.

One cat looking at a monitor showing a cat looking at a monitor, several thousand cats deep and still accepting submissions.

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.

Community-maintained film and television database with an open API, which is why half the apps you use are quietly built on it.

The listing that has catalogued live text MUDs since 1994, and still tells you which of them have people logged in tonight.

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.

A hand-maintained index of free books online, run out of Penn since before search engines were any good.

A stick-figure Dungeons and Dragons party in a story that turned genuinely epic somewhere around strip four hundred.

Beautifully drawn strips that set up a sweet premise and then take it somewhere very dark in the final panel.

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

Essays and picture galleries drawn from the strangest corners of out-of-copyright print, film and illustration.

Ten thousand sheep drawn by anonymous online workers paid two cents each, displayed together as one enormous grid.

Australian satire in short sharp headlines, which is roughly the national attention span for domestic politics.

Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.

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

Race from one Wikipedia article to another using only links, against a clock and other people online.

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

Pour coloured sand into layered dunes with the mouse, which is considerably more absorbing than it has any right to be.

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

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs, get them back visibly identical and roughly seventy per cent smaller. Twenty files at a time, free.

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

Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.

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

Text-based crime MMO running since 2004, where the market, the gyms and the prison are all operated by other extremely committed players.