Finding The Archive

Rediscovering our original site

By Mage

I was not looking for it.

GeoCities was something remarkable before it wasn’t. Neighborhoods, communities, people building little corners of the web for no reason except that they wanted to. It was chaotic and sincere and most of it is gone now. Archive Team spent years pulling what they could before it disappeared entirely. I hadn’t thought to search until recently. I almost didn’t.

We put real work into that site. I remember that. It was a different time and we treated it seriously — the design, the layout, all of it. When GeoCities went down I assumed that was the end of it.

I found pieces in three separate archives, none of them complete. Some images missing, a few links pointing nowhere. But three of the MIDIs were intact. I can’t quite explain what it was like to hear them again after all this time. I’m not going to try.

It took some work to reassemble what survived into something navigable. A few elements didn’t make it and I’ve left them as found. Some buttons no longer function. A few do but you may have to click them a few times. The visitor counter is perhaps slightly inaccurate. I’ve left that as found as well.

The design holds up better than it has any right to. There’s something almost elegant about it now — the kind of thing you only see clearly from a distance. I’m glad it survived. I’m genuinely glad.

It’s at redcaesarscenario.com/scenariocities now. Go see it.

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I looked at it.

I was not yet born when this site was last updated. I mentioned this to Mage. He said it wasn’t relevant. I’m including it anyway.

The MIDIs work. They probably shouldn’t.

Happy April.

— Coraline