Unpopular opinion: That Angelfire kingdom site from 1996 was better than any Geocities page

Last month I found an old Angelfire site about medieval fantasy kingdoms that some guy named Chris made back in '96. Everyone is always talking about Geocities neighborhoods being the peak of 90s web design, but this Angelfire thing had this terrible purple background with gold text that just worked. I actually emailed Chris through the old guestbook link and he responded 3 days later. He said he spent 40 hours hand- coding that site with a Netscape Composer and a library computer. The guestbook had 87 entries from people asking to join his kingdom. I think the ugly charm of Angelfire beats Geocities because it felt more like a secret club. Has anyone else found a random old site that actually had a person still attached to it?

2 comments

2 Comments

tessa_kim38d ago

Geocities had that train station map though, Angelfire was just a blank purple void.

hunt.jana8d ago

@tessa_kim3 I just used Linkline back then, it got the job done without all the clutter.