Happy birthday to Balamb Garden!
I originally created this site (or started creating it, at least) on 20 March 2024. I'm posting this page on 20 March 2025. I can't believe it's been a year already!
I actually have the moment I conceived this site idea on record! On 15 March 2024, I posted an entry to my blog about ways the Internet had changed over the years. Actually, I'll reproduce what I said here; this feels like an appropriate place to be nostalgic about the old web!
I was recently looking at Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite!, Zarla's Pokémon website, which she's kept online since the late 1990s. This was my favourite place on the Internet when I was twelve years old, and it's the website that first inspired me to write fanfiction of my own. I'm glad it's still around, a little piece of a different time. (There's an essay on the NPLU itself about the time the website was born into, and how things have changed.)
Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
- Personal websites! This is the most obvious change. Back at the turn of the millennium, there were countless little websites people of all ages had created about whatever they were passionate about. (Remember character shrines?) When I first discovered fanfiction, it was on the author's personal Pokémon website.
In the present day, it's rare to find a personal space someone's carved out on the Internet; people only have some sort of personal existence on a handful of social media websites, and any individual website you might find probably belongs to a company. Neocities is a present-day option for personal website hosting, though, and I know a handful of you have websites of your own, which is pretty cool!
- In the first few years of the 2000s, one of the biggest forms of online social interaction was through forums. The first place I interacted with others online was on a fan forum for Pokémorphs, a series of Pokémon/Animorphs crossover fics by rache01, and later I moderated an EZBoard called Final Fantasy Fanatics. In a way, Reddit is a relic of this era. I suppose Discord has its similarities - here are a bunch of small spaces for interaction with a group of specific people; pick your favourite - but the instant messaging and the way servers are closed off from the outside world means it has a very different feel.
- There was a time when every website had its own guestbook for people to leave messages. As a kid, I used to go onto anti-Pokémon websites, seek out the guestbook and write stories about the website owner being attacked by Pokémon. I was very cool.
And, if you entered your email address with your guestbook message, your email address was just publicly available? I remember mentioning in a guestbook message that I didn't like Eiko of Final Fantasy IX, and months later I got an email from a stranger that just said, 'If you hate Eiko, I hate YOU!' (If I recall correctly, I emailed back going 'sorry, maybe I was unfair to her' and got a response saying 'Apology accepted ^_^', so that particular online conflict resolved surprisingly well.)
- For a while, a lot of websites had their own chatrooms as well, if you wanted to talk to a total stranger who just happened to be looking at this Pokémon website at the same time as you.
- One particular website style I was fond of was 'weird little mazelike websites that you explore as if you're exploring a physical space'. Harry Potter websites were often set up as 'you're exploring Hogwarts', sometimes complete with 'common room' pages you had to give a password to enter. (Sometimes you could cheat and find the password in the page source. I always felt very smart when I managed this.)
The Nameless Forest was a choose-your-own-adventure-style website I used to wander around all the time; it's no longer online, sadly, but at least some of it is preserved by the Internet Archive. There were riddles you could solve to reach secret pages; there were hidden paths you could only find if you scrolled down far enough or clicked on the correct image; sometimes you'd encounter weird fantasy creatures, and you could 'adopt' them, which basically just meant putting their image on your own website. Adoptables, come to think of it, are another relic of the old web.
- Do you remember how people's websites used to have placeholder sections labelled 'under construction', with little GIFs of construction workers? It seemed like a weird tradition - you could just put the page up once it's done! - but I suppose it was a way to convey 'hey, there might be more on this website later; come back at some point!' when there was no easy way to announce updates to a wide audience.
- A lot of sites used the same little GIFs, come to think of it. If you were into Pokémon, you'd see the same tiny animated Pokémon sprites recurring across countless different websites. If you liked Final Fantasy VIII, there were some adorable little pixel animations of the cast that kept cropping up here and there. Where did they all come from? Did all the websites just steal them from each other? Someone must have made them in the first place.
Oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
Anyway, as I was saying, I posted the above ramblings about the old Internet to my blog!
I received a handful of comments, one of which included the line, 'I keep meaning to do something with my Neocities account, and then I don't.' I responded to this comment on 20 March:
I keep thinking 'I should get a Neocities account!' and then '...but what would I do with it?' A shrine to Squall Leonhart? I don't have much in the way of graphic design skills, and I rocket so quickly between fandoms that it's hard to pin down a good focus for a website; I'm more suited to... well, a blog, which is why I'm still here after all these years.
Maybe a site structured as 'you're exploring Balamb Garden and uncovering all my Final Fantasy VIII meta and fanfiction in the process' could be fun. (You could go to the library for the fanfiction! That would be cute.) It would be a big project, though; I'm not sure I'm capable!
I couldn't stop thinking about this idea once I'd had it. I'd even managed to track down those little GIFs of the Final Fantasy VIII characters that were everywhere on the old web, so, if I did make a Balamb Garden website, I could make it feel authentically early-2000s!
I signed up for Neocities forty minutes later and spent the next week feverishly constructing the main sections of the site. And that's how Balamb Garden came to be!
I've really enjoyed having this website! It feels good to have a place to put all my many thoughts about Final Fantasy VIII. I'm always happy to talk about this game, and now I can talk about it as much as I like.
Thank you so much for visiting Balamb Garden. I really appreciate every visit, every follow on Neocities, every kind word on the guestbook. A lot of love and enthusiasm has gone into this place, and it's great to know people enjoy the results!