Let's document Sega's early websites. Sega of America 1994-11 - 1995-03; Sega goes on-line with CompuServe & World Wide Web 1994-11; 1994-12; 1995-01 (stitched together by me); 1995-02 (Stitched together by magazine, missing a bit in the middle); There was 7 main sections in this early period. Hot New Releases: This section began a little while after the website launched. News & Events; Video Game Area; See "Home Arcade" in next post. Other Cool Stuff; Sega Mall; See Sega Mall in next post. Elsewhere; Currently no screenshots. Who are you?
Sega of America 1995-03- 1995-09 Home pages; The site got a redesign in this period, most of the previous sections carried over, and some new ones were added. 1995-03; 1995-04; 1995-05; 1995-06; 1995-07; 1995-08;
Sega of America 1995-03- 1995-09 Sega Home; Clicking through the full graphical link took you to an image map where you could click on the various sections. A later version includes the Saturn and some other differences, but I only have a cropped image; 13 sections listed on Sega Home, including some which were sub-sections previously. Who Are You? Probably just the same form as posted earlier, but here's the new banner: Home Arcade; Hot New Releases; The Sega Mall; Other Cool Stuff; Just the new banner; Sega Visions; Nothing to see here. Sega Sports; Just the banner; Sega Channel; Nothing to see here. Other Internet Sitesl Just the banner; SegaTainment; Nothing to see here. Sega Foundation; Nothing to see here. News & Events; Sega Web Information;
Sega of America 1995-03- 1995-09 New 4 E3; With the surprise release of the Saturn at E3 in May Sega simultaneously added a new Saturn section; Sega Saturn Software; Sega Saturn Hardware; Here's the banner, much of the content survived on Sega.com; Sega Saturn Contests; Nothing to see here. The Sega Asylum; Nothing to see here.
Sega of America 1995-09 - 1996-05; Sega's new Web site acts like interactive TV in a computer monitor They relaunched the website in September 1995, a few weeks before the press release; 1995-09; 1995-10; 1995-11; 1995-12; 1996-01; 1996-02; 1996-03; 1996-04;
Sega of America 1995-09 - 1996-05; Vectorman.com got archived, but it was just a page which linked back to Segaoa.com/vectorman; Visit Bug's dressing room; There was four main sections; Sega Products; Sega Live; Nothing to see here. Sega Sports; Inside Sega;
Sega of America 1996-05 - 1996-11; A countdown to Sega.com started on Segaoa.com in May 1996, which was timed to coincide with E3. Segaoa.com mirrored Sega.com until September 1996 when the mirror was dropped and an error page was seen instead. The first archive of SoA's website was captured by the wayback machine in November 1996, albeit via a mirror on slagoon.com. Sega.com wouldn't get archived until a month later. 1996-05; This design seems to have been short lived; 1996-06; 1996-07; 1996-08; 1996-09; 1996-10; Not many screenshots outside of the home page, but here's a game page;
You ever wonder if people back in the Netscape era saved their webpages? Whole folder for .htmls and all? I know there was someone who saved Warner Bros. pages in 1998 that LGR managed to find in a old laptop.
Yes we did. I tended to save cool/informative/useful pages I saw, especially since it allowed me to read them offline (computers and devices weren't online 24/7 like today). I remember downloading the entire Archie Sonic website to floppies circa '98 despite having never read the comics, as that's what www.sonicthehedgehog.com redirected to back then, and it seemed to be the closest thing to an official Sonic site at the time (aside from Sonic Team's website, which wasn't exclusively about Sonic).
It's always possible, or might just get lucky with there still being some pages in the browser cache. I've had more luck with CD-ROMs. This one has the Sega home page from 1996-01-14 along with some other game site home pages. This one has Sega's home page from 1995-04, albeit without the image files. It does have screenshots of the pages though, so we get a nice clean shot of the images anyway; And this CD lets you do a Lycos search of the internet from October 1995, although I had to use Windows 95 in PCem to get it to work. It has the text contents for the 1995-10-20 home page. The offline version of Lycos was just a subset of their main search (I think ~10% of the results IIRC), and with any duplicate pages being excluded. That means this one is actually from a mirror from a Japanese university (I guess it beat Segaoa.com alphabetically).
See this is why this is an important exercise: https://darylcagle.com/2020/08/16/sega-sports-usa-today/
It took me far too long to realise the reason there was a spiderweb between Sonic & Knuckles was because it was a website, not because it was in November and a leftover graphic from Halloween... it was the Christmas hats that did it.
Anonther one, maybe: "Come out and show your support for your favorite Sega games at the CBS This Morning Toy Test in Seattle" okay Looks like CBS ran this event for a few years. I don't know if there's anything interesting to be found, but it's certainly a thing that happened.
The original webpages for the 1995 GII Junior Summit before it had it's own site were archived by CSK here. Save link as .txt, then rename to .gz. Open with winrar then extract the .gz file inside. I remember that took me some time to work out ... Isao Okawa was heavily involved, and Sega was a sponsor.
It might have taken you too long, but my timer was still ticking until you pointed this out - I had no idea what the spider webs were about.
Vectorman and the Quest for the Lost Powerups. IIRC the "game" doesn't really work correctly, but could probably be fixed by rehosting and changing some URLs. There's also this page which might have content from Sega's Vectorman mini-site.
How SoA's site evolved after the wayback machine started archiving it. The site got a refresh around October/November 1996. Much of the old content carried over, and some new stuff was added. I don't have any screenshots from this period, but the archive on Wayback Machine isn't too bad. There's a few images missing, and the standard game pages don't get archived as they're behind a search engine. 1996-11-14 1996-12-20 1997-02-15 1997-04-07 1997-06-05 The site had another refresh around June 1997, and Wayback Machine doesn't archive a home page until December 1997, but other content is archived earlier. Unfortunately Wayback Machine archived very few images from this period. Again, much of the content is carried over, and standard game pages now have direct links, so we finally get archived pages for many of them, albeit without images. Fortunately there are a couple of screenshots from this period, so you can see what the homepage was supposed to look like. ~1997-10 1997-12-10 Early 1998 1998-02-01 1998-06-28 Another big gap now, we don't get another homepage archived until January 1999, by which time it has had another design change, although the rest of the content continued with the previous design. Just one awfully low-res black & white screenshot from this period, but it does show what images are missing from the archive. There's now a Dreamcast swirl background, with Dreamcast and Sega PC sections on the right, with a game spotlight one the left. The one here is Last Bronx, but it seems to alternate through the games listed on the right. Late 1998 1999-01-16 1999-02-18 (They fixed a typo and replaced WWS98 with Yoot Tower) This page was still up in March 1999, but in April the site was completely changed into a Dreamcast site. Whilst the old pages were still accessible for a few months, they had been completely erased by the time of the Dreamcast launch, and SoA didn't even archive any. The one exception was the Sega PC section, which survived a little longer without getting updated. RIP SegaWeb / Sega Online 1994-1999.
