Yesterday, I was casually browsing Bluesky and came across this delightful thread: Man, I love late-’90s/early-’00s websites, don’t you? The simplicity. The goofy fonts. The visitor counters. The personality! That whole thread is gold, truly, not just for the retro vibes but also for the sheer hilarity that is seeing websites that are massive, corporate-owned mazes today in their primaeval forms as personal blogging spaces about marriage, growing older, religion, travel, and other humdrum human activities. The thread above canvases earlier incarnations of sites including doordash.com, hulu.com, slack.com, x.com (not nearly the worst place on the web!!!!), and more. But it made me curious: what about video game websites? Were any of the popular game websites we know today originally something else? Perhaps something more personal, or silly? Using the good ol’ Internet Archive, I started with some big AAA gaming companies.…