🏆 Best of Game Design

When my brother and I were younger, we used to play a browser game called Mobstar.

There wasn't much to look at. Mobstar was a text-heavy online mafia game. You committed crimes, bought and sold drugs, accumulated money, improved your character, joined other players and tried to climb toward the upper reaches of a fictional criminal underworld. Most of what happened was represented through text, numbers, menus and buttons.

It belonged to a category of games that seemed to be everywhere on the Internet in the early 2000s.

And then, mostly, they disappeared.

So recently I did what anyone possessed by a sufficiently useless piece of childhood curiosity might do. I typed:

mobstar.cc

into my browser.

I expected nothing.

A dead domain, perhaps. A holding page. Maybe an Internet Archive result documenting the remains of a small website that had vanished fifteen years ago.

Instead, Mobstar loaded.

Not a preservation project. Not an emulator.

The game itself.

Even stranger, it is apparently still being maintained. Mobstar's website carries a 2003–2026 copyright notice, and on December 5, 2025, its administrators announced that the game had been reset and was beginning again with new updates.

More than twenty years after my brother and I encountered it, somebody is still keeping the lights on.

And seeing it again made me wonder whether these old games represented something more interesting than an obsolete technology. Maybe there was a design philosophy buried in them that is worth recovering.

When my brother and I were younger, we used to play a browser game called Mobstar.

There wasn't much to look at. Mobstar was a text-heavy online mafia game. You committed crimes, bought and sold drugs, accumulated money, improved your character, joined other players and tried to climb toward the upper reaches of a fictional criminal underworld. Most of what happened was represented through text, numbers, menus and buttons.

It belonged to a category of games that seemed to be everywhere on the Internet in the early 2000s.

And then, mostly, they disappeared.

So recently I did what anyone possessed by a sufficiently useless piece of childhood curiosity might do. I typed:

mobstar.cc

into my browser.

I expected nothing.

A dead domain, perhaps. A holding page. Maybe an Internet Archive result documenting the remains of a small website that had vanished fifteen years ago.

Instead, Mobstar loaded.

Not a preservation project. Not an emulator.

The game itself.

Even stranger, it is apparently still being maintained. Mobstar's website carries a 2003–2026 copyright notice, and on December 5, 2025, its administrators announced that the game had been reset and was beginning again with new updates.

More than twenty years after my brother and I encountered it, somebody is still keeping the lights on.

And seeing it again made me wonder whether these old games represented something more interesting than an obsolete technology. Maybe there was a design philosophy buried in them that is worth recovering.

When my brother and I were younger, we used to play a browser game called Mobstar.

There wasn't much to look at. Mobstar was a text-heavy online mafia game. You committed crimes, bought and sold drugs, accumulated money, improved your character, joined other players and tried to climb toward the upper reaches of a fictional criminal underworld. Most of what happened was represented through text, numbers, menus and buttons.

It belonged to a category of games that seemed to be everywhere on the Internet in the early 2000s.

And then, mostly, they disappeared.

So recently I did what anyone possessed by a sufficiently useless piece of childhood curiosity might do. I typed:

mobstar.cc

into my browser.

I expected nothing.

A dead domain, perhaps. A holding page. Maybe an Internet Archive result documenting the remains of a small website that had vanished fifteen years ago.

Instead, Mobstar loaded.

Not a preservation project. Not an emulator.

The game itself.

Even stranger, it is apparently still being maintained. Mobstar's website carries a 2003–2026 copyright notice, and on December 5, 2025, its administrators announced that the game had been reset and was beginning again with new updates.

More than twenty years after my brother and I encountered it, somebody is still keeping the lights on.

And seeing it again made me wonder whether these old games represented something more interesting than an obsolete technology. Maybe there was a design philosophy buried in them that is worth recovering.