Old Dragon Cave
Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2025 11:56 pm
Has anyone here heard of/used this site? I feel like most people probably have. This pet site is ancient as hell, yet still gets a sizeable playerbase to this day. Which I think it deserves! But here I want to highlight its early days, which I've been thinking about recently. The modern spritework is beautiful, but I can't help but admire the silly charm of the old stuff. I mean, look at this little guy. Every single hatchling had some recolor of this sprite in the site's earliest days. It's wonkier than the art that's there nowadays, but I kind of love that about it. I don't know if it's an original sprite or if it was taken from somewhere, given its age.
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.
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.