21 born · 12 peaked · 11 died
Born in 2001 21
- ◐BitTorrentBram Cohen's 2001 protocol for downloading a file in pieces from everyone who already has…
- ▲Day of DefeatA Second World War team shooter that began as a Half-Life mod, was bought by Valve and be…
- ●DieselpunkSteampunk's younger, grimier sibling: the aesthetic of the 1920s–40s run forward — art de…
- ☠Digital NativeA person who grew up online and therefore understood it. Killed when the natives turned o…
- ●GTFO'Get the f*** out' — the forum's eviction notice, delivered to anyone whose post was too …
- ▲Grand Theft Auto IIIA 3D city you could drive around, with radio stations, a silent criminal and the option t…
- ▲Halo: Combat EvolvedThe launch game that justified the Xbox: a console shooter with a working control scheme,…
- ☠KazaaThe file-sharing program that inherited Napster's users in 2001 and handed them, in excha…
- ◐Ninja LootingTaking a rare item from a boss's corpse before the group could decide who should have it,…
- ●PermabannedBanned forever — permabanned, 'perma'd' — as the forum's capital punishment, and the reco…
- ●Phoenix Wright: Ace AttorneyA courtroom visual novel in which a spiky-haired lawyer shouts 'Objection!' and points, a…
- ●RuneScapeA browser MMORPG written in Java by two brothers in Cambridge and played in school IT roo…
- ●Shiny HuntingThe pursuit of alternate-colour Pokémon that appear at odds of roughly one in eight thous…
- ↺Silent Hill 2A man receives a letter from his dead wife and goes to a foggy town to find her. The 2001…
- ▲SmarterChildThe AIM buddy that answered questions about the weather, the cinema and the news, and end…
- ☠StumbleUponA button that took you to a random good page. Every feed since has been StumbleUpon witho…
- ●Super Smash Bros. MeleeA GameCube party game that became a competitive fighting game against its publisher's wis…
- ●TeabaggingCrouching repeatedly over a defeated opponent's body in a shooter, a gesture of contempt …
- ●WikipediaThe free encyclopedia anyone can edit, launched on 15 January 2001 as a side project to a…
- ▲iPod'A thousand songs in your pocket' — Apple's music player, announced in October 2001 with …
- ☠iTunesApple's music program, launched in January 2001, whose store from 2003 sold songs for 99 …
Peaked in 2001 12
- ▲3D Pinball: Space CadetThe one pinball table bundled with Windows from the mid-1990s to XP, played by everyone w…
- ↺Age of Empires IIMedieval real-time strategy with thirteen civilisations, a priest who says 'wololo', and …
- ▲All Your Base Are Belong to UsA mistranslated line from a forgotten shoot-'em-up, and the first thing the entire web la…
- ↺Blue Screen of DeathThe full-screen blue crash of Windows — white text, a hexadecimal code, everything unsave…
- ☠Chain EmailA message threatening bad luck unless forwarded to ten people. Did not die; it changed ho…
- ▲LeetspeakNumbers standing in for letters to evade filters and signal membership. Ended when your a…
- ▲MinesweeperThe grid of hidden mines that came free with every copy of Windows from 3.1 in 1992 to 7,…
- ☠Open DiaryThe first site where strangers could comment on your diary. Everything about the social w…
- ▲Pokémon Gold and SilverThe sequel to the 1998 craze, with a hundred new creatures, a real-time clock that made e…
- ▲Snake (Nokia)A line of pixels eating dots and growing longer on a monochrome phone screen. Nokia shipp…
- ☠Table LayoutBuilding a page out of nested spreadsheet cells because there was nothing else. Every des…
- ↺Tony Hawk's Pro SkaterTwo minutes per level, a combo counter and a soundtrack that taught a generation about sk…
Died in 2001 11
- ☠Bert Is EvilA Sesame Street puppet photoshopped next to history's villains. Retired by its creator in…
- ↺ClippyAn animated paperclip that interrupted you. Hated in life, beloved in death — the earlies…
- ▲Dot-comA company whose product was its URL. Died in the spring of 2000 taking a sock puppet and …
- ↺GoldenEye 007A film licence that became the console's first great multiplayer shooter: four players on…
- ☠Hamster DanceRows of animated hamsters and a sped-up Roger Miller loop. Made to win a bet about traffi…
- ☠NapsterEvery song on every hard drive in the world, indexed. Alive for twenty-five months and su…
- ▲Pokémon Red and BlueCatch 151 creatures on a Game Boy, trade the rest through a link cable. The 1998 Western …
- ↺Pokémon SnapAn on-rails photography game on the Nintendo 64 in which the player takes pictures of Pok…
- ▲Trojan Room Coffee PotA filter coffee machine in the Trojan Room of the Cambridge computer lab, filmed by a cam…
- ↺Under Construction GIFAn animated workman, digging, forever. Admitted that a page was unfinished — a form of ho…
- ↺WebringSites linking to each other in a circle, on purpose, with no algorithm involved. Currentl…