Rabbit hole

Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.

The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.

Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.

The Archive's Flash collection, running thousands of dead games inside an emulator so the whole era stays clickable.

A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.

The indie storefront where thousands of experiments run free in the browser, and where the deeply strange ones are the point.

Every point-and-click game indie developers have uploaded to itch, most playable in the tab, most made by exactly one person.

Every clue from every episode of the American quiz institution, transcribed by fans back to 1984 and playable board by board.

The review site that effectively invented walkthrough culture for escape games, with an archive going back nearly two decades.

Stick-figure RPG that has been landing daily jokes since 2003, wrapped around a combat and item system far deeper than the drawings imply.

A text-based village of kittens that grows into a civilisation over weeks, with a spreadsheet's soul and startling depth.

The reference desk of internet culture, with sourced origins and dates for jokes you never knew had a paper trail.

Thousands of landing pages sorted by industry and style, which makes it the reference for anyone writing one.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.

Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.

A full WarCraft-style real-time strategy game running in a browser tab, complete with multiplayer, a map editor and a scripting API.

Thousands of taper-recorded live concerts released with the bands' blessing, going back to the reel-to-reel era and free to stream.

The endless study-beats stream that turned into a genre, plus the label archive behind the girl who never stops revising.

The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.

A solar-powered website that can go offline in bad weather, publishing long, careful articles on old and low-energy technologies.

Zoom into the Mandelbrot set as far as the arithmetic allows, with palette controls and no plugin to install.

Scanned film and broadcasting trade magazines going back to 1904, searchable in full text. The industry writing about itself, live.

A hand-built indie web hub with a forum, a club of personal sites and guides to making your own homepage the old-fashioned way.

Old School RuneScape's skill grind distilled into a pure idle game, with a free browser version that genuinely never ends.

The Star Trek wiki, maintained with the rigour of a national archive and roughly the same word count.

A community weblog running since 1999 where members share the best thing they found online today, with thoughtful threads underneath each post.

Around 140 visual phenomena, each with sliders to break the effect and a vision scientist's explanation of why you fell for it.

Factory building crossed with tower defence: conveyor belts feed the guns, and the guns hold the line while you fix the belts.

Decades of archived puzzle hunts from the hardest annual competition of its kind, all of it still playable.

Screenshot library of real mobile and web apps, organised by flow, so you can see how everybody else solved it first.

The Internet Archive's full film and video collection — public domain features, home movies, government reels and stranger things.

Every format anybody ever stored anything on, documented with photographs and the dates it lived between. Far more than you expect.

An exhaustive archive of worlds built in a 1991 ASCII game creator, catalogued with more care than most national collections.

The default anime and manga database and tracker since 2004, and the source of the scores everyone else ends up quoting.

A twenty-level escape game from 2001 that defined the whole genre several years before the genre had a name for itself.

The searchable index of American federal records, running from founding documents to recently declassified memos.

Neal Agarwal's collection of one-idea interactive toys, from spending Bill Gates' money to scrolling the whole ocean floor.

A free host built as a deliberate successor to GeoCities, full of hand-written personal pages by people who wanted to make one.

The 1999 virtual pet site whose real game was always the economy — shops, a stock market and genuinely vicious restocking.

Rhizome's restored survey of a hundred works of net art, each with the context needed to understand why it mattered.

The chaotic original, still hosting animation and games uploaded since 1999, and still the least sanitised corner of the web.

Thirty years of usability research written up plainly and still free to read, which is why everyone cites it.

Retail and service workers' stories about customers, filed daily, and a bottomless argument for tipping generously.

The riddle that calls itself the hardest on the internet, played by editing URLs and reading page source.

The LiveJournal community that outlived LiveJournal, still posting celebrity news with the comment threads doing the work.

The 2007 build of RuneScape, still updated by player vote and still fully playable in a browser tab you should not have open.

Radio drama, comedy and serials from before television took over, in quantities that would take several lifetimes to finish.