How to visit the last remnants of GeoCities before it gets destroyed by Yahoo Japan

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A historic district of the web that’s been frozen in time for more than 20 years is slated for extinction.

On Monday, Yahoo Japan announced that the last remaining sites of the once-popular GeoCities would be shutting down in March 2019.

GeoCities — which was founded in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo for nearly $4 billion in 1999 — was once the third-most visited site on the internet.  Essentially a web hosting service that made it easy for anyone to build their own websites, GeoCities became a thriving digital metropolis of rudimentary HTML pages devoted to personal hobbies, quirks and pastimes. 

Its Web 1.0 design lost its luster over the years, however, and in the US, the service was shut down in 2009.

But GeoCities somehow lived on in Japan. Like a lost kingdom isolated from progress or contact with the modern world, the last remaining realm of Geocities in Japan offers visitors an amazing trip back in time; an online world before Facebook, YouTube or even Wikipedia existed. 

There’s still time to visit this lost digital city before the bulldozers raze it to the ground. Here’s a look at some of our favorite, quirky sites that will soon no longer be with us. For millennials, consider this a history lesson.

For easier access, there are some projects that have preserved GeoCities pages by using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

GeoCities

One such project is called OoCitie. The service lets you tour the relics of GeoCities virtual neighborhoods like Napa Valley, where you can stumble upon classics like “The Booze Zone.”