#web development

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.

My brain is oddly empty today, despite there being so many things I would like to do. Or maybe "because of" instead of "despite of." The main idea is that I'm having trouble thinking of something creative or enriching to write, so instead will summarize some hopes and dreams I have for this site, improvements which might eventually make it a place where people can share creative ideas:

Realistic plans

• Automated sitemapping which will link up with Google Webmaster Console
• Support for embedded images
• "Live preview" mode: observe the rendered version of the page updating itself in real time (as opposed to the current editing pane, which is the "source" mode)
• Drawing tool: you can create a drawing, which will then get uploaded to an image hosting server and become an embedded image on the page.
• Complete the first full draft of the "Baseball Journal" section of the site, which means writing up the rest of the rules of the game, team summaries, and lexicon, at a minimum.
• Turn the "Baseball Journal" section of the site into a larger encyclopedia and infotainment article hub. Using resources from books and old news articles, write up interesting but little-known historical summaries (if there are any left), or compile local knowledge (for example, anecdotes about fun places to go swimming outdoors in Durham).

This site has been up for over two years and remains practically a ghost town, and that's because there's nothing interesting to read on here, and no people to interact with. For this site to be fun, either it needs people to visit it, or else I just have to up my game as an amateur writer-comedian(?)-webmaster.