Ancient Web: Jay Tholen Recovered His Teenage Klik Games

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

One of the cruelest things a teenage game developer can do to a future historian is delete everything whenever the next project looks better.

Read Jay Tholen's teenage game-development memoir

Jay Tholen, later associated with games including Hypnospace Outlaw and Dropsy, put together a long, illustrated account of making games and websites between roughly 1999 and 2004. This is a retrospective written later, not an untouched 2002 homepage. Its importance lies in recovering early source material, screenshots, old comments, and a culture that existed across dozens of personal sites and small forums.

The catalyst was The Games Factory, Clickteam's visual game-making tool. Tholen describes getting a home PC in 1997, learning pixel art with Microsoft Paint, and obtaining dial-up Internet access in late 1999. By 2001 he had an archived personal website offering game downloads and graphics libraries.

The games had audiences before they had polish

The memoir supplies a miniature release catalogue: GAGE in August 2001; The Elegy in January 2002; Hover Wars and its sequel in April 2002; Mr. Grinman the Putrid Bandit in June; and Cyathus Abandonware in November 2003.

Screenshots and recovered videos show games assembled from painted sprites, improvised collision rules, rough movement code, borrowed influences, and sometimes ill-advised humor. Tholen recalls deleting early work after negative reactions. Some projects survived only because others saved copies; he credits Joshtek's Kliktopia archive with preserving games that might have vanished.

The piece also covers #K&P IRC, Clickteam discussion forums, The Daily Click, and Create-Games profiles. These spaces were not merely places to advertise finished games. They were where a teenager asked questions, met collaborators, argued over game engines, and learned what other amateur creators expected.

Tholen is not trying to make his younger self look consistently wise. He quotes hostile reviews, acknowledges his own embarrassing replies, and points out unfinished games that were advertised more confidently than they deserved. That candor makes the story a useful primary account of Internet adolescence.

The interactive examples are not guaranteed to run on every modern computer, but the surviving media, names, dates, and linked archives let readers reconstruct the trajectory of a future professional creator while he was still an awkward kid with a personal website.

Explore the full 2001–2003 gameography and its links to preserved games.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.