I just watched a webinar on how to hold a conference online. Given the current state of affairs, with COVID-19 keeping us locked up in our homes, the planning committee for the Rochester Security Summit is rightly concerned that we might not be able to hold our traditional conference this October and we’re exploring virtual options.

During the presentation, the host noted that in the online conference that she had run, they had placed white rabbits around the virtual exhibit hall. If you clicked on these Easter eggs (or perhaps Easter bunnies) they linked you out to a website, eelslap.com, where you can use your mouse to slap some random guy in the face with an eel.

This got me thinking of another site, one that I first learned about from the crudely drawn posters hung along RIT’s Quarter Mile during my freshman year, Poke Alex in the Eye. (Incidentally, I once interviewed Alex, the creator and star—or perhaps victim is a better term—of the site, for a position we had available at one time, and I was surprised to learn that the site was still up so many years later. Sadly, it no longer seems to be.)

That, in turn, led me to think of two other online games I remember playing back in the mid-90’s. I believe they were both Shockwave games (yeah, that thing like Flash before Flash), and as such are probably long lost to the history of the Internet. I’m pretty sure that I linked to both of them on an early version of my personal “home page” while I was in school, but the earliest version of my site that the Wayback Machine has captured does not have them.

The first site was a whack-a-mole style game that had celebrities popping up for you to whack with your mouse. IIRC, they were all celebrities that had some form of black mark on them at the time for something they did. I also remember that the Queen of England would occasionally pop out of one of the holes and I think you’d lose points if you whacked her.

The other was a celebrity boxing game where you’d pick a celebrity and then go at them in the ring, first-person-shooter style. Again, I think the celebrities were all people we loved to hate at the time. This one may have been Celebrity Slugfest, which I’ve found a few references to on the web, but unsurprisingly the site itself appears to be long gone.

So, do you remember these old Internet classics? Do you have any other old favorites that you’d like to reminisce about? Please share in the comments, I’d love to hear a your Internet nostalgia.