Ancient Web: Crono and Dekar Kept a 1997 RPG Fansite Development Diary

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A 1990s RPG fan site usually kept a What's New page. Crono & Dekar's RPG Homepage went further: the webmaster wrote an elaborate history of how the entire site grew.

Read the surviving site history.

The writer dates the original GeoCities page to approximately April 19, 1997. It began with material for Final Fantasy III (the US numbering), Chrono Trigger, Lufia II, Secret of Evermore, EarthBound and Super Mario RPG. Each game initially received only pictures, music and a review, aside from an early Chrono Trigger quotes collection.

The history explains that the creator first accidentally registered the wrong GeoCities room, 2856, then made the 2857 homepage that became the fan community's address. It includes the delightfully 1990s admission that free web hosting seemed almost too good to be true.

A webring and a fan-fiction mystery

On May 4, 1997, the webmaster created the Crono & Dekar RPG Webring. Members initially had to paste navigation code onto their homepages manually. The first participating sites included Tiga's Homepage and The Arris Dome, a Chrono Trigger fan site. The webmaster recalls regularly adding members and repairing links.

The content expanded in similarly homegrown ways. In a hotel, the author drafted a continuation story about Frog from Chrono Trigger. It grew into a sequence of fan-fiction installments involving other characters. A mystery about a woman's identity produced actual reader letters, so the writer launched a July contest in which entrants could guess the answer and join a Hall of Fame.

By August the site had polls, essays on why the Nintendo 64 lacked RPGs, and a humor section nourished by reader submissions. It also acquired an email update list, an IRC chat-room experiment and multiple MIDI background themes. The webmaster describes removing extra music from the unframed homepage because the files took too long to load.

The page even preserves its own design history: a move from layouts intended for 640 × 480 monitors to 800 × 600, a revision of webring logos and complaints that the original background music restarted whenever a frame loaded.

A 2003 academic bibliography later cited a 1999 Crono & Dekar editorial, an unusual trace of the independent fan site's circulation.

Most old webmasters never recorded their trial-and-error in this much detail. This one accidentally left a manual for understanding how hobbyist gaming communities were constructed.

Explore the full 1997–1999 behind-the-scenes account.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.