WAYBACKED CYBERPET SITE: The Island of Twiluu

[malymin]

Visit by clicking this link.

This website was an absolute BITCH to hunt down evidence of it having ever existed, let me tell you. But I was able, at the very least, to eventually find record of its url to plug into the Wayback machine.

You navigate through a simple little text adventure to find pets to adopt onto your website! Click areas on the map (....on the homepage, not on this dreamwidth post) to navigate. :)

A one or two pages seem to not be archived on Wayback, though... so far most seem fine. Sometimes, though, Wayback will take you to a capture from after the website went down even if it has better captures to show you; if you can, see if there's an earlier capture on Wayback's timeline that's actually preserved. (The tiger cub page has this issue.)

In addition, you can get some "pet supplies" from the town on this page. These are purely for decorative and roleplay purposes - you can see them being used by a website that adopted from the island of Twiluu here. The objects aren't edited directly onto the pets themselves on that page, but overlaid behind or in front of the pet image.

You'll find even more pets if you brave the wilderness, of course... do you want to play in this place, with me? Dive into the bay for sea dragons. Watch a fairy.

The "forest stream" page, though, seems to be permanently lost, as its only capture is from 2023... long after Geocities as a whole shut down. In addition, there appears to have been a "castle" area that was never properly saved to wayback. The link to it, when it was functional, was the little island near the peninsula.

• "Castle Main" is archived, but the page before and after it are permanently lost.
• "Corridor 2" is archived, but the pages behind and ahead of it in sequence are permanently lost.
• "Curtain" is archived, but the page that leads to it is permanently lost. The pet that was available to adopt from it, the blue Draelon Cat, is also not archived, although you can see an adopted one (as well as yellow and pink ones, which I don't remember how to get) here.

And if you adopt, read the rules. It's just nice to respect people's wishes, even if (regardless of how the former siterunner may be IRL) it feels like they're stone-etched the wishes of the long dead.

Let me know what you discover!

EDIT:

• got a working capture of DarkCastle.
• got a working capture of TwoDoors
• got a working capture of Yarn. The alt text on the yarn image says: "I'm a magical ball of yarn! Remember these words: "tootsie roll!"  .... you may need it later!". Unfortunately, it seems like the "ghostrick" page that goes next in the sequence isn't archived.
• The Blue Draelon Cat gif is still not available.
• The skeleton page is still not available.

Comments

[kalium]

I knew I'd seen one of those page based choose your own adventure petsites before! I don't think this is the one I was thinking of - I remember one with hand drawn pets I think? - but it's the style that inspired me to try a modern version.

[malymin]

There was a lot of them! The main ones I remember visiting often were this one and Skyhaven... though Skyhaven had both an adventure section and a more 'basic' adoption section.

I wonder how many of the pages linked here were CYOA-style sites...

I've often seen people say "I don't understand what static websites are for, that social media can't do better." And well, I think social media is a much worse and more difficult medium for these kinds of adventures. I wish I saw oldweb revival sites make adventures, or even the kind of second-person fantasy opening narration a lot of cyberpet sites used! Or even find-its - obviously the PC still does them, but they often existed on cyberpet sites as well.

[kalium]

I found it there! It was the Nameless Forest. I found the archived copy a while ago somewhere else and it inspired me to try CYOA but I'm looking again and I never realised how deep it went. It's practically a full blown text adventure.

[malymin]

Oh wow, I don't think I ever visited this one! It's crazy how many of these sites there were...

Once again, it strikes me as a little strange that the retro web movement doesn't seem to have any throwbacks to this kind of thing, even on a reduced scale - especially with how modern tools like Twine makes this kind of html-based text adventure easier to structure and create on a large scale than in the old days.

I feel like the existence of these kind of adventures (and mini-quests like the "find-its" the PC still does) encourages exploratory site browsing, for lack of a better term. One of the main things that struck me about the rise of social media is that the "mode" of exploratory site-browsing becomes either difficult to impossible to set up as a "creator", or something you end up "punished" by (emotionally if not literally - "oh, the person who made this good post is a cruel and unpleasant person who would probably hate me, thats what I get for looking for more good posts i guess") more than rewarded as a "visitor". A revival of this kind of thing would be wonderful to see...

Even with the neopets-style sites with fancy backends, it strikes me that Neopets had "secrets" for you to uncover through clicking on hidden links, like the infamous "Jelly World" location, but Flight Rising (the current torchbearer for the "complex back-end, needs at least a small company to operate" pet site) doesn't have anything like that...

(Oh, this is a delightful horse! And this one, too. First creatures I've encountered so far. I'd forgotten how many cyberpets were scanned traditional artwork instead of pixel art until I started looking back at old sites recently...)