Ancient Web: Jesse Smith's World of Nintendo Kept Its 1996 Growth Diary

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Jesse Smith's Nintendo fansite is one of those rare old websites that preserved not just the hobby but the webmaster's running account of how the hobby took over his life.

Visit the Unofficial World of Nintendo.

The web page history begins in January 1996, when Smith first explored the Internet and looked for Nintendo sites covering multiple systems. On June 13, 1996, he opened a free GeoCities page in SiliconValley/Park/1026, beginning with a handful of links and big plans for codes, passwords, tips and FAQs.

The surviving homepage still carries a visitor counter labelled with that June 1996 date. It also admits that updates ended long ago and says the site is now maintained for nostalgia and historical interest.

The growth of a teenage empire

Smith's chronology documents the ordinary fragility of early web publishing. In January 1997, he says the GeoCities page was erased by an online scam, forcing him to start again at a different address. By February he had his own domain, while in May he added more than fifty message boards.

His reported traffic numbers are striking: according to his own record, the site reached 100,000 visitors by February 1997, passed 941,000 total visits in its first two years, and briefly drew more than ten thousand visitors in a day in January 1999. These are contemporaneous webmaster counter claims, not independently audited audience figures. The diary nevertheless shows a specific and understandable measure of ambition: hits, email, pages created, and daily returning readers.

The same history says the collection expanded from roughly a thousand HTML files at the start of 1998 to more than 5,700 by that year's end. One contest allegedly generated around 1,500 emails over three days. By 2000 Smith was worrying about Y2K problems in his message boards, which showed the year as 19100.

The tips-and-codes directory survives, divided among NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, Virtual Boy, and several cheat systems. Other indexes point to game endings, instruction manuals, reviews, and early Java games.

Smith's historical account contains enthusiastic punctuation and occasional misspellings, with no sign that he later polished it into a corporate success story. Those rough edges are invaluable. He recorded an expanding fan community while he was still building it.

Read the original World of Nintendo site history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.