I decided to go on the web archive to look at the earliest versions of the site available and while I think the versions from 2008 have broken styling (or maybe they didn't have any at all, I was too young to have signed up yet), I definitely remember clicking the sprites in people's signatures on various sites and finding this page.
And in general, while the oldest dragons are very basic; being based on mostly just color, again, I can't help but love the simplicity of that. Additionally, most sprites in the site's primordial era were just rips from games--mostly Final Fantasy, but even that I find kind of charming.
To me, it feels like a very sort of "older internet" type of thing. In my eyes Dragon Cave as a whole was a site designed with forums in mind--little spritework pets to put in your signature for other people to click and keep alive. But the most interesting part to me was that the site was evidently successful enough to outlive its own niche and still thrive to this day. Even when there's hardly anywhere for people to put their eggs and dragons anymore (that isn't a click site), it's still possible to have a successful collection.
Part of me wants to capture that weird je ne sais quoi of the site's earliest iterations somehow, but I'm not sure how I'd do it. I feel like it really is a sort of bygone era in a way I can't recreate in a modern age where everything is so polished and fine tuned now. Or maybe people want janky little dragons and an IRC channel to talk about them in. I don't know. Do any players feel similarly? I honestly want to start collecting lots of the site's oldest dragons.
