Some of my readers may be Millennials like me and remember a different internet than the one we have today.
Do you remember when the web felt open, full of possibilities and almost like you were being invited along for a delightful ride through the whole experience?
I certainly do.
But I haven't felt that in many years.
I crave the vibes that defined the internet around 2003-2013. That, in my opinion, was the golden era.
There were no pricing tables yet, or at least they were rare in 2003.
Every site you visited just had huge invitations to sign up for FREE.
One of the greatest casualties of the social media machine has been unique projects that had personality.
I can't be the only person here who fondly remembers the joy and randomness of hitting that Stumble button on my toolbar, right?!
StumbleUpon had a way of surfacing the truly strange stuff collecting digital dust in forgotten corners of the web.
The kind of sites it would take you to just had a specific feel to them that I have trouble replicating today.
But when it does happen, I do tend to take notice.
I was especially sad when Adobe finally discontinued Flash back in 2020. It may have been well overdue from a technological standpoint, but Flash games had a certain special feel to them that mobile apps cannot capture.
The bar to entry was pretty low when it came to creating Flash games back in the day, which I think is a positive.
There is something about games that are a little amateurish that aligns deeply with me.
And when it comes to looking for the same joy that wasting hours playing silly little forgotten Flash games brought me for so many years, the closest I've come is itch.io
What is Itch.io?
Well, I don't claim to be any kind of expert or power user. But I have been regularly using the site for a few years now, and if I had to describe it to someone who had never heard of it, I'd probably say: it's a community and platform for indie game creators and it leans hard into the spirit of imperfect experimentation.
There are fun games, of course. You may have to do a bit of digging to find one that you will put effort into returning to play, but they exist.
In fact, I recently started an Awesome List on Github to curate my favorite games on itch.io.
But just like Github has a lot more to offer than just coding projects, Itch.io is not just a game site.
Even if you may not build games (or maybe you do), Itch.io is a great place to upload graphic design assets/packs, and even online tools or software projects.
But before I move on to say more about all of that, maybe we should take a second to revise what we said a moment ago.
Full disclosure: I have tried to make a few silly games with AI.
I love playing games!
So if trying your hand at a game sounds like it could be interesting, by all means, there is no reason not to give it a try.
Other Types of Projects on Itch.io
Beyond games, there are a surprising number of different content types you can browse or create on Itch.io. In fact, rarely have I used a platform that allows so many different formats and types of projects.
There are specific categories for:
Books
Tools
Graphics
Comics
Physical games
Albums and soundtracks
That means you can more or less upload almost anything.
<a href="https://monapdx.itch.io/modular-markup-pack">Modular Markup Pack by monapdx</a>