A 20-Year-Old, Web 1.0 ‘Simpsons’ Fan Site Just Came Back Online

A PHP-built Simpsons fan page first created by a 14-year-old in 2004 is back online after more than a decade of inactivity — Krustofski.com never should have trusted those Krusty-brand servers.  

It may surprise some Simpsons fans and the terminally online alike that, despite the show’s historic longevity, The Simpsons is not, in fact, older than the internet. By the time The Simpsons premiered in December 1989, computer-wielding university students had already established international connections on the rudimentary early networks, and numerous online chatrooms already existed where the technologically advanced could argue about pop culture like children in a cyber schoolyard. But once The Simpsons erupted into the zeitgeist, it became clear that the internet would be forever changed and defined by Simpsons superfans spreading lore and endlessly quoting their favorite episodes through websites like the all-important Simpsons Archive, which still stands to this day.

Another such website came from an upstart coder, creative and Simpsons fan named Billy Gardner McIntyre, who, this past January 5th, republished Krustofski.com to serve as a living memory of those early internet communities. Props to McIntyre for never selling out to Bill Gates.

McIntyre explained the origin of Krustofski.com, also known as Simpsons Zip, in a reflective blog post that starts, “There’s a rule I’ve learned about community: you can be an old-timer or you can be an upstart, but except at the extremes and without the benefit of retrospect, you don’t get to know which one you are.” An even-older-timer would have just written, “I used to be ‘with it.’”

In his journey, McIntyre learned about the value of being a “noob” on an internet undergoing a cultural and technological adolescence, thinking back fondly of the early webmasters who made The Simpsons an online sensation. The more McIntyre interacted with the online Simpsons community, and the more he studied the coding language PHP from a book gifted to him by his programming father, McIntyre learned these lessons: “1) All of these websites were missing things that I wanted. 2) I could build a website of my own. 3) It could be great. 4) If I did that, then I could become an old-timer too.”

But in his urgency to become an “old-timer,” McIntyre saw the darker side of the internet's rapid, exponential growth, eventually coming to the conclusion that he had more fun being a creative, coding Simpsons fan before the emergence of “The Attention Economy.” By the time McIntyre left college, Simpsons Zip was indefinitely offline, a state in which it remained until this past weekend when he revived the project and recorded the lessons he learned from it.

Now, anyone with nostalgia or curiosity for the old internet can click through the pages of Simpsons Zip and read McIntyre’s history of Simpsons fast-food toys, browse his research on the GM World’s Fair exhibit that inspired the creation of Futurama or educate themselves on the bibliography of almost all the literature references from the first four Simpsons seasons.

Krustofski.com may never have been the pre-eminent fan site for The Simpsons, but thanks to McIntyre’s preservation efforts and contemplative prose, it’s a historic testament to the creativity of the show’s fandom and the enduring lessons that online communities like the constantly squabbling Simpsons following can teach to aspiring upstarts. 

Best. Website. Ever.