Worlds Chat to Worlds Online

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The year is 1995. We’re well past the eighties at this point, and a lot of people (not all) have a computer in their homes. Some even have access to the internet. Installing Windows 95 consists of waiting two hours through prompts and low resolution demonstration videos (which, at this point, is lost media). But you’re in, nonetheless. Finally, you’re not staring at black screens and green text (my household never had Windows 3.1). Your desktop is awash with grey and faded blues, all in the generous resolution of 640x480.

This was me when I was just a child, barely 9 or 10 years old at the time. I remember I’d sit and watch my Dad just … installing Windows, messing with IRQ numbers, and testing out games. Games like Doom, Wolfenstein, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Whacky Wheels (I remember even later years in the 90s watching him play Quake multiplayer against a friend). It was definitely a different time. A time when Microsoft wasn’t developing spyware and software full of bloat and popups. A time of demo CDs and screeching modems. When the internet was the wild west, and, in the year of 1995, when Geocities had just launched.

It certainly was a big year. Windows 95, Geocities, and a 3D chat program I, admittedly, only had about a half hour of play time with (a kind of dark story having to do with a predatory stranger cut my experience short). That chat program being … Worlds Chat.

Released in April of 1995, this was the first ever three dimensional chat program. It was … the beginning of the metaverse, only three years after the term was coined in 1992’s Snowcrash. It definitely wasn’t 60 or even 30 fps, but it was the first way you could visually represent yourself online, and move about groups of people as they talked to each other. Of course, we sort of already had this, but in the form of IRC and Yahoo text chat in html coded rooms (much like the advanced way we chat now, via Discord and Matrix). But, this was different. You had an avatar. You could be someone else! (A concept that was, at least to me, still very alien)

Note: I don’t mean to over-explain what a chatroom is, but I do believe there are probably some out there who have never heard of the concept outside of Discord channels.

Generation Z and Alpha would liken the experience to VR Chat in 2024.

And, although it’s still running today (or I assume it’s still running, because I was able to download the software hardly two years ago), the company itself has, or at least now seems to have lost the vision. The concept of the early internet. The wonder years. When it was all still … good. Yeah, I don’t think the current corporate internet is good, in any way, shape, or form.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the company who runs the barely changed 90s 3D chat program, doesn’t mean what I think they mean, when they say:

“Worlds is now entering the third iteration of the metaverse – one where augmented reality (AR), cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have emerged as disruptive forces reshaping markets in music, gaming, sports, fine art collecting, and shopping.”

Surely I’m not reading this in 2024, nearly two years after the NFT bubble has popped with its lifeless body being pulled along the side of the road by theft algorithms that auto-gen fungible pictures ripped from the work of artists and illustrators all over the world. Surely we’re not talking about introducing crypto and blockchain tech into a 30 year old app, when every single iteration of a game that’s introduced these things has been:

• uninteresting
• a failure
• a scam

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re just using buzzwords that they think the average John might latch onto, and join their still sort of, kind of buzzing metaverse.

Oh, oh no they were completely serious about all of this, as depicted in this 2022 statement by the CFO. It’s no surprise they’ve seemingly gone completely silent since then.

I also have to comment on their company website, that legitimately looks like it was slapped together by an amateur using templates and stock photos in Wordpress.

If I were in-charge of Worlds Online, or Worlds Inc., whatever the hell they’re called now, this isn’t the “new direction” I’d be going in. You see … there’s a whole entire community online of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people who are all extremely dedicated to bringing back the old internet. Ditching corporate social media and websites entirely, or almost entirely. Building on code older than some of the people putting it together, in places like Neocities, and on forums that harken back to the classic age of the world wide web (see: Melonland).

And, of course, there are webrings! You know, those things we had on Geocities that connected us all together (you can see examples at the bottom of the homepage here) in a much more primitive way that you could … maybe compare to Myspace? Almost?

Oh, and there is a remake of Myspace, but as much as I enjoyed having a Myspace, I don’t really see any need for it when I have Mastodon (not technically a piece of software building on old internet ideas, but more one piece of software built around the idea that the internet should’ve stayed being owned by the people).

But, I’m rambling now.

If I were the owner of Worlds, Inc., this is what my mission would be. To … stay, exactly the way it was when it launched. To be a cornerstone of the old internet that refuses to die (much like the way Geocities did, but Yahoo has a history of bad decisions), just like the code many of us continue to write. Sure, maybe this website isn’t 100% a mirror image of what it would’ve been like to be on Geocities, but there are plenty out there. And, I don’t know, there are some things I like about modern web development.

I wanted to write this all, though, because, once again, the owner of a company destroys something beautiful in the name of profit … the enshitification of everything money touches. Some people might say I’m looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. But, I’m not! I’m wearing regular, normal glasses. The internet really was great back in the nineties. It wasn’t a slog. You didn’t doom-scroll. You weren’t bombarded with crisis after crisis and scarred for life by constant death and trauma, while vapid influencers flaunt their extravagant lives in front of you for the sake of engagement farming. No. All of that garbage was still just a twinkle in the eye of Jack McTwitter Guy.

And as each year moves forward I find myself grasping harder and harder to every piece of the old internet that I can. To keep a piece of my childhood, and some form of joy in this ever-increasing black hole that corporations have created. But that black hole doesn’t have to destroy us.

We can build together, here, and we can let them destroy themselves. Let the AI cannibalize itself. Let the algorithms collapse. It’ll be fine. The good internet still exists.