Confessions of a 13-year-old Mario fansite creator

According to a whole lot of media sources, the World Wide Web is turning 25 today. That's not entirely accurate, actually—the "World Wide Web" wasn't usable by anyone outside of CERN until August 23, 1991 (Internaut Day, as it's called). If any day is properly the Web's "anniversary," it's that one.

Still, it is true that on March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote Information Management: A Proposal, a paper which discussed his observations on how data flowed around the network at his place of employment and which suggested ways to improve that flow. Berners-Lee's place of employment happened to be CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), which meant that he had access to a lot of neat technology. This let him turn his ideas about theoretical decentralized information networks into an actual for-real non-theoretical decentralized information network. Berners-Lee didn't invent the term "hypertext," but he did invent the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) along with the network it powered: the World Wide Web.

The much-storied NeXT Cube that served as the World Wide Web's first host.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Proper anniversary or not, all the talk of Web history got me thinking about just how much the concept of connected hypertext pages has changed the way we all process and share information. Through the Web, people found the ability to connect with things that they love and create something new from them, as the gradual intermingling of text and graphics (and eventually richer media like video) provided tremendous agency to the average person.

For me, that thing I loved was video games. So when my family got an AOL account in 1995, I, of course, used it to become an even more rabid consumer of gaming information than I already was, even at the tender age of 13. No longer did I have to wait an entire month for the latest gaming magazines to come in the mail; now I could get information from AOL's gaming channel or N64.com, and it was updated practically every day! Sure, it may have cost me (read, my parents) $10 in hourly usage fees to download a grainy, postage-stamp sized RealPlayer preview video of Super Mario 64 over my 28.8kbps modem. Still, the fact that I was watching that video straight from Nintendo's Space World show in Japan, the same day as the people who were actually there, was completely mind-blowing.

I devoured the copy of "Learn HTML in 21 days" that my mom bought me for Chanukah in 1995, but it would take nearly two more years before I was brave enough to produce content for the Web rather than just consume it. I was obsessed with the idea of not replicating content that had been done better by someone else; what would be the point? Even in those early days of the Web, finding a way to do something completely original was a tall order (especially for a 13-year-old).

The first thing I ever published on the Web, largely unchanged from how it looked nearly 17 years ago.

Finally, in the summer of 1997, I decided that I wasn't satisfied with any of the webpages with information about my favorite video game series, Super Mario Bros. Luckily, I hadn't stumbled on the excellent resources at the just-launched Mushroom Kingdom fan site, or I might have given up on my ambitions right there.

I still remember the day I launched the notepad-coded Super Mario Bros. HQ in August of 1997, pushing it live on the massive 5MB of personal Web space provided by AOL. The site was mainly focused on pre-Wikipedia lists of enemies, items, characters, games, products, cameo appearances, and general trivia about Mario, compiled from old magazines and strategy guides. But I also took the opportunity to share my adolescent thoughts with the world through some downright embarrassing original writing. Key quote from one of my first published pieces: "[Yoshi] is NOT Mario's pet." Yes, that fact needed both <b> tags and capital letters. The Internet must know!

My Web counter registered three visits that first day: two from me and one from my friend Ashutosh, to whom I sent the link via AIM. I traded links with every willing video game site I could to get that visitor number up (the Web's equivalent of a video game scoreboard) and made sure to update at least once a week to get people to come back regularly—it's not like my Friday nights were very busy then.

The site really took off when it was prominently listed on DMOZ's open directory project, but I felt like I really "made it" well before then, when I had to start checking my AOL e-mail daily, instead of weekly, because of the massive deluge of reader responses—sometimes up to two e-mails a day! Many of these readers asked me questions as if I was an authority on the subject. Didn't they know I was just a kid with back issues of Nintendo Power in his closet? Their interest motivated me to learn as much as I could, to earn their trust in me.