sometimes i think about the internet i grew up with, and it honestly feels like a completely different world compared to the internet we have now.
i was around eight years old when my dad first introduced me to online game websites. i remember him showing me sites like girlsgogames.com, starsue.net, dressupgames.com, everythinggirl.com, and many others that i can’t even remember anymore.
most of the games on those sites were very “girly”. dress up games, makeup games, nail salons, room decorating, hairstyling, cooking games. the kind where you’d style characters or decorate rooms from scratch. i became obsessed almost instantly. every weekend i would turn on the computer and spend hours playing them. during school holidays it was even worse. i could sit there the entire day just clicking through game after game.
then my brother introduced me to a completely different side of online games. websites like agame.com and y8.com. those had games that felt more “boy-ish”. car racing games, tower defense games, shooting games, puzzles, platformers, and a bunch of random arcade-style games.
so the two of us would take turns on the computer and jump between completely different types of games. one moment i was dressing up a character for prom, the next moment i was racing cars or solving puzzles. we were obsessed with these websites for quite a while.
when i was around ten or eleven years old, one of my friends introduced me to something completely different: fresh hotel. it was basically a variation of habbo hotel, but free. and it felt like stepping into a whole new world.
instead of just playing small games by myself, suddenly i was in a huge online virtual world where hundreds of thousands of people were logged in at the same time. the game was about creating my own character, walk around different rooms, chat instantly with people from all over the world, play games together, build and decorate rooms, trade items, and just hang out. looking back now, it’s kind of unbelievable that a game like that connected so many people in real time, i spent so much time on it.
it’s honestly where i started interacting with people from different countries. without even realizing it, this was also where my english improved a lot. when you’re constantly chatting with strangers online, you kind of have no choice but to get better at it. there were also quite a lot of malaysians playing at the time, which made it even more fun.
what i remember the most about those days was how innocent everything felt. i don’t remember people using slurs, swearing constantly, or saying inappropriate things the way people sometimes do on the internet now. it just felt like people hanging out and talking in a silly pixel world. it was a golden time.
i played fresh hotel for years until life slowly got busier. in 2020 i tried logging back into my account out of curiosity, but apparently it had been deleted because it had been inactive for too long. and even if it wasn’t deleted, there weren’t that many players anymore anyway. i think over time people simply moved on to newer games, mobile apps, and social media platforms.
recently i came across a website called findretros.com, which is basically a list of habbo hotel retro servers that are still active. it shows different versions of the game and how many players are currently online.
the number one server on the list was habboon hotel, so out of curiosity i registered and tried it out. the game itself has expanded and updated a lot, but the biggest difference was the number of players. there just weren’t many people around anymore. the rooms felt quieter, almost like walking through a place that used to be full of life.
around the same time, i also revisited some of the old flash game websites i used to play on. and honestly… they felt completely different.
many of the games i remembered simply aren’t playable anymore. that’s because flash is basically dead now. adobe discontinued flash player in 2020 due to security issues and because newer technologies replaced it. since most of those games relied entirely on flash, thousands of them stopped working.
however, i did find a few websites that preserved some of those games, websites like javagames.cc, flashmuseum.org, flasharch.com, and flashpointarchive.org. i tried playing a few games there and it gave me such a familiar feeling. the graphics, the sounds, everything felt like stepping back into my childhood for a moment.
i also remember playing on big branded websites like barbie.com, bratz.com, and myscene.com. those sites had their own mini games and dress-up worlds too. now most of those websites are either shut down or completely different.
but aside from games, another huge part of my childhood internet experience was youtube. this was around the time when beauty and makeup videos were becoming a huge thing on youtube.
the very first beauty video i ever remember watching was michelle phan’s barbie makeup transformation tutorial, which is now still her most viewed video on youtube. i remember watching it with my cousin, completely fascinated by how she transformed herself into barbie using makeup. it felt almost magical to me back then.
after that, i became completely obsessed with michelle phan. she was the one who got me into makeup and the entire youtube world. i watched every single video she uploaded and waited patiently every week for a new one. at that time she was basically the epitome of a beauty guru on youtube. she even taught me small habits that stuck with me until today, like using my ring finger to apply eyeshadow because it’s gentler on the skin.
although she stepped away from youtube around 2018, i still follow her to this day. she’s returned to creating content occasionally now, though not the same kind of beauty tutorials she used to make. her content now focuses more on lifestyle, thoughts, and personal topics.
after michelle phan, i discovered many other creators too. cutiebututiebeauty, bubzbeauty, stilababe09, zoella, bethany mota, and many more. although some of them don’t create beauty or lifestyle videos anymore and some have stopped creating on youtube entirely, i still find myself going back to their channels from time to time. sometimes i’ll watch their old videos just to reminisce. it feels a little like opening a time capsule from that era of youtube.
looking back at all of this now, it really feels like i grew up during a completely different era of the internet.
an internet where you could randomly stumble upon a flash game and spend hours playing it. where you could log into a pixel hotel world and chat with strangers from the other side of the world. where youtube creators felt like older sisters teaching you how to do your makeup.
it all felt a little simpler somehow. but i’m glad i got to experience it. future generations probably won’t experience the same version of the internet we had back then. the internet now feels more structured, more polished, more controlled. apps, algorithms, endless scrolling.
i’m literally growing up through the internet of the 2000s, the flash game era of the 2010s, and now whatever this version of the internet is in the 2020s.
what a strange and interesting timeline to have lived through.