BlackBerry Died Because It Was Too Good At One Thing
Posted on December 30, 2025
Let me tell you about a phone that was so good at email that it destroyed itself.
If you weren't there, you won't understand what BlackBerry meant in the mid-2000s. These weren't just phones. They were the phones. The business phone. The serious phone. The phone that meant you were important enough to get work email on the go.
And then the iPhone came out and BlackBerry spent the next decade slowly bleeding to death while insisting everything was fine.
This is the story of how being the absolute best at one thing became a death sentence.
The Keyboard That Ruined Your Thumbs (In a Good Way)
The BlackBerry keyboard was perfect.
Not "good for a phone keyboard" â actually perfect. Tiny physical keys with just the right amount of tactile feedback. You could type on it without looking. You could compose entire emails at highway speeds (as a passenger, obviously). The "clicky-clicky-click" sound of someone typing on a BlackBerry became the soundtrack of business meetings.
People developed BlackBerry thumb. Like, an actual repetitive strain injury from typing too much on these things. And we wore it like a badge of honor. "Yeah, my thumbs hurt â I'm important and busy."
The keyboard layout was weird â QWERTY but compressed, with keys for multiple letters, yet somehow your brain adapted. After a week, you could type faster on a BlackBerry than most people could on a full-size keyboard. It became muscle memory. Some people still miss it, fifteen years later.
Touch screens? Those were for playing games. Real work required real keys.
Email So Good It Got Its Own Addiction Name
BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was texting before texting was unlimited. But the real killer app was email.
Push email. Instant delivery. No "checking" your email â it just arrived. The moment someone sent it, your BlackBerry buzzed. Revolutionary at the time. Completely standard now, but in 2005? Magic.
This led to the term "CrackBerry" â because people were genuinely addicted. Checking email at dinner. During movies. At 2am. In the bathroom. The device vibrated, you looked. It was Pavlovian.
Executives would pull out their BlackBerry mid-conversation. Parents checked them during their kid's soccer games. The red notification light â that little blinking LED â controlled people's lives. Seeing that light meant someone, somewhere, needed you. Or at least emailed you. Probably about something that could wait until Monday.
But you checked anyway. You always checked.
When BlackBerry Meant Business
In the 2000s, having a BlackBerry signaled status. It meant:
âĸ You had a job important enough for mobile email
âĸ Your company issued you equipment
âĸ You were "connected" (before that meant social media)
âĸ You were probably in a suit right now
The IT department loved BlackBerry because of BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server). They could remotely wipe phones, enforce security policies, and control everything. For corporate IT in the 2000s, BlackBerry was the solution. Secure, manageable, enterprise-ready.
Politicians carried them. CEOs carried them. Lawyers carried them. If you saw someone with a BlackBerry, you assumed they were doing something important. Even if they were just checking email about lunch orders.
President Obama famously fought to keep his BlackBerry when he entered the White House. It became a security thing. The President of the United States had to negotiate to keep his phone. That's how embedded BlackBerry was in business culture.
Then the iPhone Happened
June 29, 2007. Everything changed.
And BlackBerry completely missed it.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, BlackBerry executives reportedly laughed. No physical keyboard? A touch screen for typing? A phone focused on music and apps instead of email? This was a toy, not a business tool.
They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
But here's the thing: they weren't wrong at first.
The first iPhone was kind of bad at email. The keyboard was frustrating. Autocorrect was a mess. Corporate IT departments hated it â no security, no remote management, no enterprise features. For the first year or two, BlackBerry really was better at what it did.
The problem? Nobody cared.
Because the iPhone did a thousand other things. Web browsing that actually worked. Apps. Music. Photos. Games. It was a computer in your pocket. BlackBerry was a very efficient email machine.
And efficiency doesn't sell phones. Desire does.
BlackBerry's Slow-Motion Collapse
Watching BlackBerry respond to the iPhone was like watching someone try to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.
The BlackBerry Storm (2008): Their touchscreen phone. It had a screen that physically clicked when you pressed it. The whole screen. It was bizarre, laggy, and everyone hated it. This was their iPhone killer. It was DOA.
BlackBerry Torch (2010): A sliding keyboard phone with a touch screen. Too thick. Too slow. Too late. Pick a lane, BlackBerry.
BlackBerry PlayBook (2011): A tablet that required a BlackBerry phone to tether to for email. A tablet that couldn't do email on its own. In what universe does that make sense?
BlackBerry 10 (2013): A complete OS redesign that was actually... pretty good? Smooth gestures, good multitasking, decent app selection (via Android compatibility). But it launched six years after the iPhone, and by then, nobody cared. The market had moved on.
Every response was too little, too late. They kept optimizing email while Apple and Google were building ecosystems.
The Thing They Got Wrong
BlackBerry's fatal mistake was thinking they were in the email business.
They weren't. They were in the phone business. And phones became computers. And computers aren't about doing one thing perfectly â they're about doing everything reasonably well.
BlackBerry had the best keyboard. The best email experience. The best battery life (seriously, those things lasted forever). The most secure platform. They won every "best at X" comparison.
But consumers didn't want the best email phone. They wanted the best everything phone.
Apple understood that a phone is a camera, a music player, a web browser, a gaming device, a social media machine, and yes, also something that sends emails. BlackBerry kept insisting email was the most important thing.
For business users in 2006? Sure. For everyone else in 2010? Not even close.
The Enterprise Trap
BlackBerry's reliance on enterprise customers became a trap.
Corporate IT departments were slow to change. They had BlackBerry infrastructure. Training. Policies. Security requirements. They weren't about to rip all that out for iPhones.
So BlackBerry kept selling to businesses while Apple captured consumers. And that worked... for a while.
But then a weird thing happened: BYOD â Bring Your Own Device.
Employees started demanding to use their personal iPhones for work. They didn't want to carry two phones â their fun iPhone and their boring work BlackBerry. They wanted one phone that did everything.
IT departments resisted, then compromised, then gave up. Apple eventually added the enterprise features everyone needed. Game over.
BlackBerry lost the consumer market, then the consumer market invaded enterprise and took that too.
The Numbers Were Brutal
In 2009, BlackBerry had 50% of the smartphone market in the US. By 2016, they had less than 0.1%.
That's not a decline. That's a crater.
The company tried everything. New phones. New operating systems. New executives. Nothing worked. In 2016, they stopped making phones entirely. They now license their name to other manufacturers and focus on software security.
The BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) app survived until 2019 as a standalone app. Then it shut down too. Nobody noticed.
What We Actually Lost
Here's the weird thing: BlackBerry was right about some stuff.
Physical keyboards are better for typing. Security is important. Battery life does matter. Focus can be a feature.
But the market decided those things weren't worth the tradeoff. We chose touch screens over keyboards, convenience over security, versatility over specialization.
And honestly? We probably made the right choice. But something was lost.
BlackBerry represented a philosophy: tools should be purpose-built. A phone for communication should prioritize communication. Don't try to do everything â do one thing exceptionally well.
That philosophy died. Now every device tries to do everything. Your phone is a camera, computer, TV, game console, and occasionally, a phone. Nothing is specialized. Everything is "good enough" at everything.
Is that better? Probably. But sometimes I miss having a device that was excellent at one thing instead of adequate at twenty.
⨠The Keyboard Holdouts
Even now, there's a small, dedicated group of people who refuse to let the dream die.
They buy refurbished BlackBerry Classics and Key2s. They argue in forums about why physical keyboards matter. They mock touch-screen typing as "imprecise." They're the vinyl collectors of the phone world â clinging to obsolete technology because it does one thing better.
And you know what? I get it.
I've never typed an email on a touch screen that felt as good as typing on a BlackBerry. Autocorrect helps, but it's not the same. The tactile feedback, the speed, the confidence of knowing exactly which keys you hit â it's gone.
Every year, someone releases a "keyboard phone" trying to recapture the magic. Every year, it fails. The market has spoken.
đ The Real Lesson
BlackBerry died because the world changed and they didn't.
They perfected email on mobile devices just as email stopped being the center of mobile communication. They built the best tool for 2005 and kept selling it in 2015.
The iPhone didn't win because it was better at email. It won because email stopped being the point.
This is the trap of expertise: when you're the best at something, you can't imagine that thing becoming irrelevant. BlackBerry couldn't conceive of a world where typing speed mattered less than having Instagram.
But that's the world we got.
RIM (Research In Motion, BlackBerry's original company name) posted their last quarterly profit in Q4 2010. The writing was on the wall. The little blinking red light that once controlled executives' lives faded out.
And now, a generation of people have never experienced the pure, focused joy of that keyboard. They'll never understand why some of us still reach for phantom keys that aren't there. They'll never know what it was like to have a device that did exactly one thing perfectly.
They just have glass rectangles that do everything pretty well.
And that's fine. It's better, even. But sometimes, late at night, I still miss that click.
Did you have a BlackBerry? Do you still remember your PIN for BBM? (Mine was 2A3C4D5E and I'll never forget it.) Sign the guestbook and share your CrackBerry stories.
Your Parents Had a Whole Secret Phone (And You'll Never Understand)
Posted on December 14, 2025
Okay Zoomers, gather 'round. Grandpa needs to tell you about something so incomprehensibly cursed that you won't believe it was real.
Bandit phones.
Not a burner phone. Not a backup phone. Not even a "work phone." A secret second phone line in your house that your parents didn't know about. Run through the same landline jack. Same physical phone. But a completely different phone number.
Let me repeat that because I can see your brain breaking: Two phone numbers. One phone. Your parents had no idea.
đ Wait, What Even Is This?
Picture this: It's 2002. You're 14. You want to talk to your crush without your mom picking up the kitchen phone and listening in. (Yes, all the phones in the house were connected to the same line. Yes, anyone could pick up and hear your conversation. It was a nightmare.)
So some absolute genius company was like "what if we sold teenagers a second phone line that their parents didn't know existed?"
For like $10-15 a month, you got:
âĸ A completely separate phone number
âĸ That worked through your existing landline
âĸ With its own voicemail
âĸ That only rang on YOUR phone in YOUR room
âĸ And your parents never saw it on the phone bill
You'd get a special small phone (usually purple or translucent plastic because it was the 2000s) that connected to your phone jack. When YOUR number got called, only that phone would ring. The main family phone wouldn't make a sound.
From your parents' perspective, nothing changed. From YOUR perspective, you had a private line like you were running a teen therapy hotline.
đ¯ Why This Was Absolutely Insane
You have to understand: this was before unlimited texting. Before smartphones. Before Discord. Hell, before MySpace was big.
If you wanted to talk to someone privately, your options were:
1. Use the family phone (mom listens in)
2. Walk to their house (effort)
3. Use AIM (parents could read over your shoulder)
4. Literally mail them a letter like some kind of Victorian orphan
A Bandit phone was freedom. Pure, unfiltered, unsupervised teenage freedom. You could:
âĸ Talk to your boyfriend/girlfriend past your phone curfew
âĸ Coordinate plans your parents didn't approve of
âĸ Have actual private conversations like a human being
âĸ Give out a number that wouldn't ring through the whole house at dinner
And your parents would never know unless they literally looked at the detailed phone bill and noticed an extra line item they didn't recognize. (Most didn't.)
đĩī¸ The Absolute Espionage of It All
The marketing for these things was unhinged. TV commercials showed teenagers whispering into phones while their parents walked by, completely oblivious. The tagline was basically "lie to your parents â for cheap!"
And we ATE IT UP.
Getting a Bandit phone (or similar brands like "Teen Line" or "My Line") was a status symbol. You weren't just a kid with a phone. You were a kid with a secret phone. You were basically Jason Bourne but with more Avril Lavigne posters.
Kids would put the number on their AIM profiles. Write it in yearbooks. Give it to their crush like it was their social security number. This was YOUR number. Not your family's number. Yours.
đĩ How Parents Eventually Caught On
Obviously, this couldn't last forever.
Some parents noticed the charge on the phone bill. Others heard the Bandit phone ringing in their kid's room and were like "why do you have two phones??" Some kids just got sloppy and left the phone out.
But the REAL death of the Bandit phone? Cell phones got cheap.
By the mid-2000s, parents started giving their kids basic cell phones. Those Nokia bricks, flip phones, Razrs. Suddenly you had a truly portable private line that you could take anywhere. The Bandit phone was stuck in your room. The cell phone came with you to school, the mall, everywhere.
Plus, texting became unlimited. Who needed to make voice calls when you could text your entire social life? By 2006-2007, the Bandit phone was obsolete.
đ¤¯ The Part Zoomers Can't Comprehend
Here's what you need to understand about how wild this was:
There was no way to be privately reachable otherwise.
You can text someone right now and only they see it. You can DM them. You can Snap them. You can Discord them. You have seventeen different ways to have a private conversation.
We had ONE. The phone. And it was shared. By the entire family.
Imagine if every text you sent appeared on a TV in your living room that anyone could read. That's what using the family phone was like. Everyone could pick up an extension and listen. Your siblings did it to be annoying. Your parents did it to be protective. There was no privacy.
The Bandit phone was the first time teenagers could have genuinely private communication at home. It sounds so basic now, but back then? Revolutionary.
đ The Absolute Chaos It Enabled
Let's be real: Bandit phones enabled SO MUCH teenage nonsense.
Kids calling their boyfriend/girlfriend at 2am. Planning parties their parents didn't know about. Prank calls (remember those?). Three-way calling to gossip about someone while they were also on the line. Drama. So much drama.
But also: genuine connection. Being able to talk to your best friend about something serious without your whole family knowing. Having a support network when things were rough. Being a teenager and having some semblance of independence.
The Bandit phone was chaos, sure. But it was our chaos.
đ Why This Would Never Fly Today
Can you imagine a company today selling "here's a secret communication device your parents won't know about" to teenagers? The moral panic would be INSTANT.
"Predators could call them!" "They could be getting groomed!" "What if they're being bullied and parents don't know?" "This enables dangerous behavior!"
And honestly? All valid concerns. The Bandit phone was kind of sketchy when you think about it. But the 2000s were a different time. Parents were less worried about online dangers (because online wasn't as big yet) and more worried about long-distance charges.
The marketing literally relied on "keep secrets from your parents" as a selling point. That's insane. But it worked because the culture was different. Privacy for teenagers was seen as normal, not suspicious.
đą What We Have Now (And What We Lost)
Today's teens have more privacy and less privacy simultaneously.
You can text whoever you want, whenever you want, and your parents can't physically pick up an extension and listen in. That's more privacy.
But your parents can also install monitoring apps on your phone. Check your location. Read your texts remotely. Track your screen time. Access your social media. That's WAY less privacy.
The Bandit phone was analog freedom. Once you had it, your parents couldn't monitor it without physically picking up the extension in another room. Now? Everything's digital and everything's trackable.
We traded one kind of privacy invasion (anyone picking up the phone) for another (surveillance capitalism and parental monitoring apps).
đ What It All Meant
The Bandit phone was a weird, brief moment in tech history when teenagers found a loophole in the system and companies happily exploited it for profit.
It existed because landlines were the default and cell phones weren't ubiquitous yet. It died because technology moved on. Simple as that.
But for a few years in the early 2000s, thousands of teenagers had secret phone lines in their bedrooms, and their parents had no idea. They'd be having full conversations while their parents watched TV downstairs, completely oblivious that their kid was on a call.
It was sketchy. It was brilliant. It was peak early-2000s chaos.
And Zoomers, you'll never know what it was like to have a purple translucent phone under your bed that was YOUR line and yours alone. No phone plan. No data limits. No parental controls. Just a phone number that was entirely, secretly yours.
Peak teenage rebellion was paying $12.99 a month for a second landline.
God, the 2000s were weird.
Actually, the 2000s Kind of Sucked (And That's Okay)
Posted on November 18, 2025
Last time I spent 2000 words gushing about NFS Underground 2 like it was the greatest achievement in human history. Before that, I wrote about how the old web was this magical utopia of creativity and community.
And look â I meant all of it. But I also need to be honest with you: the 2000s kind of sucked.
Not in a "it was all bad" way. But in a "nostalgia is lying to you" way. We remember the good stuff and conveniently forget the frustrations, the limitations, and the genuinely terrible parts. So let's talk about what we're actually not missing.
The Tech Was Painful
Remember dial-up internet? No, you don't. You remember the idea of dial-up. You remember it as a quirky inconvenience, a charming limitation of the era.
Here's what you actually forgot: waiting 10 minutes for a single image to load. Getting kicked offline because someone picked up the phone. That screeching modem sound at 2am when you were trying to be quiet. Download speeds measured in kilobytes per second.
You couldn't use the internet and the phone at the same time. Think about that. Your entire household's communication was held hostage by whether someone was checking their email.
And MP3 players? My first one held 256MB. That's about 60 songs. Total. Not per playlist â total. And you had to carefully curate which songs made the cut, like you were preparing for a desert island. "Do I really need three Led Zeppelin songs, or can I squeeze in one more Sum 41 track?"
Flip phones were terrible. The keypads wore out. Texting required hitting the "2" key three times to get a "C". Phones randomly died. And if you dropped it? Hope you liked gathering battery pieces off the ground like some kind of sad scavenger hunt.
Gaming Had Real Problems
Yes, NFS Most Wanted was incredible. But you know what else was true? If a game shipped broken, it stayed broken.
No patches. No updates. No fixes. If a game-breaking bug made it to release, that was just... your life now. Remember trying to get past that one glitched mission? You couldn't just google a workaround patch â you were stuck.
DRM was a nightmare. Some games required you to keep the disc in the drive at all times. Others had "copy protection" that just straight-up didn't work with certain DVD drives, so legitimate customers couldn't play games they bought. StarForce was literally installing rootkits on people's computers.
And online gaming? Hope you liked hosting matches on your own terrible internet connection. No matchmaking. No skill-based pairing. Just getting absolutely destroyed by someone who played 12 hours a day while you tried to figure out the controls.
Split-screen was great when it worked, but let's be honest: playing four-player split-screen meant each person got a screen the size of a postage stamp. And someone always screen-watched.
The Music Piracy Era Was Stressful
Everyone talks fondly about Limewire and Kazaa like they were these great tools of liberation. And sure, free music was cool. But you know what wasn't cool?
The very real threat of lawsuits.
The RIAA was suing individual people â college students, parents, grandparents â for tens of thousands of dollars. People had their lives ruined over downloading some Metallica songs. That's not funny or charming; it was genuinely scary.
And the downloads themselves? Half of them were mislabeled. You'd download "Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit" and get some random garage band or, worse, a 30-second clip of someone yelling profanity. Or a virus. Mostly viruses.
Every download was a gamble. Is this actually the song I want, or is it going to install 47 toolbars and turn my homepage into a casino ad?
The Web Was Actually Pretty Slow
I've written multiple posts about how great the old web was. And philosophically? I stand by it. But functionally? It was slow as hell.
Loading a single webpage could take minutes. Watching a video online? Forget it. YouTube didn't exist until 2005, and even then, videos buffered for ages. You'd click play, go make a sandwich, come back, and it was at 12%.
Flash websites were beautiful and completely unusable. They took forever to load, broke constantly, and were completely inaccessible to anyone with a disability. We prioritized "cool" over "functional" and everyone just... accepted it.
And those GeoCities sites I romanticized? A lot of them were genuinely hard to navigate. Broken links everywhere. Auto-playing MIDI files you couldn't stop. Animated GIFs that made the text unreadable. We remember the charm and forget the actual user experience was often terrible.
Being Unreachable Wasn't Always Freedom
I've talked about how not being constantly online was liberating. And sometimes it was! But let's also acknowledge: sometimes it just sucked.
Plans fell through constantly because you couldn't coordinate last-minute changes. "Meet at the mall at 3pm" meant you had to be there at 3pm sharp, because if someone was late, there was no way to know why or when they'd show up.
You missed important calls because you weren't home. No voicemail unless you paid extra. No way to check messages remotely. If something urgent happened, tough luck.
Getting lost in an unfamiliar area meant you were actually lost. No GPS. Just vibes and maybe a printed MapQuest direction that would inevitably tell you to turn on a street that didn't exist.
Pop Culture Had a Lot of Cringe
We remember the good stuff. But the 2000s also gave us:
Those terrible "epic movie" parodies. Remember when every movie spoof was just "random = funny"? Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie â genuinely painful.
Reality TV at its worst. Not just harmless guilty pleasures, but genuinely exploitative shows that humiliated people for entertainment.
Emo/scene culture gatekeeping. If you liked a band after they got popular, you were a "poser." Music snobbery was rampant and exhausting.
Casual homophobia and sexism in mainstream comedy. So many jokes that were considered "edgy" back then are just... yikes now.
The 2000s weren't some progressive paradise. A lot of the culture was actively worse than what we have now.
The Actual World Wasn't Great Either
Let's zoom out: the 2000s had the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, post-9/11 paranoia, the 2008 financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, the rise of surveillance culture, and the normalization of torture through "enhanced interrogation."
It wasn't a carefree decade. It was marked by anxiety, recession, and war. A lot of the "fun" pop culture we remember was escapism from some genuinely dark stuff.
The internet might have been more creative, but it was also less accessible. Not everyone had broadband. Not everyone had a computer at home. The digital divide was real and created genuine inequality.
So Why Are We Nostalgic?
Here's the truth: we're not nostalgic for the 2000s. We're nostalgic for being young.
When you're 14, everything feels significant. Your favorite band isn't just music â it's your identity. That video game isn't just entertainment â it's a defining memory. The limitations feel like adventures because you don't know any better.
But the things that actually made the 2000s special weren't exclusive to the 2000s. Creativity, community, experimentation â those things still exist. We just have to choose them.
The old web had magic not because it was old, but because people made things. You can still do that now. The racing games were fun not because of the era, but because developers took creative risks. Indies do that today.
Nostalgia shows you the bedroom, not the arguments. The custom cars, not the loading times. The freedom, not the limitations.
What We Should Actually Bring Forward
This whole website is a love letter to the 2000s, but I don't actually want to go back. I want to take the good parts forward:
The creativity and experimentation â but with modern tools that actually work.
The sense of ownership â but without the technical headaches.
The community focus â but more inclusive and accessible.
The playfulness â but without the gatekeeping and toxicity.
We can have personal websites without dial-up. We can have customization without broken Flash plugins. We can have underground communities without excluding people who don't fit a narrow mold.
The best parts of the 2000s aren't dead â we just have to choose them. Build a website. Make something weird. Join a small community. Customize your stuff. Those options still exist.
But let's not pretend everything was better back then. Some things were worse. Some things were frustrating. Some things genuinely sucked.
And that's okay. We can appreciate what worked, acknowledge what didn't, and build something better going forward.
What's something from the 2000s you definitely DON'T miss? I'm curious what your rose-tinted glasses are blocking out. Sign the guestbook and be honest â it's okay to admit some things sucked.
The Golden Age of Illegal Street Racing Games
Posted on November 15, 2025
Need for Speed: Most Wanted wasn't just a game. It was a moment.
You know the one I'm talking about. That intro where you're racing the BMW M3 GTR through the streets at dawn, Styles of Beyond blasting, before Razor cheats you out of your car. The pure, concentrated early-2000s energy of it all. The game didn't just let you race â it made you feel something.
And Most Wanted wasn't alone. Between 2003 and 2008, we lived through the absolute golden age of illegal street racing games. NFS Underground, Midnight Club 3, Burnout 3, Juiced â these weren't just racing games. They were cultural artifacts. They captured a specific moment when car culture, hip-hop, and video games collided in the most beautiful, ridiculous way possible.
And we'll never get that back.
đī¸ When Racing Games Had Soul
Here's what made 2000s street racing games special: they had personality.
Underground 2 let you customize everything. And I mean everything. You could spend hours in the garage tweaking your Nissan Skyline's underglow, adding vinyls, adjusting the cant on your wheels. The game respected car culture. It understood that for a lot of people, the car itself was the point â racing was just an excuse to show it off.
Most Wanted had that Blacklist system where you worked your way up through 15 rivals, each with their own personality, car, and territory. You knew who Razor was. You hated him. When you finally beat him and got your M3 back, it meant something. Modern racing games give you a championship trophy. Most Wanted gave you revenge.
Carbon had the canyon duels, the crew system, territory wars. Underground had those amazing magazine covers when you won events. These games understood drama, progression, and making you feel like you were part of something bigger than just "Race 1, Race 2, Race 3."
đĩ The Soundtracks That Defined an Era
Let's be honest: half the reason we remember these games is the music.
Underground introduced an entire generation to rock-rap fusion with Lil Jon, The Crystal Method, and Static-X. Most Wanted had Styles of Beyond's "Nine Thou" â which is still THE illegal street racing anthem. Carbon brought in Shortcuts, Nahkti, and a darker, more aggressive vibe.
These soundtracks didn't just accompany the game; they defined it. You can't think about Underground 2 without hearing "Riders on the Storm" by Snoop Dogg. You can't think about Burnout 3 without remembering how perfectly the soundtrack synced with causing massive highway pileups.
Modern racing games have licensed music too, but it's curated to be safe, broad, inoffensive. The 2000s games took risks. They had a point of view. They said "this is what street racing sounds like" and committed to it.
đšī¸ Arcade Fun vs. Simulation Snobbery
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: arcade physics are more fun.
I know, I know. Gran Turismo and Forza fans will come for me. "But realistic tire wear!" "But proper weight transfer!" Look, I respect simulation racing. I do. But there's something magical about the way an NFS game lets you drift around a corner at 140 mph, scrape three cop cars, hit a speedbreaker, and land perfectly to continue the race.
The 2000s street racers understood that realism isn't the same as fun. They gave you just enough vehicle weight and handling to feel good, then threw realism out the window in favor of spectacle. Burnout let you ram opponents into walls at 200 mph and walk away. Midnight Club let you activate special abilities mid-race. These games weren't simulating reality â they were simulating the fantasy of illegal street racing.
And that's what made them great.
đŦ Peak Fast & Furious Energy
These games didn't exist in a vacuum. They were part of the early Fast & Furious cultural moment.
The first F&F came out in 2001. 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003. Tokyo Drift in 2006. And right in that window, we got Underground (2003), Underground 2 (2004), and Most Wanted (2005). The games and movies were feeding off each other, creating this feedback loop of import car culture, street racing aesthetics, and impossibly cool underground racing scenes.
The games captured something the movies eventually lost: that scrappy, underground energy. Before the series became about stealing god's eye satellites and driving cars into space, it was about quarter-mile races for pink slips. The games stayed in that pocket longer.
NFS Underground's entire aesthetic â the neon underglow, the vinyl wraps, the body kits, the hydraulics â was pure early F&F. And it worked because the culture was real. People really did modify Civics and Eclipses like that. The games weren't inventing a fantasy; they were celebrating a subculture.
đŽ What Modern Racing Games Lost
So what happened? Why don't we get games like this anymore?
Part of it is that racing games split into two camps: ultra-realistic sims (Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport) and over-the-top arcade chaos (Mario Kart, Rocket League). The middle ground â arcade-style street racers with personality â basically disappeared.
The 2015 Need for Speed reboot tried to recapture the magic and... didn't. It had the customization, it had the aesthetic, but it felt hollow. Always-online requirement. Cringeworthy live-action cutscenes. The soul was gone.
NFS Heat (2019) got closer, but it still felt safe. Corporate. The edges were sanded off. No more edgy soundtracks. No more genuinely antagonistic rivals you wanted to destroy. Just clean, acceptable, algorithm-friendly racing.
And split-screen? Forget it. The 2000s were the last era where you and three friends could crowd around one TV with four controllers and race together. Now everything's online, matchmaking, anonymous opponents you'll never see again. We traded couch co-op for convenience and lost something irreplaceable.
đ The Moments We'll Never Forget
Some memories are burned into my brain:
That first time you saw your customized car on a magazine cover in Underground. The game literally put your creation on the in-game equivalent of Import Tuner and made you feel like a star.
The Pursuit Breaker moments in Most Wanted. Smashing through a gas station to drop a canopy on the cops behind you. Chef's kiss.
The canyon duels in Carbon. One mistake and you're off the cliff. Pure adrenaline.
Causing a massive pile-up in Burnout 3's Crash mode. Watching the damage counter climb into the millions as cars explode in slow motion.
The Midnight Club 3 open world. Cruising through San Diego or Atlanta with your crew, challenging random racers, finding shortcuts.
These weren't just gameplay mechanics. They were experiences. They made you feel something.
đ Why It Mattered
I think what I miss most about 2000s racing games is the creativity.
Developers were willing to take risks. They'd try weird stuff. Juiced had betting systems and crew members you could recruit. Midnight Club had that crazy "find your own route" open-world approach. NFS Carbon had autosculpt for designing custom body kits. These features didn't always work perfectly, but they tried something new.
Modern racing games feel like they're following a template. Here's your car list. Here's your track list. Here's your online multiplayer. Nothing too weird. Nothing too specific. Nothing that might alienate a potential market segment.
The 2000s street racers knew exactly who they were for: people who wanted to feel like underground racing legends, people who loved car culture, people who wanted drama and personality and style along with their racing. They weren't trying to be everything to everyone.
And maybe that's the real lesson. When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. The 2000s racing games were unapologetically themselves. They were cheesy, over-the-top, sometimes ridiculous â and that's exactly why we still remember them.
Of course, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I've spent 2000 words gushing about these games, but let me be real with you: the 2000s weren't actually as great as I'm making them sound. More on that next time.
What's your favorite racing game from the 2000s? Sign the guestbook and tell me which game defined street racing for you.
Why I Don't Want My Website to Be 'Discoverable'
Posted on November 12, 2025
A friend asked me recently: "Why haven't you optimized your site for SEO? Don't you want people to find it?"
And I realized something that probably sounds crazy in 2025: No. Not really.
I don't want this site to be "discoverable" in the way we usually mean it. I don't want it ranking on Google. I don't want it going viral. I don't want thousands of strangers stumbling upon it because an algorithm decided it would maximize their engagement.
Let me explain why that's actually a good thing.
đ¯ The Tyranny of Discoverability
Somewhere along the way, we decided that if content isn't easily discoverable, it's worthless. If your blog doesn't rank on page one of Google, why bother writing it? If your video doesn't hit the algorithm just right, did it even happen?
This mindset has ruined the internet.
It means every piece of writing is reverse-engineered for search engines. Every video title is clickbait. Every blog post is stuffed with keywords. We're not creating for humans anymore â we're creating for robots that decide what humans see.
And worse: it makes us write for everyone instead of someone.
đĄ Small Spaces Are Better Spaces
Think about your favorite online communities. I bet they weren't the biggest ones.
The best forum I ever joined had maybe 200 active members. We all knew each other's usernames. Inside jokes developed. When someone disappeared for a while, people noticed and asked if they were okay.
That forum never showed up on Google. You found it through a link from another small site, or because a friend told you about it. That barrier to entry â that tiny bit of effort required to find it â filtered for people who actually cared.
The huge subreddits with millions of subscribers? They're different. Louder, faster, more anonymous. Not necessarily worse, but definitely not intimate.
When you optimize for discoverability, you're optimizing for scale. And scale is the enemy of community.
⨠The Joy of Being Hard to Find
When someone finds this site, I want it to feel like discovering something.
Maybe they clicked through from another personal site's links page. Maybe a friend sent them the URL directly. Maybe they were browsing Neocities and stumbled across it by chance.
However they got here, they meant to be here. They took an intentional step. And that changes everything.
When someone signs my guestbook, I know they actually read the site. They're not just drive-by traffic from a Google search for "cool retro websites." They found their way here through the old paths â links, recommendations, exploration.
Those people are my audience. All twelve of them.
đ Against Growth for Growth's Sake
Here's a question nobody asks anymore: Why do you want more visitors?
For a business, the answer is obvious: more visitors means more customers means more money. But this isn't a business. It's a personal website. What am I selling? Who benefits from getting to 10,000 monthly visitors instead of 100?
Not me. More traffic just means more maintenance, more spam in the guestbook, more people demanding updates or changes. The people who find this site organically are already the right audience.
We've internalized the Silicon Valley growth mindset so deeply that we can't imagine creating something that isn't supposed to scale. But think about it: your dinner party doesn't need to "grow its userbase." Your journal doesn't need "engagement metrics." Your garden doesn't need to "optimize for reach."
Some things are allowed to be small.
đ Privacy Through Obscurity
There's also something freeing about not being findable.
I can write whatever I want here without worrying about it showing up when someone googles my name. I can experiment with weird ideas. I can be myself without performing for an imaginary mass audience.
This isn't hiding â the site is public, anyone with the URL can visit. It's just choosing not to broadcast. It's the difference between having a conversation in your living room versus shouting in a public square.
The old web understood this. You could have a whole website dedicated to your niche hobby or weird interest, and it would just... exist. Quietly. For the people who cared enough to find it.
đą How to Be Intentionally Undiscoverable
If you're inspired to make your own small corner of the web, here's how to keep it cozy:
Skip the SEO. Don't worry about keywords, meta descriptions, or sitemaps. Write for humans, not search engines.
Don't share it on social media. Or do, but sparingly. Let it spread organically through links and word of mouth.
Embrace the link economy. Put your site on a links page. Join a webring. Get listed in small directories. These are low-traffic ways to be found by the right people.
Use robots.txt if you want. You can literally tell search engines not to index your site. Not every page needs to be in Google.
Forget analytics. Do you really need to know your bounce rate? Just make stuff and let it exist.
đ The Web We Need
I think the internet would be better if more sites were like this. Small, weird, personal, hard to find unless you're actually looking.
Not because discoverability is bad â sometimes you need to be found. Businesses, public services, important information should absolutely be easy to discover.
But personal websites? Hobby blogs? Fan shrines? Creative projects? Maybe those can just... exist. Not everything needs to compete for attention.
This site has Comic Sans and rainbow text and a guestbook nobody's signed yet. It loads in under a second. It costs me $0 to host on Neocities. It will never make money, never go viral, never be featured anywhere.
And that's exactly why I love it.
If you found your way here, welcome. You were meant to be here. Not because an algorithm sent you, but because you followed a link, or a recommendation, or curiosity. You're not traffic. You're a guest.
And that makes all the difference.
How did you find this site? I'm genuinely curious. Sign the guestbook and let me know your journey here â every path is interesting.
Why the Old Web Was Better (And What We Lost)
Posted on November 9, 2025
Remember when the internet felt like exploring someone's bedroom instead of walking through a mall?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately while building this site. Every time I add another blinking GIF or pick a garish color combination that would make a modern designer weep, I realize something: the old web wasn't just different aesthetically â it was different philosophically.
đ The Web of Bedrooms
In the early 2000s, personal websites were exactly that â personal. Your GeoCities page was like inviting someone into your room. It was messy, chaotic, and completely, unapologetically you. You had your favorite anime characters in the header, a MIDI file of your favorite song playing on loop, and a page dedicated to your hamster named Mr. Whiskers.
Nobody cared if your color scheme was "on brand." There was no brand. There was just you, HTML tables, and whatever GIF animations you could find on animation websites.
Today's web feels more like a endless corporate park. Every site looks the same: minimal white space, the same three fonts, perfectly centered hero images with overlay text. Instagram profiles. LinkedIn pages. Medium blogs with that signature font. We've optimized the soul right out of it.
đ Discovery vs. Algorithm
Back then, you found websites through webrings â circular chains of sites about similar topics. You'd click "next site" and stumble onto someone's shrine to their favorite TV show, complete with fan fiction and a chat room.
Or you'd browse directories. Or follow a link from a friend's site. Every click was a small adventure. You never knew if the next page would be brilliantly weird or just... weird weird. But that was the charm.
Now? The algorithm decides what you see. Facebook shows you content designed to maximize engagement (read: outrage). Google surfaces SEO-optimized content farms. TikTok feeds you what keeps you scrolling. We've traded serendipity for efficiency, and lost something magical in the process.
⨠Creation vs. Consumption
Here's the big one: the old web assumed you were a creator.
If you wanted to be online, you built something. Maybe it was just a page with your favorite quotes and a guestbook, but you made it. You learned HTML by viewing source on other people's pages. You taught yourself CSS by breaking things and fixing them. Everyone was a builder.
Modern social media turned us into consumers. Sure, you can "post content," but within their walled gardens, using their templates, playing by their rules. Try to customize your Facebook page â you can't. Want to change your Twitter layout? Nope. You're not a creator anymore; you're a tenant.
And worse: we stopped owning our content. Your tweets, your photos, your memories â they live on someone else's server. If the company goes under or decides to delete your account, poof. Gone.
đĨ Community vs. Audience
Old web forums and guestbooks fostered real communities. You'd recognize the same usernames. Inside jokes developed. People with niche interests â model train enthusiasts, obscure anime fans, amateur astronomers â found each other and built genuine connections.
Now we have "followers" and "engagement metrics." Conversations happen in the replies, but they're performative. You're not talking to people; you're talking to an audience. Everything is a take, a hot take, a content opportunity.
The old web was about connection. The new web is about attention.
đ What We Can Bring Back
I'm not suggesting we all abandon modern platforms (I'm on Bluesky â see the footer!). But we can reclaim some of what made the old web special:
Build your own corner of the internet. Get a domain. Learn basic HTML. Make something that's yours â truly yours. Let it be weird. Let it be ugly. Let it have eighteen different fonts and a tiled background of stars.
Link to other people's sites. Bring back the blogroll. Make a links page. Help people discover things the algorithm would never show them.
Make things for the joy of making. Not everything needs to be monetized or optimized. Sometimes a website about your cat is enough.
Own your content. Cross-post to social media if you want, but keep the original on your own site. Your digital home should be yours.
đ Final Thoughts
The internet used to be a place we built together, one garish personal homepage at a time. Somewhere along the way, we let corporations build it for us instead. We traded creativity for convenience, communities for audiences, bedrooms for billboards.
But here's the thing: that old web never really died. It's still here, in the corners. On Neocities. On personal blogs. On weird little sites maintained by people who remember what the internet could be.
This site â with its Comic Sans and rainbow text and complete disregard for modern design principles â isn't just nostalgia. It's a reminder that the web can still be a place for creativity, weirdness, and genuine self-expression.
It's a rebellion against the algorithm.
And honestly? It's way more fun.
What do you remember about the old web? Do you miss it? Sign the guestbook and let me know â I read every entry.
How I made this website
Posted on November 6, 2025
This site started as a small retro web experiment â I wanted a page that blends the feel of the 2000s GeoCities era with a few modern conveniences.
What I used:
- Plain HTML for structure (index, about, links, guestbook, blog, 404).
- CSS for the visual style and animations (gradients, striped "under construction" banner, and a rainbow text animation).
- Lightweight assets only â I replaced external PNG/GIF icons with emoji and CSS patterns to keep the site small and easy to host on Neocities.
Design notes:
- I used a playful font (Comic Sans) and bright gradients to evoke early personal homepages.
- Navigation is simple and repeated on every page so visitors always know where they are.
- Small features like a guestbook, site counter, and "Now Playing" area are there for nostalgia and to make the site feel alive.
Features added so far: a Games section, a Blog, a custom 404 page, and a Bluesky link in the footer. I deliberately avoided heavy libraries to keep this portable and easy to upload to Neocities.
If you want, I can split this into a longer standalone post (with screenshots or an expanded developers' notes page), add a thumbnail for a game, or wire the guestbook to a backend.
Continue reading â