Before Jon Skeet became one of the most recognizable names in programming Q&A, he had a Worms fan page.
Visit Boggy B’s “Armed to the Teeth” Page
The surviving page is wonderfully direct. It identifies itself as unofficial, notes that the views are Skeet’s own rather than the University of Cambridge’s, acknowledges Team17’s trademarks, and then gets to the important business: Worms.
The page offers personal tactics, cheats and Challenge mode codes, a FAQ, PC utilities, favorite landscapes, animation screenshots and links to other Worms sites on the Web.
That list captures what a serious game fan page looked like before a wiki absorbed every category into one database. The author did not merely write about liking the game. The site collected the things players actually needed.
Information for addicts
The page’s own description says it is not intended to advertise Worms, only to be a source of information “for addicts like me.”
That sentence could serve as a mission statement for half the useful old Web.
Fan sites were often built by somebody who knew a subject well enough to realize that the official material was not going to answer every question. So they made their own FAQ. They saved codes. They wrote utilities. They linked to everybody else doing similar work.
The title, Boggy B’s “Armed to the Teeth” Page, is itself a period Worms reference. Boggy B appears in the original Wormsong and became one of the recurring names associated with the series.
The page also preserves the old expectation that the Web was conversational. Skeet explicitly invites visitors to email him with material to add and even provides an address for people whose browsers do not have built-in mail support.
That line dates the page more effectively than any copyright footer could.
There is no account system, no voting mechanism and no comment platform. If you knew a trick the page should contain, you mailed the webmaster.
Modern community databases are much better at scale. What they often lose is the visible presence of one person deciding what belongs, explaining it in their own voice and wiring the useful pieces together by hand.
The Worms page is small, but that is part of why it survives so cleanly. A couple dozen lines of HTML can carry a surprising amount of cultural residue.