This made me cry. Something about the phrase “I’d give anything to sit at that old, chunky desktop again” hit me hard. I guess I just really miss the way things used to be.
The ending of this made me cry. Not to get personal or nothing, but my childhood was pretty horrific, all things considered. Games (either free sites like classic runescape, poptropica, gaia online or console games, as the only place I could play mmos were after school because my home didn't have internet for the longest time) were kind of an escape from that for me as a kid. I can't reverse time, reclaim a childhood stolen from me. In some ways going to these dead sites is like visiting a grave of an old friend who helped you so much. There's melancholy in it, sadness. I can't regain my first desktop, an old chunky Windows ME without an internet card. It's corpse lines a dump somewhere alongside many other 90s-00s computers. But it, alongside all those virtual worlds, live on in memory. There's something beautiful in that, I think.
god i feel this. old games felt like a magical world and a warm hug and escape from rough childhood. i hope things are easier for you now than they were then stranger 🫂
I'm a returning wizard101 player and it's still active! Usually weekends are the busiest and the top 3 realms will be crowded or full :) They're working on Arc 1 revamp (which is wizard city to dragonspyre) I'm hoping this helps old players to return to their favorite childhood game. annnnd that maybe KL will eventually make wizard city and krok free. I believe with msp, usa is def the most active server however it's mainly on forums and forums has always been a shitshow lol
I love this video, I am an active player on Wizard101, started playing in 5th grade, I'm 25 now! You were in the tutorial realm, which pretty much no one uses. The top busy realms are always popin if you ever wanna get on again! ❤😊
god this hit hard. i get in these nostalgic periods too where i go searching through my memories or any old account i can find for scraps of childhood and nostalgia. i have so many fond memories of mmos and especially with the commodification of social media... theres no real 'fun' sites to hang out with or meet new people on anymore. everything has become so mainstream and any fun game or etc is boxed into 'aesthetics' and for a purpose or a social media presence etc. i miss old internet so much as chaotic as it is... there are fanmade projects remaking moshi monsters, club penguin, and toontown though! toontown especially is pretty active i think.
this is why im so glad neopets still has such a dedicated niche fanbase (and why i feel annoyed when people complain about them adding new OPTIONAL paid features lol)
Hi Salem! I'm a little older than you, so I don't know some of these games. But some of these MMOs really bled into real life. One of my friends met her husband on World of Warcraft!
I played a really obscure MMO called Gopets that has literally nothing about it left other than a few videos ppl took when the servers were shut down. The owner of the game sold it to Zynga, the company that did farmville i think, and i’ve been holding on to the hope they’d bring it back some day
I was never able to play those because that house couldn’t get internet… still can’t. We lived in the forest area in the rural outskirts of the city we lived in. We couldn’t even get pizza delivery out there. That road is dangerous for people who aren’t very familiar with it anyways. But now that childhood wonder is dead and playing those games won’t fill the void in my heart
I loved Animal Jam as a kid, it’s too bad I can’t access my old account anymore due to that one massive data breach a few years ago. It was my top favourite virtual world, alongside ROBLOX if you can count that (though that’s more of a games platform). Trying to start over in AJ Classic or the Play Wild version just isn’t the same. On the topic of ROBLOX actually, there are so many old games from a decade ago I wish I could return to but can’t for a myriad of reasons - usually because either the game owners or ROBLOX took it down. Seeing those closed games, alongside old games that are still available but dead remind me a lot of dead virtual worlds. I’ll always cherish those dumb fun memories I had with other ROBLOX players in the myriad of roleplaying games I’ve played throughout the years though.
Wizards ceo and staff talk bout new content via twitch nowadays they have 2 new packs of stuff releasing this year, a dungeon that was just release, some carnival themed thing coming soon, and they’re sister game who was previously abandoned is slowly being revived by them getting new content as well
I used to play OurWorld hard, and the last time I logged in it was empty and sad like you showed in other mmos. They also dont have hardly as many games as they used to have. I gotta see if moshi monsters rewritten is still up tho. Club penguin rewritten got shut down because of disney sending a cease and desist letter to the people making it :((
Thank you so much for this video, Salem!!! You managed to put into words what I've been feeling for the past 2 years or so; that bittersweet feeling we can't quite name while trying to revisit the games I loved. I miss those times...
You were in a tutorial world for Wizard it’s not dead I go on maybe every couple of months bc I can’t always afford membership and let me say I see bout 100-200 players in each separate section of each world a day when I’m playing
I'm mad they deleted my original webkinz account. I had like 20 pets on there. I kept a few of the plushies that I consider rare but thats all I have now.
Logging into dead mmos is a happy-sad experience. A lot of us had great childhoods in those games, and even though everything is the same we can’t go back in time to relieve those experiences, they’re just memories now