Last week’s post about early 2000s video game websites reminded me of this one. It has a few hallmarks of that era of gaming websites, like an image background and images for borders around the content. The markup is pretty retro, too: it uses a <frameset> and frames.
I’m not really sure when the site was made, but it was probably 2006. archive.org’s first snapshot is January, 2007.
When Epic removed all Unreal titles from download stores, they mentioned xmpcommunity.com in their blog post. So this is now like an officially sanctioned way of playing the game.
They also mentioned oldunreal.com for getting the original Unreal game to run. That’s another fairly retro looking site, although they did change from handwritten HTML pages to a CMS a few years ago. Still has some “old internet” elements to it, though, like a page about netiquette. Now there’s a classic internet term. And page about netiquette with a cookie banner on it? That’s like the duality of the web right there. That page is a metaphor for… something. I don’t know what. But it is.