I don’t remember exactly when I found HeadBone Zone, but I remember having an advantage most kids didn’t: we had a T1 line at home 😏.
My dad worked for Ziff Davis as a benchmarker, which meant he needed a fast internet connection to download and upload tests. While my friends were negotiating phone line time with their parents, I had the internet available whenever I wanted. No modem sounds, no “get off, I need to make a call” – just… the internet, always there. Looking back, I think this is why the web always felt so open to me. It wasn’t a scarce resource I had to ration. It was just there, waiting to be explored.
The other thing about having a tech-savvy dad? He knew how to block AIM at the firewall level on his Unix box that all our traffic routed through. When I got AIM taken away for… teenager reasons… it was gone. No workarounds, no sneaking. Just blocked.
This becomes important later.
What Was HeadBone Zone?
HeadBone Zone was a kids website that launched in 19971 The Wayback Machine has some captures of headbone.com, but a lot of the interactive content is lost to time. If anyone has screenshots, I’d love to see them. Please!!! – the sweet spot of “the internet is for everyone now” but before the web got too corporatized and sanitized. It had everything: kid-friendly chat rooms, email (my first email account that wasn’t my parents’), and games that were way more ambitious than they had any right to be.
The site was run by Headbone Interactive, who also made educational CD-ROMs like Iz and Auggie: Escape from Dimension Q and Elroy Goes Bugzerk2 PC Gamer named Elroy Goes Bugzerk the “Best Educational Product” of 1995. Headbone was legit. . Knowing they got their start in educational games makes a ton of sense when you see what they built online.
Can we talk about these buttons in the footer? Look for us on 100HOT!
The Games
The games were why I kept coming back, and they were ambitious in ways that still confuse me. How did they do it?!
Rags to Riches was a band management simulator where you’d compete against other players across a 10-week concert tour – choosing venues, setting ticket prices, recording albums. How did a kids website in 1998 have real-time multiplayer browser games with economic simulation? I still don’t fully understand. But managing that fake band taught me about supply and demand, about pricing strategy, about the dopamine hit of watching numbers go up because of decisions you made.
There was a celebrity stock market with prices that changed by the minute. You’d buy low on some pop star and hope they had a good week. Absolutely insane to put in front of children, but also: how did they DO it? Real-time price updates? Processing buy/sell orders from thousands of kids?
Mystery on Mars had you solving puzzles by – and I quote from a 1997 LA Times review – using your skills in surfing the Web to find the answer. How novel!
Camp Champ was a trading card game years before anyone else was making something like this online. Complex rules, summer camp theming, tons of comic material to support it. And you could win prizes – real physical objects that would show up at your house.
I once won an Iron Giant toy – the kind that came up to my knees – from having a top score in one of their games. The movie had just come out in 1999, and I was obsessed with it3 Still obsessed with The Iron Giant. . An actual physical object showed up at my house because I was good at a free browser game. I don’t think I’d ever gotten mail before that wasn’t a birthday card.
Toward the end of their run they leaned more heavily into brand deals – I vaguely remember needing to buy GOGURT the summer it was released because there was a HeadBone Zone tie-in.
The Pager
The games were fun. But the pager? The pager was everything.
HeadBone Zone had a “pager” – basically AIM for your friends on the site. You’d have it open in a browser window and it would poll for new messages every few seconds. Looking back, this was probably some poor server getting hammered by thousands of kids hitting an API endpoint constantly. Real-time messaging! On the internet! In 1998!
Remember how my dad blocked AIM at the firewall level? The pager became my workaround. I made all my friends from school sign up for this kids game website they couldn’t care less about, just so we could keep talking. They’d have the pager open in a tiny browser window while doing homework, hitting refresh, pretending they cared about Rags to Riches so we could gossip about whatever drama was happening.
My computer was in my room – a luxury I had because my dad’s job meant we’d get extra machines from work. There was a family computer in the living room that my mom and sister mostly used, and then there was my computer. Which meant I could have the pager open all day without anyone knowing.
This is how I communicated with the internet. Not just with school friends, but with the people I was starting to meet online as I got interested in building things myself. I was just starting to work on what would become Subeta and needed to talk to people in real time to test ideas. I wasn’t anywhere near capable of building a live chat system myself! The pager was my infrastructure.
Some of those people are still my online friends today. Bri (formally @boop on Twitter – I miss her!) started as someone I forced on to the HeadBone pager. Twenty-five years later, we’re still in touch.
Then It Was Gone
HeadBone Zone shut down after Bonus.com acquired them in 20004 Bonus.com acquired them and shut them down almost immediately. Gave young me an early window into private equity ruining everything :( . The website went offline and took years of kids’ memories with it.
When I started Subeta in 2003, I was 13. I built a stock market. I built chat features. I built games where you had to come back every day to see your numbers go up. I didn’t realize until much later that I was just trying to rebuild HeadBone Zone – trying to recreate that feeling of a place on the internet that was yours, with games that respected your time and people you actually wanted to talk to.
This is the first in a series about the things that shaped me online. I want to write about LiveJournal next, and Neopets, and all the places that taught me what the internet could be before it became what it is now.
I still believe in that version of the internet. I’m experimenting with building on ATProto – you can see my early attempts at keiths-thoughts.leaflet.pub – because I think the decentralized web might let us build places like HeadBone Zone again. Places that are small and weird and yours.