📼 Nostalgic

Mahjong solitaire in a dozen layouts with no download and no account, exactly as it was on every family PC in 2004.

A community of personal website makers with tutorials, events and a directory of members' handmade sites to wander between.

A ranked list of websites that weigh less than half a megabyte. A tour of the fast, lightweight personal web, sorted from tiniest to merely small.

Miniclip's pool game, still the default way to lose imaginary money to a stranger in another country at half past two.

Collection of period-correct cursor trails — rainbows, bubbles, snowflakes, ghosts — demoed live so you can wave the mouse about.

Windows 98 rebuilt in JavaScript, right down to the window chrome and the sound the error dialogs make.

Enormous free MUD with hundreds of areas and a browser client, so you can be killed by a wandering mob without installing anything.

Text MUD running continuously since 1997, with a player-run economy, real politics and a genuinely intimidating combat system.

One of the oldest portals still standing, from the era when a game loading in thirty seconds counted as instant.

Browser MMO that has shipped a story release nearly every week since 2008 and looks exactly as Flash-era as you remember.

Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.

Free MUD with multiclassing, a web client and a player base that has been levelling the same characters since the nineties.

Every opening and ending sequence in decent quality, searchable by series or by song. A dangerous tab to open at work.

Apple II software preserved and emulated, including the educational titles that an entire generation met at school.

Seattle's novelty institution: rubber chickens, emergency moustaches and an unreasonable number of items shaped like tinned meat.

A survivor of the Flash era that converted its best strategy and adventure titles rather than letting them quietly die.

Decades of ASCII drawings sorted by subject, from cats to warships, every one of them ready to copy and paste.

Thousands of educational films saved from the skip — driver safety, dating advice, duck and cover — digitised by one collector.

Two decades of other people's terrible family portraits, submitted willingly and captioned by the people in them.

Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.

Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.

A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.

Community for adding glitter, sparkles and animated hearts to photographs, still busily active long after the trend died.

Monkeys pop balloons along a fixed path, and the upgrade trees behind that sentence are deep enough to justify the reputation.

Roll a rectangular block across floating tiles into a hole, with switches placed to force you to think in three dimensions.

The cat plays whatever key you press, on bongos, a keyboard or a full drum kit. Peak internet, and still maintained.

The original boredom portal, still sorting thousands of time-wasters into categories with no discernible editorial filter.

The screensaver logo in full screen, with a counter for how many times it has hit the corner while you waited.

Tens of thousands of riddles, brain teasers and lateral thinking problems submitted by users since 1999.

A German board game world that has hosted Carcassonne and Puerto Rico since 2001, complete with a slightly baffling lobby.

The write-draw-write chain game that predates the current crop, still running, still free and still producing pure nonsense.

Weaponised arcade racing around an open city, with the loud handling model of a mid-2000s console game.

A collage assembled entirely from GeoCities pages — every GIF, marquee and tiled background salvaged and put back to work.

Opens as ASCII candy counting up on a blank page and quietly becomes a full role-playing game with a sea, a shop and a dragon.

The four-day jam game that grew into Celeste: thirty screens of very precise dashing, running in the page at PICO-8 resolution.

Nearly a million recorded games from four centuries of chess, replayable move by move, with the real arguments in the comments.

Community-written choose-your-path stories with ratings, which is the only thing keeping the good ones above the fan fiction.

The offline dinosaur from Chrome's error page, playable while you still have a perfectly good connection.

Scanned American newspapers from 1770 to 1963, full-text searchable, which is a dangerous thing to discover on a weeknight.

Five photographs, one question each: what year was this taken? Points scale with how close you land, and the cars always give it away.

Decades of adverts preserved exactly as broadcast, including the jingles you will regret having remembered.

Several thousand DOS, Amiga and console titles catalogued with screenshots, each playable without leaving the page.

An audio museum of sounds made by objects that no longer exist — dial tones, shutter clicks, the whirr of a rewinding tape.

Home consoles from the Atari era onward, running in the browser. Mostly worse than you remember, which is part of the appeal.

The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.

Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.

Frogger with better manners: hop a chicken across roads, rivers and railway lines until the inevitable lorry.

The volunteer-edited web directory that outlived DMOZ, still organising the internet into a category tree by hand.