Hi! To clarify, no, this is not a geocities website. It's (almost) completely fictional. My intended purpose was to create a site that would invoke nostalgia though both it's usage of recognizable characters and games, and to tell a story using the ambiguous nature of "identity" and how we present it online, now and in the past.
NintendoFan's website uses existing, archived gifs and images of Geocities websites. I used https://gifcities.org/, specifically their "Sonic", "Chao", and "Plant" collections, a collection of Chao gifs, Emma31's Backgrounds.
NintendoFan's website also includes several pieces of original content- Almost all of the text in the old about page (about.html), the pokemon fanfiction (thesecret.html), and the expanded about page (moreabout.html) is from my own fanfiction.net profile I had when I was 9 years old. I wanted to include this text to add genuieness to the pages, without necessarily being mocking, and as it mirrors the situation within my own piece- having a piece of your childhood on display for the Internet to see, a part of the Internet you were likely too young to be on and will never be able to fully remove. The picture shown in about.html, "lugismall.jpg", is a heavily compressed version of one of my own images, as a reference to a picture that was in my old profile- a picture so frequently stolen and passed around that it is nearly impossible to find the source, with every attempt to search for the original artist ending with 100 pages of stolen content.
Both of these facets, the original and referenced content, is intended to invoke the nature of the early internet- without the ability to search for artist on a wide scale, artwork in all forms could be passed around from person to person with a very small chance of finding the original source, in the wild-western days of "I like it so I'm going to download it and keep it on my page."
I wanted to explore the ways people choose to present themselves online- especially in the early days of the internet and personal blogs, and how these are both similar and vastly different from the current internet era. We aren't able to communicate directly with this person- we can only assume and guess and who they are in their daily lives, and all information we know is given by them. There would be very, very little way to find them, even if they were real- they never gave a name, a state, a school, barely even their interests- their username isn't exactly unique, either. The only way would be to contact them directly, and given that this is an archived site, that's unlikely. We can only know this person by whats on this site, even if they have an entire life outside of it.
In short- in the present, we are known by companies and our social media and everyone that can find an ip address. But, for the past? There's no guarantee that they live where they used to, that they have the same email, that they would even respond. The people in internet archives may not exist anymore, or at least how they were almost two decades ago. Their identities, as they were, are still there.