Video games are mourning the old, weird, clunky Internet

Videoverse, a visual novel that follows the final days of the online social network for a fictional gaming system in 2003. — Kinmoku/The New York Times

Surfing the Web in the 1990s and early 2000s was a slower endeavour, and fewer people had access to the technology.

But it is still easy to reminisce about the days when it felt like a public marketplace, with high odds that someone out there had made a blog or GeoCities site about the niche topic you found interesting.