From Neopets to Multiply, the internet in the ’00s and the early 2010s was such a foreign land. It was a simple time where surfing the web meant having to keep your siblings away from the telephone unless you want to get disconnected from your dial-up connection. The younger Gen Z Filipinos may have never experienced that problem before, but for those bordering on being zillennials, this is all too familiar.
Despite those hiccups, the internet gods served us with such great content. Consider us #blessed to witness these websites when they were at their peak. Sure, we’re pretty happy today browsing through websites like Youtube and Reddit. But there was something about the low-res graphics and poor UI from websites of yesteryear that make us want to jump on a time machine ASAP.
Get your nostalgia goggles on because we are going on a trip down memory lane. Here are five websites from Gen Z Filipinos’ childhood that you may have forgotten about.
Just typing down the name of this virtual pet website makes we want to sign-in right now to grab some free omelette! If you’re not aware, Neopets has been around since 1997 and allows you to create or adopt pets of different species. There is really no objective to it; it’s basically Tamagotchi on steroids.
As far as I know, no virtual pet website has ever come close to matching the quality of Neopets. It had a lot of Flash games where you could earn money (called Neopoints), numerous worlds you could explore, a stock market, message boards, plots, shops, quests, and way more! Neopets is still a thing nowadays but it was never to capitalize on its momentum once Viacom acquired it.
Now it’s filled with microtransactions to make your pet look prettier, and it just hasn’t been the same. Here’s a suggestion to make the website relevant again: develop a Neopets mobile app now!
As a guy who grew up in a household that just loved sticking to gender roles, I was never really able to appreciate what My Scene’s everythinggirl.com had to offer. But I do remember watching my sisters play this on our shared computer a lot.
It was basically the ultimate dress-up game that every child loved because everything was drawn beautifully. From having your nails done and finding that perfect shade of lipstick for your female character, it was also a good way to release one’s inner creativity. When you’re done with the shopping spree part, you can even design your own room too.
Would it hold up to today’s standards? We don’t know. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re never gonna know the answer because Mattel has discontinued the website. If a reboot is happening though, it would probably need to cater to other standards of beauty to stand a chance.
But we have some good news: Babe.net has some old links from My Scene which you can access if you suddenly get the urge to play them again.
We are cheating a bit with this entry because Disney is pretty much still alive and kicking. But take a look at what the games section for the local Disney Channel website has to offer. It’s a travesty!
Gen Z Filipinos who were on the internet played such iconic games on Disney’s website like the sandwich-stacking game from Lilo & Stitch, and the Suite Life game where you had to run away from Mr. Moseby. A lot of time was also spent playing That’s So Raven games until bedtime. There was just a lot of fun mini-games to play in the website that ate up so much of our time.
So what the hell happened from the 2000’s to now where everything is so… basic. Has Disney just embraced their role as a greedy corporate machine and plan to suck out the fun in every child who enters their website?
Look, I totally get that children are now playing Disney games in their tablets, but I mean look at that user interface. There is no heart to it.
In any case, we can always access the links to older Disney games thanks to Babe.net. What a shame.
Y8.com is home to some of our favorite silly internet games and we’re here to remind you that it still exists! I remember wasting my free time playing all 23912486 versions of the Idiot Test and The Impossible Quiz. And don’t even get me started on all those escape room games.
When online multiplayer wasn’t super huge back then, some of us would get together on one computer to play games that were pretty decent knock-offs of legit video games. That usually meant Player 1 had to occupy the WASD part of the keyboard while Player 2 was in control of the arrow buttons.
There were a lot of similar websites that had a huge collection of Flash games, but Y8 was probably the most popular one for Gen Z Filipinos. Relative to the other websites listed here which have died or become a shell of themselves, Y8 is still going strong.
What’s great is that the website still looks and feels like how it did before but still manages to keep up with the times due to its clean modern design.
While millennials had Friendster as their “stepping stone” to the world of social media, Gen Z Filipinos relied on Multiply. Before the Philippines had caught whiff of Facebook, we all had Multiply accounts. Here, we were able to share experiences, photos, videos, and reviews through a blog of our own.
It also had traditional features of modern social media sites like a news feed that shows you all the activity your friends are up to.
In a nutshell, it was a social media site mixed with blogging which was actually a pretty neat idea at the time. But with the advent of Facebook status updates and micro-blogging through Twitter, Multiply failed to be purposeful.
I do have a lot of memories creating numerous posts in that website, and it’s actually kind of sad to see that it just died. After a quick Google search, I discoverd that the company officially filed for bankruptcy back in 2017. But for those of us who were lucky enough to really get into Multiply, it will forever live in our hearts.
Speaking of nostalgia and growing up, have you read our list of 11 signs that you grew up with Filipino parents? Warning: it may be too real. Never miss out on anything by following us @ZoomersCornerPH on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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