The Black Io Chronicles.

In a lot of ways, Worlds.com is the ultimate ‘90s nostalgia trip, offering an express ticket to that one massively awkward portion of the decade where otherwise sane people assumed the future of computing would involve strapping on a VR headset and playing through the entirety of TRON every time you wanted to copy a document.

First launched in '94 and lionized by the likes of David Bowie and Aerosmith, Worlds.com was one of the earliest graphical chatrooms in online history, making it the crusty, cloud-hassling ancestor to the likes of Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel. In defiance of all common sense, it’s still up and running - pretty amazing when you consider whatever relevance it might have had probably peaked around the time the first Matrix movie hit theatres.

As seasoned connoisseurs (and occasional creators) of '90s schlock, cryoclaire and I recently downloaded the Worlds client to take it for a spin. And as you can probably guess from the screenshots, we weren’t disappointed.

Worlds, Inc. may boast of “rich media graphics”,  but in practice, it’s room after room of visual non sequiturs broken up by an equally relentless stream of download prompts that forces you to restart the program every. single. time. you. switch. an. area.  Not that it matters, since pretty much every environment is (a) completely deserted and (b) charmingly ugly, coming across in places like an amateur Doom level modeled after the prom-limo offspring of a lava lamp and one of those “Punch the Monkey” banner ads. In keeping with this overall aesthetic, I slipped into the most aggressively awful avatar I could find; this turned out to be a hideous animu creature, the sort a 12-year-old DeviantArt user might have whipped up if asked to Rule 37 Tyrion Lannister.

Claire’s jester-reaper and my chibi sex nightmare managed to burn almost an hour goggling at the sights, starting with the themed music lounges. SPOILER ALERT: “Classic rock” is a hippie staggering around in an underground bunker illuminated by flashing GIFs designed solely to kill every epileptic person on the planet, while the proud traditions of "Classical Music" are represented by a geisha(!) and a series of long hallways the developers half-inched from an EverQuest dungeon sometime back in '97. "Country" was almost normal - if you ignored what looked like an awful lot like a dead body sprawled out in the middle distance. Along the way, we found a bathroom that led into what can only be described as some kind of CHUD party dungeon and wandered the world’s saddest frat house.

The game’s branded content is equally bizarre and hilariously outdated: witness that spoopy Blair Witch-themed diner or HansonWorld II(!!), located in the basement of a gas station sited smack dab in the middle of a vast desert wasteland I can only assume is some kind of extended metaphor for Hanson’s career post-“MMMBop”. Once the novelty of wandering through the world’s worst funhouse wears off, though… well, you’re out of luck, since all of the embedded video links apparently broke sometime during the first Bush administration and most of the hot, hot music news involves Metallica spatting with Napster users. 

Still, the Worlds client is a free download, and can easily offer tens of minutes of entertainment to the less discerning nostalgia hound. And for all its eye-fouling looks, there’s something fundamentally endearing about it; part of me almost wants to strongarm Claire into slapping together a janky Crow Bar with WorldsShaper.

(Fun postscript: Since DMC World apparently doesn’t pay the bills like it used to, operator Worlds, Inc. has instead resorted to suing gaming behemoths Activision Blizzard for patent infringement - as appropriate a capper as any to this bizarre, blessedly failed experiment in “virtual worldbuilding”.)