WELCOME
Here you will find (amongst other things) an archive of the UK band The Prodigy's old official websites. Not only have The Prodigy made a lot of awesome music, but their their old websites were awesome too, and even though these websites seem antiquated today, the world wide web of the early 00s was something special no matter if you are/were into The Prodigy or not. There was no shortage of animations, sound effects, music, identity and attitude, compared to the bland social media profiles that makes up most online presences today. You can read more about this in the "ABOUT" section.
WEBSITE ARCHIVE
The old official The Prodigy websites were made using Macromedia (later Adobe) Director and Flash, requiring the Shockwave and Flash browser plug-ins. These plug-ins were unstable and a huge security problem, and they were discontinued by all major browsers years ago. For this reason, it is no longer possible to experience the old official websites using your normal browser*.
However ...
You can now download an old school virtual machine that contains an old browser and the old websites in one single package, ready to start up and browse. With a virtual machine, the security and stability problems associated with the old plug-ins and browser will not affect your actual computer.
(1) Download and install VMware Player 17.5 or later for Linux or Windows (if you do not have it already)**
(2) Download the virtual machine and unpack it (3.4 GB)
(3) Start VMware Player, press "Player" (top left) -> "File" -> "Open" and point it to the file "TheProdigy.vmx" that you unzipped in step 2
(4) Press "Play virtual machine" in VMware player, and wait for the virtual machine to start up
(5) You can now open the Firefox browser in the virtual machine and browse the old websites!
If you need it, the username in the virtual machine is "liam" and the password is "liam".
The performance of the virtual machine depends on the computer you run it on. I have tested the virtual machine on a Ryzen 7700X, i7 7700K and i3 12100F with 2 cores and 4GB RAM allocated to the virtual machine, and the performance was good. Laptops with low power / low performance CPUs might struggle. You can download the files that were hosted on or embedded in the old websites by clicking here.
The following websites are included in the virtual machine:
- 2002 BGAT beta
- 2002 BGAT
- 2004 AONO
- 2005 TLTS
- 2008 IMD (new and exclusive!)
- 2004 Memphis Bells
- 2004 AONO e-card
The 2008 IMD website has never been online here before and cannot be seen even on archive.org. The only way to re-visit it is via the virtual machine.
*The old version of the website archive with live pages can be found here, including my terrible spelling and questionable art skills. The AONO to TLTS era websites (Flash) can be partially emulated in Chrome and Firefox with the Ruffle add-on. I am not sure if there exists a browser that is old enough to support the Shockwave plug-in (to view the BGAT websites) but new enough to be compatible with TLS 1.3 which this website requires.
**It might be possible to run the virtual machine on Mac using VMware fusion, but I do not own a Mac and have no way of testing it.
ABOUT THEPRODIGY.DK
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to any of the official The Prodigy websites, and I am hosting them only for the purpose of archiving old internet / Prodigy history.
What's the point?
Back in the days before social media apps and news instantly arriving to our pockets, The Prodigy (and most other musicians and bands) used to have very unique and elaborate websites. As a child in the 90s I was very into The Prodigy, and from '98-ish to '04 I was eagerly hoping for a new album to arrive. From time to time I would check their website to see if something new had come out, and would get lost in the maze of strange pages that made up their website. In these relatively early days of the internet, things were very different from now. Content was primarily individual websites, rather than profiles on huge corporate platforms. Websites rarely send out newsletters, and definitely did not push instant updates into an endlessly scrolling live news feed, so getting updated on the latest affairs was often something like this: you sat alone in your room or the house office/computer room, manually connected to the internet (paid per minute), and then slowly navigated to the website of interest, and after a substantial loading time, you could see if there was something new. It was a solitary and somewhat tedious task to jump between the same websites over and over again whenever you were online, often without seeing anything new at all. Instead, many websites of the era aimed at offering something else in return.
Social media profiles all look and work exactly the same, but they let their users interact instantly (or almost) with their heroes (or give them the impression thereof) and other fans/followers - the social interactions make up a large part of the value. There were bulletin boards and chat rooms in the 90s and early 00s (The Prodigy website included), but using them was a lot less common and a bit cumbersome. The websites of the time however, were distinctly different both in regards to how they looked and how they worked. The old The Prodigy websites are a great example of this, with unique art styles and aesthetics, music and sound effects, downloads (screensavers, demo songs, wallpapers, etc), and interactivity on an almost game-like level. They had style, attitude and identity that matched the band's image and brand, and gave visitors a small Prodigy world to explore and immerse themselves into. Combined with the absence of traditional menu/navigation structures and instead offering hidden pages and untraditional interaction forms, it made for an explorative experience rather than a social experience.
In retrospect, I do not think that the old web was better. The use of browser plugins like flash, java, shockwave, and so on was horribly slow and full of bugs and security holes, which often caused browsers and computers to crash, or could even infect your computer with viruses and potentially erase all your files if you landed on a malicious website. To top it off, the majority of websites that used these technologies did so in a horrendous way. Putting the usability and technical shortcomings aside, it did offer a distinctively different experience. An experience that is rare today, as its value proposition has faded as technology evolved and user preferences/expectations shifted. Modern browsers with WebGL, fast JavaScript engines, Web Audio API and so forth can not only do the same as the old plugins, but much more and vastly more efficient, but this is not what users want any more. Offering visitors a downloads section could be a major attraction point in the past, whereas many people today would barely know what such things are or why anyone would want it. I enjoyed many aspects of the "old web" a lot, however esoteric it could seem at times, so when the AONO website replaced the BGAT era website in 2004, I tried to scrape together as much as I could before it all went away. The old official prodigy forum (phpBB) kept being hosted on the old web server for some time, and by guessing the file names I gathered as much as I could. I even found a beta version of the website, though it is only partially complete. Flash and Shockwave websites were very difficult to scrape automatically, which is why even archive.org does not have complete versions. To have a cool "Prodigy"'ish email address, I bought the domain theprodigy.dk in the mid 00s, and at some point in time I got the idea to use the domain for something semi-useful and uploaded a website archive here.
The result, this website, is rather niche and limited in scope by its Prodigy theme, but serves as a good example of what the web used to be, and gives some insight into what it was like to be a fan of a band at the time. Back when papers with words and photos printed on them were a mainstream news source, and everyone was still figuring out what to do with the internet. While these types of websites were not uncommon, Eugene Riecansky (who made most of them) deserves praise for how he transformed "dry" information into coherent designs and experiences, which made the Prodigy websites amazing.
