This week in tech, 20 years ago

It’s difficult to remember a time when online media wasn’t arranged largely around memetic cultural events. On any given April 20th in recent years, for instance, you can find all sorts of weed-themed stories pegged around the unofficial holiday for marijuana. That’s not so in 1999: a search for “420” brings up precious few results.

Instead, the science and technology news of late April included one big company shake-up, some odd developments in space, and an extremely doomed game studio founded by Michael Crichton. Here’s this week in tech, 20 years ago.

The year is 1999. Microsoft, accused of using its market power to strangle web browser company Netscape, is still embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit. The first sections of the International Space Station have entered orbit. Companies and governments alike are working to fix the Year 2000 Bug, which threatens to crash computers across the world. And email is maybe ruining the English language. Welcome to a new year of This Week in Tech, 20 Years Ago.

This February, we’ll be following how the internet transformed writing, music, and revenge — plus stories about spy satellites and dances with computers.

We’re heading into the last days of 2018, and by extension, the last days of our look back at 1998 — where the dot-com bubble was steadily inflating, cyberspace was transforming everything from crime to horoscopes, and the end of the internet (or maybe civilization itself) was just a year away with Y2K. And that means one thing in the media world: time for some retrospectives!

I’ll be deviating slightly from the normal format by accepting a few pieces from both earlier in December and later in January, so I can offer a spread of analysis looking back at the year.

Half-Life is one of my favorite video game series, and in honor of its 20th anniversary, I spent a week replaying the first game — which feels incredibly refreshing in 2018. As expected, Valve Software didn’t make any surprise Half-Life 3 announcements to commemorate the milestone. But the team behind Black Mesa, an unofficial remake, released an evocative trailer for their game’s final levels. Those levels are due next year, keeping Half-Life growing even after two decades.

The rest of this week in 1998 had a few noteworthy moments too. Read on for Will Smith, the International Space Station, and the year’s creepiest animatronic toy.

You can find a lot of Halloween-themed coverage on The Verge, but this week also marked the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos — and the 20th anniversary of Grim Fandango, the classic adventure game that was heavily inspired by it. Grim Fandango was one of the last games from the acclaimed studio LucasArts, and its clever blend of noir pastiche and folklore has earned it acclaim since the very beginning, when GameSpot praised its “great writing and beautiful art direction.”

There’s a less-than-proud tradition of artists ripping off surface-level Día de Muertos imagery, an issue game director Tim Schafer has discussed: “I knew I was appropriating someone else’s culture, so the idea was to be as authentic as possible and do as much research as possible,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. But Grim Fandango is a distinctive piece of art, full of puzzles that have (mostly) held up well. It was released on the Nintendo Switch just this week — and if you decide to play it, here are five other stories to check out while it’s downloading.

A few months ago, I mentioned that it was “unfortunately” too early to write about the release of beloved role-playing game Fallout 2. Well, Fallout 2 was released this week 20 years ago, and I am definitively not going to write about it — because I already spent half my summer immersed in the series while researching the never-released Fallout Online. Fortunately, Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton has you covered with an entertaining analysis of Fallout 2’s first, frustrating level.

Instead, this week’s stories cover cyber romance, Y2K, and one of the year’s worst new TV shows.

One of 1998’s biggest tech stories was the massive antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. It’s Monopoly Week on The Verge, so I wrote a bit about that lawsuit’s place in the ‘90s legal landscape. I also reviewed Antitrust, the 2001 thriller about a fictionalized Microsoft that murders software developers to steal their code.

But today’s big news involves another incredibly important, potentially monopolistic tech company: Google, which was founded on September 4th, 1998. To celebrate, you can check out some “stickers” from one of Google’s earliest iterations. Or you can read on for news about celebrity chat rooms, flame mail, and a North Korean satellite.

There is surprisingly little news about technology and the 1998 World Cup.

The 2018 World Cup wraps up this weekend, and we’ve had lots to say about it — from how streaming video has made watching the games more convenient (unless it completely screws up) to how World Cup memes have made it all the way into Amazon’s Alexa. But in 1998... well, apparently it was the first year that officials used electronic displays during games. There were also a number of World Cup video games, including a ridiculous-looking Japanese arcade game and the first FIFA World Cup game from EA Sports — but these came out during the pre-Cup hype period, not the event itself.

This week in 2018 has been dominated by video game news, since the E3 conference in Los Angeles just wrapped up. The most exciting game I could find from this week in 1998 was the Nintendo 64 puzzler Wetrix, which essentially combined Tetris with terraforming. You can dig up the game itself through emulator sites, and Nintendo Life wrote a great piece about its weird development history — it was the accidental byproduct of a completely different project called Vampire Circus, which was sadly never produced.

Otherwise, the news this week tapped a rich vein of anxiety over digital avatars, online privacy, and having your baby on the internet.

As a person who covers day-to-day technology news, I often wonder how my writing might come off to someone in the future — and whether anyone will even be reading it. I can’t answer those questions, but I can do the next best thing: look back at what other people were writing 20 years ago.

Here are five stories — big and small — that science and tech enthusiasts might have checked out during the week before May 12th, 1998.

As a person who covers day-to-day technology news, I often wonder how my writing might come off to someone in the future — and whether anyone will even be reading it. I can’t answer those questions, but I can do the next best thing: look back at what other people were writing 20 years ago.

Here are five stories — big and small — that science and tech enthusiasts might have checked out during the week before April 21st, 1998.