Man, cartoonnetwork.com was the first website I ever frequented. When my family first got an internet connection, I didn’t know about search engines, so I would just type things I liked into the url bar, put a “.com” at the end, and hope for the best. Speeds were super slow on our dialup connection, so I’d often have time to make and eat a sandwich while waiting for a flash game to load.
Aw yeah, I remember the days seeing what the president was up to at whitehouse dot com.
I know most people here will be fine with pirating and most of these shows and movies will not actually be lost. But as this thread proves, even modern shows can be lost. And there are 2 things here I find especially sad:
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As mentioned in the article the CN website had a lot of digital games. I think most of them will be lost. This is something we’ve seen a lot throughout the history of web based games.
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“I’m more frustrated at the continued removal of online spaces for kids. It leads to them going to media spaces for adults, and that never ends well.” from This reddit comment.
Regarding 2, it feels to me as time wears on there are fewer and fewer online spaces in general. I fear it won’t be long before the internet is just a handful of “competing” social media companies and that one outlier group running the “Fediverse” that the propaganda says is the “Dark Web”.
I agree. I may be young but the internet feels like it’s being engulfed by the big corpos. The spaces made by different kinds of people seem to be fading away, or suppressed by those major companies.
Regarding point 1, I have not checked but I would not be surprised if Flashpoint has them archived. They have so much. https://flashpointarchive.org/
Even if you’re on Mac or Linux, I totally recommend getting a virtual machine running Windows just for this. It’s amazing being able to go back and not only play your favorite cartoon network flash games, alongside ones you never knew existed outside of your country, while also being able to play other games outside of that sphere.
Even if you don’t like flash games, you can find countless flash animations as well and view them in all their original glory. I know you can find some ones like I think the Ed Edd n’ Eddy highschool van What Is Love? animation is in there. That, or I’m thinking a fan series EEnE highschool spin-off intro being there. Regardless, it’s absolutely worth checking out.
Edit:
Felt as though I had to share these ancient Internet relics.
That’s super cool. Thanks for sharing, somehow I was completely unaware of this
Thank goodness we can count on various humans
pack ratarchival behavior.
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David Zaslav will stand by, burning more cash and trashing more titles, only to keep failing, and making our culture—as well as our history—all the poorer for it.
To quote Bugs Bunny, “what a maroon.”
I checked because it got briefly mentioned in the article: WBD stock price is down 40% YTD!
I wonder if it will keep crashing until they get bought out by the Mouse for some loose change they found in the fountains at Disney World.
