In 2002, I was in year 8 and had very few friends. After enrolling in my third high school in two years, I was pretty sick of having to make a good impression for a bunch of cruel thirteen year olds. I spent all my free time re-watching episodes of Toonami that I’d taped, drawing bad anime or downloading midi files off of a multitude of Sailor Moon webrings.

Just before the summer holidays, it suddenly became very cool to have your own Geocities webpage. My friends had jumped on board, and as I was in the height of peer pressure acceptance, I followed suit. Thanks to the wonderful Geocities WYSIWYG editor, I knocked up a Hello Kitty profile page full of Comic Sans and a baby pink text cursor trail that I’m pretty sure read ‘WeLcOmE 2 mY wEbSiTe ^_^’. It was really just another pointless page among the trash heap of post Y2K internet. But at least it was my pointless page. Oh, and I just found an archived version. It’s beautiful.

My father was dating some woman at the time who was seemingly very excited that I had an interest in web design, and gave me a copy of Photoshop 6 as some kind of peace offering. A lot of my father’s girlfriends would give me gifts over the years, but this topped the list. I had no idea what I was doing with it, but there was no shortage of tutorials available to devour. It wasn’t before long that I was plastering Photoshop brushes all over Cardcaptor Sakura manga scans and attempting pixel art. It turned out to be a pretty productive summer.

I took Computer Studies as an elective in year 9 and the material we were learning was horrendously out of date, even by 2003 standards. We spent a good part of the year learning Logo and I became overly acquainted with that stupid turtle as I attempted to make my first game – a Japanese flash card quiz. The whole reason I had taken the class was to learn more about web design, which turned out wasn’t going to be taught until after I dropped it in favour of Art and Japanese. So I continued to rely on tutorial sites for how the hell to use Dreamweaver and think beyond frames.

As I was way into the whole ‘kawaii’ mascot kind of crap, I fell prey to all sorts of time wasting gimmicks. Mikan Seijin springs to mind. It was a relatively popular Japanese character that had its own short cartoon show on Fuji TV, and someone out there in the vast emptiness of web 1.0 decided that the world definitely needed a screenmate – a glorified widget, popularised by Neko though I’d hazard a guess most people are more familiar with a certain sheep? So instead of writing essays, I would spend a lot of my time poking this stupid tangerine around and dropping it off of different dialog boxes. It was a great, meaningless distraction that ate up way too many background resources to keep running. Plus it only had a limited number of animations before it became somewhat of an eyesore.

It was from here that my journey into the early weird wide web took an unexpected path into the world of flash. It’s no surprise really. After all, this was a time where I’d be getting chain emails from kids in my class with Group X’s ‘I Just Want (Bang Bang Bang)’ attachments and the ever popular Homestar Runner began taking precedence over my constant Simpsons references. It’s thanks to early flash hubs like Albino Blacksheep that I was able to experience some of the crudest comedy (and animation) the adolescent internet had to offer.

Through some kind of planetary alignment and cosmic miracle, my budding interest in quirky time wasting Japanese gimmicks and flash animation/games came together in the form of veteran web developer, Toshimitsu Takagi and a series of room escape games he made available on his portfolio site. At that point in time, it was still fairly common to find a lot of Japanese websites that hadn’t utilised Unicode, rendering all the text into a meaningless wall of glyphs. It created a further divide between the western web and the Japanese web, the architecture behind the design and interfacing differed greatly. The Japanese web was predominantly built for cell phone use, the reliance on text over images and sparse design elements made Japanese websites on western computers almost incomprehensible from a design perspective. So when I found a Japanese site that not only managed to circumvent this common issue by using Flash that combined Japanese and English, but one that was visually appealing, I jumped right in.

I’d read rumours about how difficult Crimson Room was, and the way people talked it up almost made it into a horror game. Of course, the premise is quite simple. You awake in an unfamiliar room, locked in with no memory of how you got there. There’s no backstory, no character narrative, just you and a room full of possible solutions. The one downside to the room escape genre is the reliance on ‘click everything until stuff happens’, though anyone who had come from a background in early point and click adventure games would likely cut the gimmick some slack. Personally, I like the ‘click everything’ gimmick because it further emphasises the need to come to a solution and y’know…escape the room.

Other than the opening jingle and the final ending, there’s very little in the way of music in Crimson Room, drawing further prominence to the one sound effect you will come to know – that dreadful DUN-DUNNN when you come across a clue. Once you begin to exhaust all your options though, hearing that chime after clicking pixel by pixel over a damn mattress for fifteen minutes is incredibly satisfying.

The first time I played Crimson Room, I probably sat up late at night and stressed over my lack of puzzle solving ability. The rather poor English translation made it a little difficult to rationalise how to combine certain objects, not to mention the zero explanation of any of these objects. None of them carry any particular meaning, and only serve a purpose as a means to find another key object before finally cracking the doorknob off and escaping.

Or so you think.

Viridian Room is the follow up to Crimson Room and is actually a much better game, though not nearly as popular. Though this time you’re not alone, pull the light switch and you’ll find yourself in a small studio with a covered skeleton. I’d go further into it, but that would just spoil the cute little twist at the end. But I will say this – look into the hole where the doorknob was and have your mind blown. It’s a neat little trick that really made me wish there were more interwoven flash games like this still around.

I thought about all this because I realised that all I did this summer was binge watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine and farm more S++ soldiers in MGSV (oh, and not write…obviously). While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with that, it made me a little nostalgic for a time when my entertainment options were limited to what could feasibly load on a 56k modem before I ripped my hair out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a way to get Mikan Seijin working on a 64-bit PC.