Post by cometahavoc on Nov 17, 2024 12:41:19 GMT
first post in here! ^_^
so, I already made a post about this on r/tipofmyjoystick, but as you may figure it didn't yeild any results. I'm fairly certain the matter of this post is completely lost media (as much as I'd like to be proven wrong), but I figure if you actually want to find something you need to know what it's called first
I've always been somewhat of a "gamer". as a kid in the timeframe of 2016-2017, I remember looking for super mario bros. fangames online. not so sure whether I was looking for bowser fangames in particular, but I ended up finding one to the site in question. it was a fairly basic platformer, where you played as bowser as he went through one of his flying spaceships: you could move left to right, collect coins, jump on enemies... the physics weren't all that great, though. I'm not sure what games the sprites were from, but mario maker 1 had recently released, so I figure they must have been from there
(of course, this game isn't what I'm actually looking for. it would be a nice find, for sure, but I'm more interested in re-discovering whatever the hell this domain was)
so after clicking through a link or two, I found myself on the homepage of that site. from what I can recall, its design was not very dissimilar from that of youtube, though it's color scheme was more like yoyogames' game maker. various user-created games were presented there, possibly with "newer" and "best of x" sections. i'm sure there were banners, maybe for ads or for website logos.
I don't remember anything specific about the login system itself, although my mind tells me there was: the most interesting part about this site was its "game-making" process (or rather, the lack of it). upon entering this section of the site you'd be greeted by several "templates": a platformer template (of which the aforementioned bowser game was based on), an "infinite runner" game (similar to the coolmathgames run series of games), a hangman style game, and possibly others i'm forgetting (there might have been a second platformer template but I'm not sure on this). after selecting your template, you'd be asked to input the sprites you wanted to use for each element of the game (and by sprites, i refer to non-animated pngs that would just sort of drag around). I believe the platformer template let you select a different sprite for when your guy jumped, and the hangman game allowed you to select the word the player needed to guess to win. after all that was done, you'd write a name and description for your game and upload it to the site. the games didn't have any sounds whatsoever
although flash was still very much a thing back in the day, I heavily doubt these games were made on it, mainly because of the quick website integration usually associated with HTML5 (though I didn't really know much for programming languages back in the day). the games were presented, again, like a youtube video, with recommended games on the side, comments, and a rating system
I'd say the website was somewhat active back in the day, say, there was at least a few games being posted daily. I can't recall anybody's username though, not even my own, but I remember making a series of serialized games (as serialized as the format permitted it, anways). they were about luigi from super mario going to minecraft and getting captured by peppa pig (pretty random, I know). one time I decided to make two sepparate versions of a game, kinda like how pokémon does it: one where you played as luigi, the "green version", and another where you played as sonic the hedgehog, the "blue version"
I couldn't tell you exactly when the website was made, it looked pretty contemporary for the time, but it must have gone under before 2018. trying to access the website after would reveal the domain had been sold to the godaddy company. though there were ocasional mod messages, I can't recall any previous announcements of this before it happened, as I didn't visit the website much for a while
and that's about all I can say, I guess. I limited myself about personal details on my original tomt post, but if more concrete information will make the search easier, it can't hurt to try. I'll link below some mockups I made for the aforementioned publication:
