Years ago the Internet used to go all out in celebration of big movie events. Here are three of the best promotional movie websites ever made that are still around or have been archived for your present-day enjoyment.
TBS Superstation: Mortal Kombat
Archived Version
When Mortal Kombat premiered on TBS Superstation, it was a big deal. "Never before seen on network TV!" was the tag line. TBS decided to celebrate by holding Cyber Kombat: a combination of Mortal Kombat with World Championship Wrestling, where hosts Glacier, Disco Inferno and Lee Marshall ask trivia questions about Mortal Kombat that viewers could answer online. Participating in the contest could have won you a Panasonic 36" television and a Nintendo 64, back when a 36" TV was big business.
What Remains?
The character biographies and behind the scenes content are all still there, but Cyber Kombat is obviously no more. What upsets me most is that the best part of the site, Cage’s Challenge, is dead. It was a Mad Libs-esque game where you could pit Johnny Cage against the dreaded army of butts, led by General Butt, and defeat them using Cage’s awesome butt-punch maneuver.
Hammond’s Office (The Lost World)
Archived Version
When my sisters and I were little we used to rent The Lost World game for the Sega Genesis on an almost weekly basis. I don’t know why my parents never just bought it since they probably spent twice as much on rental fees, but that was my childhood.
One day while we were playing, we noticed “www.lost-world.com” written at the bottom of the menu screen. Being geniuses, we concluded that this must be an actual website. So we turned on our IBM Aptiva, pressed Ctrl, A, then F5 (that was the only way to get it to boot from the hard drive), waited for Windows ’95 to load, started up Internet Explorer 4, connected to the Web at a blazing fast 28.8 kbps and typed in the URL. To our satisfaction we found that the site truly was real, and our time hadn’t been wasted.
Digging a little deeper we found a sort of adventure game, similar to something like Myst, where you explore the office of John Hammond. The idea was to uncover promotional material for the film and hidden clues that could win you a trip to Kauai.
What Remains?
Most of the site is still there, though some of the interactive elements may be broken. I know for certain that you can’t log into any protected accounts on the InGen intranet. Other than that, if you find yourself stuck anywhere, just view the page source and it should get you back on the right track. That’s how we did things back in the ’90s.
TITAN A. E.
Archived Version
This was an awesome contest. Sign up, then either create or join a ship. Each crew member who joins your ship would add to your total resources and, I guess, the idea was to end up with the best ship in the universe to fight off the Drudge.
The movie debuted around the same time that Dragon Ball Z was at the height of its popularity, so the most common names for ships were like SSJ4 Gogeta, USS SuperSaiyan and HMS Kuririn. If I had the option of going back to replay this Web game, I’d name my ship the Knob Goblin to reflect my tastes for vanity doorknobs.
What Remains?
Pretty much nothing. The URL has been dead for a while and I could only even reach the splash page through the Internet Archive version.
And that’s about the point where I stopped paying attention to online movie promotions. Perhaps—and I’m going to assume this is fact—because they all began to suck afterward. These days it’s nothing but a bunch of viral shit that only comes across as pretentious, like that Cloverfield movie. Who the hell does J. J. Abrams think he is? He hasn’t done anything to put him on the same level as Spielberg or Scorsese. But that Zack Snyder fella, I tell ya, that boy’s got a head on his shoulders. He’s goin’ places.
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