01
All Your Base Are Belong to Us
A disastrously translated game line escaped its cutscene and took over the early web.
Archive score98
Internet archive / 2000
Internet moments from 2000
Backdrop
The Internet in 2000
Year reference
Y2K.govA networked world braced for the date change.
Source: President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion- The dot-com boom was collapsing, but forums, Flash sites, and peer-to-peer sharing were teaching people that the web had its own strange culture.
- Search, message boards, and home pages made remix jokes easy to discover and pass along.
Archive order
Archive picks
02
Homestar Runner
An armless athlete, a masked bully, and a pile of non sequiturs turned one Flash site into an early-web comedy universe.
Archive score96
03
More Cowbell
Christopher Walken wanted one thing from a fictional 1976 studio session: more cowbell.
Archive score96
04
REJECTED
A talking banana, an oversized spoon, and a collapsing cartoon universe made nine minutes of handmade nonsense feel infinitely quotable.
Archive score95
05
Happy Tree Friends
Cute forest animals and sudden graphic cartoon violence made a Flash series into an early-web staple.
Archive score91
06
3 Drunk Flies
Three flies, one beer can, and a frog who did not volunteer for the bit.
Archive score86
07
Genryu’s Blade
Nelson Hurst’s action short shows the hand-drawn energy of independent Flash animation at the turn of the web.
Archive score84
08
Bob and George #1: “Megaman Helps Out, Part I”
Mega Man sprites became the cast of a webcomic whose first gag was simply that the comic was not ready yet.
Archive score83
09
The Newgrounds Flash Portal
A submission page gave bedroom animators a place to publish, be rated, and become somebody’s new shared link.
Archive score82
010
The Terrible Secret of Space
Two space robots promise protection from the universe’s worst secret, mostly by pushing people down stairs.
Archive score78
011
The Pygmy Shrew
A mock nature documentary gave a tiny shrew an absurdly melodramatic life story.
Archive score78