Revisiting the first video game websites from the dark ages

In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad’s Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs – but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled “SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read.” There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then – and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.

Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She’d been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. “[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that’s saying a lot,” she says. “So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass.”

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Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. “I definitely wasn’t even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing,” she says on a Zoom call. “I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me – didn’t know back then that it was called copy – and put it all together.” For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan’s face. “I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that’s all I had,” she laughs, pointing to the website’s splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she’s worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she’d unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. “I don’t even remember how much [Irrational] paid me,” she grins, “but it probably wasn’t very much.”