Viral Infection Archived

A little while back, Gauntlet archived a bunch of Sinster Six stuff due to the imminent closing of Geocities, the internet’s longtime favourite source of simple, free-hosted websites. Today, I bring you the results of my own Geocities salvage operation, the site of the original EXE1 Team, Viral Infection.

VI had a bit of a rough history with hosting. First we were on Geocities, then a couple of flakey servers belonging to friends of TRC. As a result of lots of moving, we racked up a lot of different formats and layouts in our brief 2001-2002 existence. After it was all over, it came full circle back to Geocities on my own account. With a lot of content lost with former servers and so many conflicting backups, I didn’t post much on this memorial site, just the sprites, links to the stuff Gauntlet already put here, and the new VI-related stuff like TRC’s reunion epilogues and the Virus Gallery.

When I started the move to this server, I figured I would just grab all that stuff and plunk it over. I wish now it were so simple, but I kept finding more and more extra stuff I wanted to add:

  • Files stored on the Geocities account I hadn’t posted any permanent links to anywhere like my name origins article or the navisceration checklist.
  • The other backups gathering dust on my hard drive I now had the technical know-how to convert and clean-up to fit with the others.
  • A lot more content thought long-gone courtesy of archive.org. I could have sworn I tried that place years ago. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.
  • How about all-new stuff? Mostly out of necessity, I needed to whip up some new images replace lost ones in the bios and chip galleries, and when I decided all the script-based stories needed to be sprited like epilogues, I suddenly needed sprites for a few of the original characters.

It took a couple weeks longer than I expected (i.e. it took two weeks instead of one night), but it’s done. There’s a lot of nostalgia in there, things some of you haven’t seen in seven years. I highly reccommend a glimpse at the sprite gallery, and a quick read of the stories, or what I could recover of them. Also check the Downloads page for some avatars and wallpapers.

I gotta say I’m going to miss Geocities. There are a lot of old friends’ sites that look like they won’t be recovered like this, like Clownman’s Circus or Darkman’s Robot Warriors. I actually grabbed a few things from those sites to put on VI here because I don’t want the internet to be forever deprived of Stoneman’s sprite animation of Megaman’s exploding head.