Zoomer here

[Anonymous No.10842561]

I'm interested in learning what the experience browsing gaming forums was like from late 90s to mid00s since it feels so magical to me. tell all you know and please suggest gaming news sites or forum that are no longer present but can be accessed via wayback machine

[Anonymous No.10842580]

I spent a lot of time shitposting on the Pokemon Diamond forums on Neoseeker from 2008-2010 as a kid, and I'm pretty sure all of the old posts are still accessible with a little digging. For what it's worth, while people go on about the sense of community and such, the big thing that sucked was forum oldfags/mods/admins constantly sucking each other off and basically getting anyone banned for the smallest offense. Most old forums are still around to browse, though most images are basically all taken offline from imageshack/photobucket/imgur and wayback machine doesn't store those images either.

[Anonymous No.10842594]

they were like reddit but with avatars and signatures. and instead of karma you had post counts. and instead of being on one website, they were spread out and smaller. Overall, they were much better communities. You had to have a lot of accounts for basic things though e.g. forum tech support for a game

[Anonymous No.10842610]

i was a shitposter since the mid 90s but for video games specifically i never used anything but gamefaqs, and i didnt post that much anyway. those boards now dont even look that much different than they did in ~2000, but thats quite a rare exception. the internet truly was a magical place back then though. completely seaparte from real life and no modern day censorship, plus the only people really using it were autists and weirdos.

[Anonymous No.10842638]

>>10842561
they werent much different from /vr/, just slower and with a more strict moderation.

[Anonymous No.10842642]

>>10842561
Visit neogaf, resetera, and insert credit. The Gaming Age forums were a big hub for discussion and they spawned neogaf and resetera. Insert Credit was where people interested in imports and what became the indie scene hung out there. It went through some changes but the forums are still there. Also the-nextlevel, shmups.com forums, and shoryuken are mostly intact or have archives available I think. GameFAQs forum archives also go way back to that era.

[Anonymous No.10842681]

>>10842561
Odyssey of Hyrule - good Legend of Zelda OOT news site, here is mirror: https://geocities . ws/wik25/~max/zelda64.htm
Planet Gamecube - Gamecube news
Cheatcc - lots of cheat codes
GameFAQs - boards are now controlled by leftists, very unfortunate
VGMusic - MIDI files for video game music that predates youtube https://www.vgmusic.com/
Pojo - this has more to do with Dragon Ball franchise but it was great back in the day https://www.pojo.com/dragonball/

[Anonymous No.10842825]

>>10842561
GameFAQs was kind of hard to get into in the early days since you had to use an ISP-based email account to sign up, and they didn't allow all ISP emails. But this was at a time when at least 50% of gaming sites had complete bullshit info and fake cheat codes, so just the fact that account creation was limited made it feel more legit and that's pretty much what it ended up being. I remember reading the forums for like a year before I could finally make an account there. I was super happy when I finally got to join in on the discussions.
I think people were a lot nicer on gaming forums in the early to mid-2000s. There were a lot of things that still felt new and exciting then that have become mundane now, and people tended to focus on the exciting and positive things. Also the gamefaqs subforums for retro games were all still fairly active, so pretty much any game you could imagine usually still had active discussions, which is no longer the case.

[Anonymous No.10842831]

I remember that one BBS that was advertised in-game at the Chao kindergarten in SA:2B was eventually shut down because the kids were too rowdy and the board software was too primitive to allow actual moderation

[Anonymous No.10842832]

>>10842681
>GameFAQs - boards are now controlled by leftists, very unfortunate

yeah, it is really sad. Gamefaqs used to be pre-4chan without images (automatically purged threads, LUE being pre-/b/, etc).

[Anonymous No.10842883]

>>10842832
I want to blame the shitty and inconsistent moderation system, but really it comes down to the site being bought by CBSi (or whosoever pwns them now). Once that happened, they had to clamp down on wrongthink because the owners don't want to risk being associated with anything non-mainstream. There's literally no way it gets better unless it falls into the hands of a private owner somehow, and that's not going to happen.

[Anonymous No.10842889]

>>10842883
how the hell did "misgendering" become a mainstream issue

[Anonymous No.10842907]

>>10842889
I actually told a lady, “did you just assume my gender?” when she called me sir (I’m in my 40s and look like the stereotypical bald white dad with glasses) and she got scared. I had to let her know that I was just joking because her eyes got big and she looked afraid.

[Anonymous No.10842925]

>>10842889
Jews.

[Anonymous No.10842934]

>>10842561
it was like /vr/ but with less posting about the you-know-whats

[Anonymous No.10842974]

>>10842561
The experience was pretty much the same. Replace "zoomer" with "millennial" and "tidepod" with "avocado toast" and you're basically there. The rest of the stupid was nearly identical.

[Anonymous No.10842998]

>>10842561
I logged into my gamefaqs account for the first time in like 15 years around 6 months ago. It was absolutely wild going back and seeing the stupid shit I was posting as a 16 year old lol. Spent most of my time on the Metal Gear solid boards.

[Anonymous No.10843020]

>>10842561
Since you posted the FF11 website, maybe you'd appreciate the PSO website too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081210194620/http://www2.sega.com/gamesite/pso3card/content.html

[Anonymous No.10843042]

>>10842561
It was pretty awesome. The thing about modern social media is it tries to mash everyone together in one mediocre mush pile.
Forums would compete with each other and each one had its own personality and focus. So for an MMO one might be where the PvPers tend to hang out and have more of a shit-talking culture and the other might be where the PvErs hang out and demand you be nice to everyone. So you could pick the forum that you enjoyed most. They also had less people. You would get to know other posters. In modern social media everyone is an anonymous jackass, even on sites like Facebook that use your real name/picture.
Forums vs Modern social media almost mirrors dedicated servers vs matchmaking. If you were lucky enough to experience TF2 in its prime it is kind of like that atmosphere. See pic if you need a refresher.

[Anonymous No.10843052]

>>10842580
>the big thing that sucked was forum oldfags/mods/admins constantly sucking each other off and basically getting anyone banned for the smallest offense
It's like a proto r*ddit. Thankfully none of the forums I were on were that bad; Nobody got in trouble if they stayed reasonably on topic (and there were off topic boards for anything unrelated to the main topic of the sites) or illegal. I guess there were a few trolls here and there that got banned but literally nobody wanted them there anyway.

[Anonymous No.10843057]

>>10843042
I just can't take anyone who uses the word "toxic" seriously (unless they're talking about TMNT or other 90s cartoons)

[Anonymous No.10843062]

>>10843057
What if they're talking about toxic waste dumps?

[Anonymous No.10843090]

>>10843042
>You would get to know other posters.
This is what I miss most about old internet. I remember when people would even post stuff like "Where's [person]???" if a regular didn't post for half a day. Enter a chat room and get dozens of hug and grin emojis from people happy to see you. It was all just so comfy, even the trolling and being trolled. No one knows anyone anymore.

[Anonymous No.10843096]

>>10842638
>strict moderation
Depended heavily on the board. I would say standards of civility were higher than here and it was common to punish blatant trolling, but the libprogs hadn't infiltrated mod positions everywhere yet so you could usually speak your mind and debate whatever you wanted so long as it was on-topic. Extreme bigotry was usually not tolerated but there also wasn't such hypersensitivity about it that basically began killing off all interesting discussions on the internet during the 2010s. 4chan cries about the 2016 US election but /v/ had been getting refugees from the increasingly censorius and intolerant web for years already.

[Anonymous No.10843106]

>>10843096
/v/ was on life support by 2010 and functionally dead by 2012, 2016 was just the nail in the coffin

can't wait until later this year (although weirdly enough it feels like even normalfags largely don't give a shit about politics anymore, it's like everyone is checked out of society in general)

[Anonymous No.10843145]

who here /vbulletin/

[Anonymous No.10843154]

>>10843106
I was here as early as 2006, but I was underage banned and only posted on /b/, never went on /v/ back then. I found 4chan from an rpg maker 2k3 forum. Good times. I miss the old days.

[Anonymous No.10843189]

>>10842561
It's kind of weird, I've been on 4chan so long I can hardly remember the time before anonymous posting wasn't the norm. I guess think of 4chan if every poster was a tripfag with their own personality instead of co-opted board culture in how to conduct yourself. There would be a few very prominent posters who would have posting quirks and personalities that took on a life of their own and were often overlooked even if it caused problems. These people would seemingly be in every thread with strong personal opinions on many things and a lot of users would just nod their head in agreement with whatever they posted, which was one of the things that drew me to 4chan in the first place.

A good example was a Final Fantasy forum I was on. The forum had been going for some time and had already developed and established group of posters with a few very active ones like I described above. Most of the time, threads on the site were created for one of three topics: Either someone was looking for mechanical advice on a game, wanted to discuss peoples' opinions on game related discussion, or wanted to post their OC fanfiction for others to read. I usually frequented the former two, although as I got older and took up tabletop RPGs, I participated in the latter as well.

In opinion threads, the OP would often state their own opinion and board members would chime in on their own which would occur for a while. What I saw occurring usually was as soon as major community member would post, the entire rest of the thread would shift their opinions to reinforce theirs. Discussion was futile after this point, not in the same sense as /v/ attempting to discuss something popular where bad actors will dissent for the sake of dissent, but because you would be shouted down for offering anything to the contrary to a celebrity's post. It seemed like the site would always seek consensus in this manner, the direction decided by a single poster and backed up by everyone else.

[Anonymous No.10843261]

>>10843189
You would think mechanical discussion would be exempt from this, since you're discussing empirical data that has a clear right and wrong answer, but even mechanics are exempt from being warped by celebrity posters. I remember once explaining in detail how an ability in Final Fantasy Tactics worked to another user who made a thread about it. I posted how its trigger rate was based on the Brave value of the unit, how its damage was calculated, and how in practical terms you would see better results with it by doing the following things. Around the same time, another popular user posted as well with a more simple and incorrect explanation of the matter, which garnered more attention than my post.

A little annoyed, I addressed the user's post and pointed out errors in it. Almost immediately other users moved to condescend to me that I should accept the popular user's post as correct since their high activity on the forum was proof of their knowledgeable nature and I myself was barely active, making only a post or two per day on average. This was then hammered home by the person I quoted writing a post saying that they have extensive experience in the game and are sure this is how it works based on numerous playthroughs of the game. In just a single post, this user declared themselves a foremost expert on the game and stated their their opinion was gospel on the matter while simultaneously acknowledging it as an opinion, not a statement of fact.

By this point, I was furious and didn't even know why. I had personally tested and proved to myself this was how the game ran and was still being besmirched by some public personalty who was spouting falsehood to be taken by the masses as truth. So I dragged out my Playstation and with a cheap digital camera, I took photos of tests and variables to conclusively prove that I was correct beyond a doubt. I made several posts in a row, going as far as to provide memory locations in gameshark to prove my point.

[Anonymous No.10843307]

>>10843189
It's kind of weird, how people blog on 4chan

[Anonymous No.10843334]

>>10843261
After six long posts made over the course of an hour, I sat back in my chair, satisfied that I had chronicled the exact nature of the support ability we were talking about to a point where my position was irrefutable and unassailable. And for several hours, the thread was silent, with not another post being made. I had achieved victory; I had WON that argument. I had climbed the highest mountain and punched the face of god, showing everyone that these people to be charlatans, mere impostors of true fans who actually know the games they talk about. I got me another coke out of the fridge and booted up Team Fortress Classic beaming with confidence and ready to finish my night with a few rounds of capture the flag on Well.

When I got done around 10 and was settling down for school the next day, I hopped back on the forum to check again if my opponent, my adversary had conceded defeat, certain that he had seen the error of his ways and would've given up the fight.

Instead, I was greeted to having my posts removed from the thread and a warning issued for spamming. A DM was sent to me by the moderation team explaining that I had violated the rules of the site and would face a one week ban on posting as consequence for my actions, after which I would need to appeal the ban with the moderation team.

That was probably the turning point when I gave up community forums entirely and started sticking to larger, more impartial forums. It was significantly harder to get banned from an official video game forum and the moderators' presence curbed celebrity posters by being able to trump their status with their own. Their impartiality was a huge boon against combating hiveminds since they would often evaluate posts on their own and wouldn't take heavy handed action based on their personal feelings.

[Anonymous No.10843345]

>>10842610
It's strange to actually hear the GCN being referred to as "Dolphin."

[Anonymous No.10843387]

Imagine 4chan but slightly bit tamer, not anonymous and dedicated to games/one game in particular. It was an age before "Accept me or I can END YOU!", so there was a lot of tough love stuff.
All the remaining forums, save for maybe RPGcodex; are basically resetera clones, full of random gay zoomers because they like "the old internet aesthetic, twitter told me about it!", I've witnessed one forum I like turn into this.

[Anonymous No.10843423]

>>10842832
GameFAQs just reposts other peoples work. It used to be derived from usenet, then blogs. Now I am guessing people post directly to Game FAQs? I don't care, the last thing I would do there is read forum comments.

[Anonymous No.10843467]

>>10842561
We typed in webpages and waited for the page to load. We got lucky if there were links for more of what we were looking for instead of if there were tons of images/mov files, because that would take forever.
We made usernames, cropped images for avatars and signatures and were tasked to actually enjoy and invest in the games we were discussing. There weren't women.

.t late 90s

[Anonymous No.10843471]

>>10843062

[Anonymous No.10843535]

>>10843090
This. I joined a community a year ago, figured I’d dip my toes into it again. Spent a half year in there, helped others, was friendly, people seemed to find my comments funny. Literally no one gave a hoot when something happened to me. It’s as if I was never even there.

Back when I used old forums, they had found my phone number and left me voice mails wishing me well. I still have those calls. Also would exchange handwritten letters, etc. I also noticed though myself that when I’d read Reddit, I don’t even look at the usernames, since there are so many. I think old forums worked better because there would be only maybe 20-40 heavy posters, and perhaps four pages of comments per topic or less. And people were happy to talk with people who shared similar interests because you couldn’t really find that anywhere else.

[Anonymous No.10843718]

>>10843189
>>10843261
>>10843334
Yeah, a big problem I always had with GameFAQs forums was that many debates would devolve into 'I've been here longer than you', and newcomers who were factually correct would get shouted down by longtime regulars who had no idea what the fuck they were talking about.
Funnily enough, if the game in question had its own separate fan website, you would see the same regulars from GameFAQs on its forum, but they're usually the joke of the forum because they can't auto win arguments by flouting their 4k karma from logging on every day for the past ten years.

[Anonymous No.10843742]

>>10842561
Information was a lot more scattered by then. Like take the Resident Evil communities, plural. You had one website specialized in prerelease/development material, but it was in French. You had a forum specialized about modding the games and also had lots of knowledge regarding hidden/unused content left in the games. You had a website specialized in old interviews, but it was in Spanish. You had another site specialized in concept art, but behind log-in and they put their watermark on the images.

And rather than putting their efforts in common, they'd compete against each others, it was like "who's the biggest fan", "who is able to find the best unknown information and put his name on it" etc and then eventually the places die and the information is lost, if it was even available to you to begin with.
Centralized wikis certainly have their flaws but overall they're much better for information sharing. I've uploaded a ton of Resident Evil info on TCRF, that I digged up myself, and that I left anonymously. If you ask those old community members they'll tell you they've know this for 15 years. Yeah, they have, the 12 of them. And they'd rather it stays that way.