Battlegames is 27!

On 18th June 1998, those of you connected to the internet might have bumped into a bright and shiny new web page (we didn’t call them ‘sites’ back then) resembling the one seen above. Of course, at the time, it would have had the impressive dimensions of 640 x 480 pixels, tiny by today’s standards, but given that we were all sitting next to squealing modems connected to dodgy telephone landlines and highly pixellated screens, it would still have required patience as those graphics downloaded.

Ah, the graphics: I was running a design agency at the time, lauded as being one of the cutting edge companies at the forefront of web design in the southern UK. I spent hours squishing those GIF and JPG images to reduce the number of Web ‘hex’ colours they used to the bare minimum, so that they would download as quickly as possible.

And in the centre of that page was an animated GIF, with the waving “COME INSIDE” flag getting gasps of admiration from the weberati. My business partner Andrew and I worked on it for days, combining the ‘trophy of arms’ image with the flag to get it just right.

Sadly, I don’t seem to have a screenshot of the very first home page (remember those?) from the launch day, and the one above was from the update in November of that year, by which time it had won one of those strange website awards that seemed so important to us at the time, but which nobody now remembers or cares about! And, as you can see, the ‘browser wars’ were prominent, as Netscape and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer locked horns to dominate the space. Oh, the hours wasted trying to make every site I built compatible with both – and then along came Firefox, Safari, Chrome and all the others to make the job even more impossible until we switched from HTML to CSS and other standards.

I have a lot of fond memories of those early days, when the ‘Net was still, relatively speaking, virgin territory and every time I built a website, it felt like putting the first footprints in newly fallen snow. And, in so many ways, it really was a pure and unsullied environment, full of potential and excited, chattering geeks wondering just what they could build in this new territory…

To round off this little trip down memory lane, here’s something else that I found lying around in my archives: a scan of the comic strip I made using coloured pencils in an idle moment back in, I believe, the mid-late 1980s, showing the origins of The Wars of the Faltenian Succession. Back then, the thinking was that Faltenland was actually more French in character – hence Fauterre. (Linguists might like the pun, with the word origins being faux terres – false lands. But my Germanic leanings won out on this occasion.)

Happy Waterloo Day!

Henry