l+++ draft = ’true' title = “Gamequbed: Bringing an early 2000s Nintendo fansite back to life” date = “2026-07-13” description = “Looking back on the restoration of Gamequbed” tags = [ “games”, ] +++

As with a lot of other people my age, I grew up on fansites. The late 1990s and early 2000s were an exceptional time for finding like-minded folks who shared your passions. Being the pre-teen dork that I was, I desperately sought out Nintendo coverage across all corners of the internet. By around 2002, I landed on Gamequbed and added it to the ever-rotating list of sites I pored over daily for GameCube and Game Boy Advance coverage. I remember spending weekend nights furiously refreshing Gamequbed’s home page every couple of minutes, waiting for a new article to pop up, as if expecting the staff of mostly teens to provide around-the-clock breaking news coverage.

Unfortunately, as with most sites of that era, it was shuttered in late 2004. One day, I visited the site and discovered the it was picked up by a company that parked the domain and propped up a soulless home page filled with ads. Gamequbed was gone and buried.

That is, until 2013.

While in college, I decided on a lark to look up Gamequbed again, curious to see what the current domain owners were doing with it now. To my surprise, the site was gone. Even more shocking, the domain had expired. I immediately sprung into action and scooped up the domain. Finally, I thought to myself, Gamequbed is back!

I wish I could say I immediately turned around and started this project, but I can’t. The site remained dormant with a simple static image on the homepage evoking a bygone era of Gamequbed for well over a decade. I made one brief attempt at restoring Gamequbed’s old articles during that time but couldn’t keep up, as class and other obligations often got in the way. I just couldn’t muster up the energy to meaningfully commit to this project. The world was a different place and my priorities were, frankly, elsewhere.

A lot has changed since then. Maybe this is just a sign of getting older, but my corner of the digital world has gotten, well, depressing. Year-round layoffs continue to decimate the games industry and the press outlets that revolve around it, the internet has been captured by the handful of tech conglomerates who seem more than happy to transform it into a pipeline for AI-generated content, and staying engaged with any hobby that so much as sniffs a stick of RAM has become prohibitively expensive. The collective optimism about the future of video games and the internet has been replaced with sheer horror and dread.

I would be more than happy to see the cornerstones of my upbringing replaced with something better, but it looks more like a lot of them were destroyed without anything to show for it. Games and games culture, as it exists on the internet now, often barely feels fit for human consumption. I’ve tried channeling some of that frustration into supporting outlets like Debug, Remap, Aftermath, Giant Bomb, and a few others. Still, I briefly found myself retreating to old gaming podcasts of the mid-2000s and early 2010s for a few months last year. While digesting games media content old and new, and mulling over the state of the modern internet, I felt compelled to finally get this project off the ground.

In May 2025, I began the long process of restoring the site’s content: first starting with editorials and features, then reviews, previews, and cheats, before finally tackling the announcements and news behemoths. Any remnants of the original Gamequbed were long gone at this point, so my work almost exclusively involved manually mining the snapshots available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I tried my best to be as thorough and faithful to the original site as possible, with the recognition that some content has simply been lost to time.

For fun, whenever an article cited another website, I usually tried to use a Wayback Machine snapshot of the link that would approximately show how the site looked around that time. Likewise, every article includes at least one link to a snapshot I used for restoring the page, so other folks can see the content as it was, or pretty close to it.

The site’s theme blends Gamequbed’s second and third iterations of its original layout, while still lightly integrating some modern UX sensibilities. I also commissioned WhiteFox Designs, the creator of the Konga Beat and Konga Launcher logos, to design a new logo for the site that evoked the look of that era. I wanted the new Gamequbed site to be inspired by 2000s fansite aesthetics without being encumbered by them. Regardless of your age, visiting the site should feel fun and inviting.

I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly and make Gamequbed part of a broad thesis on the state of the modern internet. However, I will say it reminds me of what I miss: the sense of exploration and simple joy of browsing the web. Every day was an opportunity to find a new site or new forum built by fellow passionate nobodies. Even at its worst, it felt honest and real. The writing on many of these sites, including Gamequbed, was quite amateur, but you could tell the people involved were genuine and serious about their work.

These communities haven’t gone away, they’re just much harder to find. They’re tucked away in obscure Discords and not necessarily easy to search through or properly archive. Everything is more centralized and at the mercy of gatekeepers who don’t always have the best interests of the community at heart.

I don’t want to return the internet as it was—it was not without its own flaws—but I would love to experience those feelings again. I want others to have that opportunity too. I hope we will someday. For now, I’m happy to maintain this site and give folks a glimpse into a bygone era of the internet: a fan site run by a rotating group of passionate teens who loved Nintendo and wanted to share that with the world.

This is Gamequbed.